How the west was wronged: review of The Earth Is Weeping

Atlantic Books, £25

Review by Brian Morton

MANIFEST Destiny is a fine-sounding phrase; and so is “vindictive earnestness”, until you examine what it means. The former was the slogan of the United States’ inexorable push west, across plains that should, according to the almost biblical logic of expansion, have been conveniently empty except for endless herds of buffalo. The latter, spoken by William T Sherman to fellow-general Ulysses S Grant, was uttered in pained recognition that between the white man and his goal lay scores of indigenous tribes – it’s OK to call them Indians again – for whom the buffalo represented not just food and shelter but a key symbol of the sacred cycle of death and renewal. The result of that clash was a series of bloody encounters, mostly on a small scale but no less brutal, that lasted from the end of the Civil War until the apocalypse of the Wounded Knee massacre at Christmas 1890.

Any historian of the Indian wars faces two major obstacles. Older readers who grew up on westerns find it hard to shake off a view of American soldiers as chiselled heroes in blue and “Injuns” as whooping savages. The post-bellum reality of the United States army was far less glamorous: a ragtag rump of half-trained renegades in fit-me-up uniforms, wayward in marksmanship, but no more venal than the men who purported to lead them. The honourable exceptions are the so-called Buffalo Soldiers of the segregated black regiments, who had a point to prove in citizenship. The other major obstacle is the emotional revisionism of Dee Brown’s 1970 bestseller Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, which restored an earlier, Fenimore Cooper version of the native American as a noble savage sorely used by a pack of genocidal psychopaths carrying orders from the hypocritical Great Father in Washington.

The reality was, of course, more complex. Brown’s absurdly partisan account may have been a necessary corrective, but it swung the consensus too far. There were murderous Indian tribes and septs. For every peaceable Kicking Bird, there was a Lone Wolf. Abominable violence was committed by both sides, who used a particular form of terrorism to discourage the enemy, mutilating corpses almost beyond recognition, sparing neither women nor children. But probably the greater violence was done to the truth, both by the Federal authorities who issues peace treaties and concords they had no intention of keeping, and by tribal chiefs who visited the Great Father to ratify such agreements with no intention of ever giving up their traditional ways.

Why they should have to is, of course, the primary question. The idea that a people whose rationale was semi-nomadic hunting and gathering should submit to the Cain-like curse of sedentary agriculture, violated the reality of the pre-colonial American West. The government refused to accept the sovereign status of hereditary chiefdoms and their lands, arguing that the Indians had “mere possessory title” to sacred places. The biblical logic of Manifest Destiny was given a legalistic gloss; “vindictive earnestness” turned war into something that looked more like vermin control.

No-one knows more about this period than Peter Cozzens. The miracle of The Earth Is Weeping is that a mass of factual detail is presented so readably and, though one hesitates to put it this way, excitingly. There is a small atavistic thrill in coming across names as familiar as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse early in their careers, but there is a deeper satisfaction in coming to understand better the astonishing patchwork of tribal politics and frictions that made up the pre-white west. Sioux (the specific target of Sherman’s phrase), Apache and Cheyenne are well known and almost legendary. Not so Quahadi, Modoc and Nez Perce, all of whom played key roles in the Indian wars and over a range of landscapes as often snowy and wind-driven as they were hot and sandy on the Hollywood model.

Impossible to summarise, because so widely dispersed in location, personnel and significance, The Earth Is Weeping demands to be read. It has heroes and villains: officers like Winfield Hancock, Philip H Sheridan and, of course, George Armstrong Custer cast the army in a dark light, only relieved a little by an occasional figure like Edward RS Canby, who seems to have been possessed of some compassion or at least no murderous intent. Likewise, a figure like Captain Jack of the Modoc seems to have understood a need to live with, rather than war with, the white man; didn’t save him, though. Some Indians were almost as formidable a force in Washington as among the gulches and creeks. Red Cloud of the Oglala Lakota gets close to the essence when he says: “The Great Father .... has left me nothing but an island. Our nation is melting away like the snow on the side of the hills where the sun is warm, while your people are like the blades of grass in spring when summer is coming." Manifest Destiny.