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"In this documentary history, Richard G. Hardorff presents a broad range of views of the Washita battle. Eyewitnesses to the destruction of the Southern Cheyenne village included soldiers, officers, tribal members, Indian and white scouts, and government officials. Many of these witnesses recorded their memories of the event. With Washita Memories, Hardorff has collected these surviving documents into a one-of-a-kind primary resource.".
Using Cheyenne and Arapaho accounts, Charles J. Brill tells the story of General George Armstrong Custer’s winter campaign on the southern plains in 1868-69, including his attack in Black Kettle’s village on the snowy backs of the Washita River. Brill’s searing account details the ruthlessness of the U.S. Army’s efforts to punish southern plains tribes for what they considered incessant raiding and depredation. Brill provides the Indian point of view as he follows Custer into a battle that remains controversial to the present day. In a new foreword to this edition, Mark L. Gardner discusses the significance of Brill’s history-placing it in context with other Custer and Indian Wars studies-and its Value to scholars and general readers today. Gardner also provides an overview of the career of Oklahoma journalist Charles J. Brill, much of whose life has remained a mystery until now.
A brief history of the Battle of Little Bighorn, the deadly clash between U.S. soldiers and Native American forces in 1876. Commonly known as Custer’s Last Stand, the Battle of Little Bighorn may be the best recognized violent conflict between the indigenous peoples of North America and the government of the United States. Incorporating the voices of Native Americans, soldiers, scouts, and women, Tim Lehman’s concise, compelling narrative will forever change the way we think about this familiar event in American history. On June 25, 1876, General George Armstrong Custer led the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry in an attack on a massive encampment of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians on the bank of the Little Bighorn River. What was supposed to be a large-scale military operation to force U.S. sovereignty over the tribes instead turned into a quick, brutal rout of the attackers when Custer’s troops fell upon the Indians ahead of the main infantry force. By the end of the fight, the Sioux and Cheyenne had killed Custer and 210 of his men. The victory fueled hopes of freedom and encouraged further resistance among the Native Americans. For the U.S. military, the lost battle prompted a series of vicious retaliatory strikes that ultimately forced the Sioux and Cheyenne into submission and the long nightmare of reservation life. Grounded in the most recent research, attentive to Native American perspectives, and featuring a colorful cast of characters, this account elucidates the key lessons of the conflict and draws out the less visible ones. This may not be the last book you read on Little Bighorn, but it should be the first.
Bringing together Custer, Sherman, Grant, and other fascinating military and political figures, as well as great native leaders such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo, this “sweeping work of narrative history” (San Francisco Chronicle) is the fullest account to date of how the West was won—and lost. After the Civil War the Indian Wars would last more than three decades, permanently altering the physical and political landscape of America. Peter Cozzens gives us both sides in comprehensive and singularly intimate detail. He illuminates the intertribal strife over whether to fight or make peace; explores the dreary, squalid lives of frontier soldiers and the imperatives of the Indian warrior culture; and describes the ethical quandaries faced by generals who often sympathized with their native enemies. In dramatically relating bloody and tragic events as varied as Wounded Knee, the Nez Perce War, the Sierra Madre campaign, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, we encounter a pageant of fascinating characters, including Custer, Sherman, Grant, and a host of officers, soldiers, and Indian agents, as well as great native leaders such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Red Cloud and the warriors they led. The Earth Is Weeping is a sweeping, definitive history of the battles and negotiations that destroyed the Indian way of life even as they paved the way for the emergence of the United States we know today.
"An engrossing and tautly written account of a critical chapter in American history." --Los Angeles Times Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Hurricane's Eye, Pulitzer Prize finalist Mayflower, and Valiant Ambition, is a historian with a unique ability to bring history to life. The Last Stand is Philbrick's monumental reappraisal of the epochal clash at the Little Bighorn in 1876 that gave birth to the legend of Custer's Last Stand. Bringing a wealth of new information to his subject, as well as his characteristic literary flair, Philbrick details the collision between two American icons- George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull-that both parties wished to avoid, and brilliantly explains how the battle that ensued has been shaped and reshaped by national myth.
This collection of essays represents an attempt to move beyond degradation and exploitation as the defining ecological narratives of the Great Plains by examining the region through the interrelated themes of water, grasses, animals, and energy.
Custer’s Last Stand remains one of the most iconic events in American history and culture. Had Custer prevailed at the Little Bighhorn, the victory would have been noteworthy at the moment, worthy of a few newspaper headlines. In defeat, however tactically inconsequential in the larger conflict, Custer became legend. In Inventing Custer: The Making of an American Legend, Edward Caudill and Paul Ashdown bridge the gap between the Custer who lived and the one we’ve immortalized and mythologized into legend. While too many books about Custer treat the Civil War period only as a prelude to the Little Bighorn, Caudill and Ashdown present him as a product of the Civil War, Reconstruction Era, and the Plains Indian Wars. They explain how Custer became mythic, shaped by the press and changing sentiments toward American Indians, and show the many ways the myth has evolved and will continue to evolve as the United States continues to change.
Western Heritage Award, Best Western Nonfiction Book, National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Nothing can change the terrible facts of the Sand Creek Massacre. The human toll of this horrific event and the ensuing loss of a way of life have never been fully recounted until now. In Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway, Louis Kraft tells this story, drawing on the words and actions of those who participated in the events at this critical time. The history that culminated in the end of a lifeway begins with the arrival of Algonquin-speaking peoples in North America, proceeds through the emergence of the Cheyennes and Arapahos on the Central Plains, and ends with the incursion of white people seeking land and gold. Beginning in the earliest days of the Southern Cheyennes, Kraft brings the voices of the past to bear on the events leading to the brutal murder of people and its disastrous aftermath. Through their testimony and their deeds as reported by contemporaries, major and supporting players give us a broad and nuanced view of the discovery of gold on Cheyenne and Arapaho land in the 1850s, followed by the land theft condoned by the U.S. government. The peace treaties and perfidy, the unfolding massacre and the investigations that followed, the devastating end of the Indians’ already-circumscribed freedom—all are revealed through the eyes of government officials, newspapers, and the military; Cheyennes and Arapahos who sought peace with or who fought Anglo-Americans; whites and Indians who intermarried and their offspring; and whites who dared to question what they considered heinous actions. As instructive as it is harrowing, the history recounted here lives on in the telling, along with a way of life destroyed in all but cultural memory. To that memory this book gives eloquent, resonating voice.
More than a history of Western movies, The American West on Film intertwines film history, the history of the American West, and American social history into one unique volume. The American West on Film chronicles 12 Hollywood motion pictures that are set in the post–Civil War American West, including The Ox-Bow Incident, Red River, High Noon, The Searchers, The Magnificent Seven, Little Big Man, and Tombstone. Each film overview summarizes the movie's plot, details how the film came to be made, the critical and box-office reactions upon its release, and the history of the time period or actual event. This is followed by a comparison and contrast of the filmmakers' version of history with the facts, as well as an analysis of the film's significance, then and now. Relying on contemporary accounts and historical analysis as well as perspectives from filmmakers, historians, and critics, the author describes what it took to get each movie made and how close to the historical truth the movie actually got. Readers will come away with a better understanding of how movies often reflect the time in which they were made, and how Westerns can offer provocative social commentary hidden beneath old-fashioned "shoot-em-ups."
When Edward W. Wynkoop arrived in Colorado Territory during the 1858 gold rush, he was one of many ambitious newcomers seeking wealth in a promising land mostly inhabited by American Indians. After he worked as a miner, sheriff, bartender, and land speculator, Wynkoop’s life drastically changed after he joined the First Colorado Volunteers to fight for the Union during the Civil War. This sympathetic but critical biography centers on his subsequent efforts to prevent war with Indians during the volatile 1860s. A central theme of Louis Kraft’s engaging narrative is Wynkoop’s daring in standing up to Anglo-Americans and attempting to end the 1864 Indian war. The Indians may have been dangerous enemies obstructing “progress,” but they were also human beings. Many whites thought otherwise, and at daybreak on November 29, 1864, the Colorado Volunteers attacked Black Kettle’s sleeping camp. Upon learning of the disaster now known as the Sand Creek Massacre, Wynkoop was appalled and spoke out vehemently against the action. Many of his contemporaries damned his views, but Wynkoop devoted the rest of his career as a soldier and then as a U.S. Indian agent to helping Cheyennes and Arapahos to survive. The tribes’ lifeways still centered on the dwindling herds of buffalo, but now they needed guns to hunt. Kraft reveals how hard Wynkoop worked to persuade the Indian Bureau to provide the tribes with firearms along with their allotments of food and clothing—a hard sell to a government bent on protecting white settlers and paving the way for American expansion. In the wake of Sand Creek, Wynkoop strove to prevent General Winfield Scott Hancock from destroying a Cheyenne-Sioux village in 1867, only to have the general ignore him and start a war. Fearing more innocent people would die, Wynkoop resigned from the Indian Bureau but, not long thereafter, receded into obscurity. Now, thanks to Louis Kraft, we may appreciate Wynkoop as a man of conscience who dared to walk between Indians and Anglo-Americans but was often powerless to prevent the tragic consequences of their conflict.