The Earth is weeping The epic story of the Indian wars for the American West

Review by Choice Review

The story of the fabled western Indian wars holds a fascination not only among today's US audiences, but also among readers worldwide. Cozzens, editor of the five-volume Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars (2001-05), presents a comprehensive survey of the battles, skirmishes, and massacres that occurred in the Trans-Mississippi West between the Civil War and the tragic events that unfolded at Wounded Knee in 1890. He challenges the biases contained in Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (CH, Jun'71), which sympathetically portrayed Native Americans as tragic victims but did little to explain how their own cultural values shaped their choices within the larger context of conflict. Cozzens's expansive bibliography and detailed endnotes testify to the thoroughness of his research, as well as his exemplary use of ethnohistorical materials to help explain Indian cultural viewpoints. This more balanced approach examines Indian motivations, which were shaped at the family and band levels, not at the mythical united tribal level. Likewise, the book honestly demonstrates that white military officers, agents, and federal policy makers were not always opponents of Indian rights. Nineteen excellent maps accentuate the value of this narrative. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Michael L. Tate, University of Nebraska at Omaha

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

SELDOM DOES A nonfiction book pack the cultural wallop that Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" did in 1970. Just months before its publication a group of Native American activists calling themselves Indians of All Tribes had occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, demanding that the former prison outpost be deeded back to them by the United States government. So when Brown - a white novelist and historian from Arkansas with a degree in library science - published his searing account of westward expansion, accusing the Army of annihilating Indians between 1860 and 1890, his timing was explosive. While Brown's book contained factual errors, it dramatically succeeded in changing the attitudes of the Vietnam War generation about how the West was really won. Now, 46 years later, the military historian Peter Cozzens counters Brown with "The Earth Is Weeping" - a largely chronological march with an Army viewpoint of the same era, a work reminiscent in scope and approach to James McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" (about the Civil War). Cozzens is determined to debunk the main thrust of Brown's one-sided book - that the government's response to the so-called "Indian problem" was genocide. He documents a string of gratuitous massacres of Native Americans, much to be deeply regretted, but insists that official Washington never contemplated genocide. "It is at once ironic and unique," Cozzens declares, contra Brown, "that so crucial a period of our history remains largely defined by a work that made no attempt at historical balance." Balance is what Cozzens is seeking in this detailed recounting of random carnage, bodies burned, treaties broken and treachery let loose across the land. Although the book is not a seamless narrative, and its writing is sometimes stodgy. Cozzens admirably succeeds in framing the Indian Wars with acute historical accuracy. Whether discussing the chaotic Battle of Washita in present-day Oklahoma or Custer's skirmishes with Sitting Bull's Lakota coalition or the surrender of Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé. Cozzens demonstrates vast knowledge of American military history. His picture is disheartening. During Reconstruction numerous Native Americans from the East were assigned to Western reservations under the watch of the Army. Inebriated rank-and-file soldiers routinely disobeyed orders and sometimes burned down Indian villages. The Civil War generals William T. Sherman and Philip Sheridan, tasked with overseeing Indian affairs, come off as fierce conquer-at-all-cost leaders, morality be damned, as their troops ferociously battled against recalcitrant Arapaho, Comanche, Cheyenne and Kiowa tribes. Even Abraham Lincoln, that most sanctified of presidents, exhibited much the same insensitivity as other government officials of the era, warning Chief Lean Bear, a Cheyenne peace negotiator, at a White House meeting in 1863 that his "children" (that is, Army soldiers) might terrorize Western tribes and violate peace treaties because it wasn't "always possible for any father to have his children do precisely as he wishes them to do." Sure enough, in Colorado on May 15, 1864, Col. John Chivington ordered his cavalry to murder Cheyenne "whenever and wherever found." When four columns of mounted soldiers approached an Indian settlement near the Smoky Hill River, Lean Bear rode forward with the tribal chief Black Kettle at his side to greet them. Because Lincoln had presented Lean Bear with a peace medal, which he wore on his shirt as protection, he felt safe. But when he was 30 feet from the soldiers, they riddled him with bullets. "The chief was dead before he hit the ground," Cozzens writes. "After the smoke cleared several troops broke ranks and pumped more bullets into his corpse." Cozzens excels at showcasing how rogue officers like Chivington often disregarded orders from Washington in pursuit of glory. At the same time, he is very clear that many Army officers behaved honorably. Gen. George Crook - nicknamed Gray Wolf Chief by the Apache - was consumed by "outrage" over the Army's mistreatment of native peoples. "That a general would offer such a candid and forceful public defense of the Indians seems implausible," Cozzens explains, "because it contradicts an enduring myth: that the regular Army was the implacable foe of the Indian." And nobody can accuse Cozzens of candy-coating Native American culture. Rivalries between tribes, outlying examples of weird mysticism and secret collaborations with the Army are all explored. After explaining how Plains Indians saw warring as a "cultural imperative," a way to prove manhood, Cozzens offers a graphic description of the art of scalping. "Indian men wore their hair long, which made taking the scalp of an enemy warrior relatively swift and simple," he writes. "Grasping a tuft or braid in one hand, with the other a warrior made a two- or three-inch-wide cut around the base of the skull, usually with a butcher knife. A quick jerk tore away the skin and hair with a 'report like a popgun.'" According to Cozzens, many Native American warriors mutilated corpses because disfigurement was thought to safeguard the killer from the dead person's revengeful spirit in the afterworld. Indian victories are few and far between in "The Earth Is Weeping." There is, however, one impressive exception. Red Cloud, the war chief of the Oglala Lakotas, conducted successful attacks against the Army in the northern Rocky Mountain region from 1866 to 1868. He then shrewdly negotiated the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), which not only created the Great Sioux Reservation but also set aside a vast land called Unceded Territory. Red Cloud's new reservation included the Black Hills of South Dakota. With the discovery of gold, the reservation would soon shrink, but Red Cloud had prevailed against the government and its Army, as had few other Indians of his time. "Red Cloud's war had revealed a regular Army woefully unprepared for its Indian-fighting mission," Cozzens explains. "The Army's problems, however, were of no interest to westerners, who expected General Sherman to punish the Indians whenever and wherever they caused trouble." TOWARD THE END of "The Earth Is Weeping," Cozzens recounts how Geronimo - who surrendered in the Arizona Territory to Gen. Nelson A. Miles in 1886 - became a dancing-bear figure for white audiences, appearing as a circuslike attraction and signing photographs of himself for children enthralled by the Wild West. The Apache warrior once hungry for scalps and revenge in the desert-seared arroyos along the Mexican border had become a gentleman farmer at Fort Sill, Okla. (site of the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation). He drank whiskey. raised cattle. played shaman and sold bow-and-arrows. "Since my life as a prisoner has begun I have heard the teachings of the white man's religion," Geronimo said of his conversion to Christianity, "and in many respects believe it to be better than the religion of my fathers." The pacification of Geronimo serves as a closing metaphor for the crushing Native American defeat retold in "The Earth Is Weeping." For every Indian triumph like Little Big Horn (1876), there was a drubbing like Wounded Knee (1890), for every surprise Indian victory there were huge retaliations by the Army. As if to add insult to injury, one evening in February 1909, Geronimo got drunk in the town of Lawton, Okla., fell off his horse and was discovered the next morning half-submerged in icy water. "Four days later," Cozzens writes, "at age 79, the man whom no bullet could ever kill died in bed of pneumonia." A bloody era of American history was at last over. Still, I have a feeling the academic fight for the true legacy of the Indian Wars - Brown versus Cozzens - has just begun. Even Lincoln exhibited much the same insensitivity as other government officials. DOUGLAS BRINKLEY is a professor of history at Rice University and the author of "Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America"

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The settlement or conquest of the trans-Mississippi West is embedded in our national consciousness, and the military defeat and confinement of the various Indian tribes is an integral part of that epic story. Cozzens, who has written extensively on the various Indian wars, offers a magnificent single-volume account of the post-Civil War conflicts that shaped our history and the mythology of the frontier, spanning four decades and ranging from the Great Plains to the Pacific and from Canada to Mexico. In examining the various Indian tribes and subgroupings within them, Cozzens does an admirable job of conveying their complexity and political divisions. We learn, for example, about the disdain many Apaches held for Geronimo as well as the conflict between progressive and traditional Lakotas as they coped with reservation life. Icons like Custer, Cochise, and Crazy Horse are given their due, but Cozzens also covers less well-known figures and conflicts, including Captain Jack (Kintpuash) and the Modoc War, and the particularly tragic defeat and displacement of the Utes in Colorado. American military leaders, especially generals Crook and Miles, are viewed honestly and sometimes sympathetically, and Indian leaders are treated with equal balance and fairness. This is a beautifully written work of understanding and compassion that will be a treasure for both general readers and specialists.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this sweeping narrative, Cozzens (Shenandoah 1862), an expert on 19th-century warfare, confronts Dee Brown's classic text, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Cozzens finds it too reductive in its treatment of the various Native American tribes involved in the bloody contests over land that raged from the 1860s until 1890. He persuasively argues that those who allied with the U.S. government and took up arms against other tribes can't be dismissed as simply greedy, and he zeroes in on issues that motivated each tribe to choose sides. After opening on the plains of Wyoming with Red Cloud's War of the 1860s, the first half of the book builds to the crescendo of Custer's "last stand" at the Little Bighorn in 1876. Cozzens tucks into this section an insightful chapter on how Native Americans and the U.S. Army both trained men to fight. The second half ranges from the betrayal of the Nez Perce in the Northwest to the bitter conflicts in Apacheria in the Southwest, concluding with the 1890 slaughter at Wounded Knee. Cozzens excels in describing battles and the people who orchestrated and participated in them, expertly weaving in the relevant politics and never shying away from the role racism played in this destructive warfare. Maps & illus. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Renowned Civil War historian and author Cozzens (Shenandoah 1862: Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign) provides a marvelous work sure to enlighten scholars and novices alike. Here he takes the listener on a journey of post-Civil War civilian and military aggression as it moves westward in America. Well-known names such as Custer, Sherman, Grant, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, and Sitting Bull are all covered in great detail. Cozzens strives to remain neutral and nonjudgmental as he lays out the actions of both Indian and non-Indian peoples. Some listeners may be surprised to learn that signed treaties by the government were continually disregarded. Narrator John Pruden effortlessly pulls the listener along on the voyage with perfect pronunciation of names of the various tribes, chiefs, generals, and locations. VERDICT Fans of the author's previous works, the American Civil War, the American West of the mid- to late 1800s, and plight of the Indians as they struggled to survive against military forces will be fully engaged. ["Highly recommended for the intertwined history of Native Americans and the post-Civil War frontier U.S. Army": LJ 8/16 review of the Knopf hc.]-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A sturdy overview of the Indian Wars.Cozzens (Battlefields of the Civil War: The Battles that Shaped America, 2011, etc.) turns his attention westward to the combat between invading whites and Natives along the frontier. Traditional histories set the beginnings of that conflict with the Sioux Uprising of 1862, but Cozzens starts in 1866 with the better-studied war of resistance mounted by Red Cloud. His long narrative continues to the shameful massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee a generation later, a compressed period with many set pieces, from the Battle of Little Bighorn to the murder of Crazy Horse and the Geronimo Campaign. The author covers all the ground dutifully if without much flair; this is a narrative of facts more than ideas, and it sometimes plods. Still, Cozzens is not without insightthe Indians who had gone to war against the government had usually done so reluctantly, he writes, and they had lost their land and their way of life anywayand there is much merit in having a readable history of the Indian Wars in one volume. Cozzens promises to bring historical balance to the story, and he does, but this mostly means demonstrating to readers that not all whites were devils and not all tribes that were not wholeheartedly in resistance were sellouts, the view we have been accustomed to since Dee Browns Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). As Cozzens notes on the latter score, many Native groups saw the federal government as a reliable protector against rival tribes, and regardless, instances were few where there was monolithic opposition to the whites even within a group. Still, as Gen. George Crook noted of the Indians, all the tribes tell the same story. They are surrounded on all sides, the game is destroyed or driven away, they are left to starve, and there remains but one thing for them to dofight while they can. A useful one-volume history refreshingly without many bones to pick but also without much fire. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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chapter 1 The Plains Aflame President lincoln vastly understated the case when he told Lean Bear that his white children sometimes behaved badly. In the two and a half centuries between the settlement of the Jamestown colony in Virginia and Lincoln's cautionary words to the Cheyenne chief, a relentlessly expansionist white population had driven the Indians westward without regard to treaty obligations or, sometimes, even simple humanity. The government of the young American Republic had not intended to exterminate the Indians. Nor had the founding fathers simply coveted Indian land. They had also wanted to "enlighten and refine" the Indian, to lead him from "savagery" to Christianity, and to bestow on him the blessings of agriculture and the domestic arts--­in other words, to destroy an incompatible Indian way of life by civilizing rather than by killing the Indians. The "civilized" Indians would not live on their homeland, which the federal government meant to purchase from them at the best possible price by means of treaties negotiated on the legal premise that tribes held title to their land and possessed sufficient sovereignty to transfer title to the true sovereign; that is to say, the United States. The federal government also pledged never to deprive the Indians of their land without their consent or to make war on them without congressional authorization. To prevent settlers or individual states from infringing on Indian rights, in 1790 Congress enacted the first of six statutes collectively known as the Nonintercourse Act, which prohibited the purchase of Indian land without federal approval and carried stiff punishments for crimes committed against Indians. Not surprisingly, the punishment provision of the law quickly proved toothless. President George Washington attempted to intercede on behalf of the Indians, to whom, he insisted, full legal protection must be afforded, but his admonitions meant nothing to land-­hungry whites living beyond the government's reach. In order to prevent a mutual slaughter, Washington sent troops to the nation's frontier. Once sucked into the fray, the small American army spent two decades and nearly all its limited resources in wresting the Old Northwest from powerful Indian confederations in undeclared wars. That set a dismal precedent; henceforth, treaties would be a mere legal veneer to conceal wholesale landgrabs that Congress tried to palliate with cash annuities and gifts of merchandise. After George Washington, no president lost much sleep over Indian rights. Indeed, the executive branch led the way in divesting the Indians of their homelands. In 1817, President James Monroe told General Andrew Jackson that "the savage requires a greater extent of territory to sustain it than is compatible with the progress and just claims of civilized life, and must yield to it." As president in the 1830s, Jackson took Monroe's injunction to its harsh but logical extreme. With the authority granted him under the Removal Act of 1830, and by employing varying degrees of duress, Jackson swept the roving tribes of the Old Northwest beyond the Mississippi River. When southerners pressured him to open Indian lands in Alabama and Georgia, Jackson also uprooted the so-­called Five Civilized Tribes--­the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Cherokees, and Seminoles--­and resettled them west of the Mississippi River in Indian Territory, an unsustainably large tract spreading over several future states, which was gradually reduced to comprise solely present-­day Oklahoma. Most of the "civilized" Indians went peaceably, but it took two long and bloody conflicts for the army to dislodge the Seminoles from their Florida strongholds, and a handful ultimately were allowed to remain. Jackson never doubted the justice of his actions, and he truly believed that once beyond the Mississippi River the Indians would be forever free from white usurpation. Fur trappers, traders, and missionaries would be permitted to pass through the Indians' new home and venture out onto the Great Plains, or into the mountains beyond, but there assuredly would be no further upheaval because army explorers had reported the Great Plains as unsuited to white settlement, and the public took them at their word. But already there were pressures on the periphery. A burgeoning fur trade on the Missouri River expanded white contact with the western tribes. Also, the removal treaties bound the federal government to protect the relocated tribes not only from acquisitive whites but also from hostile Plains Indians, who had no desire to share their domain with newcomers, be they Indian or white. Meanwhile, white Missourians and Arkansans demanded protection from the dispossessed Indians in the event they found their new land somewhat less than the Eden they had been promised (which they did). The government's answer was to build a chain of nine forts from Minnesota southward to northwest Louisiana between 1817 and 1842, creating a tantalizing abstraction known as the Permanent Indian Frontier. Of the 275,000 Indians whose homelands lay outside Indian Territory and beyond the newly constituted military barrier, the government cared little and knew even less. White conceptions of the Indians of the American West were simplistic and tended toward extremes; Indians were either noble and heroic or barbaric and loathsome. But when the "Permanent Indian Frontier" crumbled less than a decade after its creation, a cataclysmic chain of events suddenly brought whites and Indians face-­to-­face west of the Mississippi. The first crack in the permanent frontier appeared in 1841. Lured by the promise of fertile land in California and the Oregon Country, a few lumbering caravans of white-­topped prairie schooners ventured tentatively onto the plains. The trickle soon became a torrent, and the rutted wagon road thus created along the shifting sands of the dreary Platte River became etched in the nation's psyche as the Oregon Trail. Then came the annexation of Texas in 1845, and a year later the United States and Britain settled a contentious dispute over the Oregon boundary. In early 1848, the War with Mexico ended in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by which Mexico ceded California, the Great Basin, and the Southwest, as well as its claims to Texas, recognizing the Rio Grande as the international border. In just three years, the United States had grown by nearly a million square miles and become a continental nation. Expansionist orators exhorted Americans to fulfill the nation's Manifest Destiny by emigrating to Texas, California, or the Pacific Northwest. (No one as yet considered the Great Plains other than a vast and tedious obstruction.) In August 1848, gold was discovered in California's American River. The following year saw a mass migration unequaled in the young nation's history. Within a decade, there were more whites in California than there were Indians in the entire West. Genocidal gold seekers decimated California's peaceable small tribes, and the growth of white settlements in the newly organized Oregon Territory alarmed the stronger northwestern tribes. As yet there had been no open conflict with the Indians in the West, but the peace was tenuous, warned the commissioner of Indian affairs. The Indians, he said, had abstained from attacking immigrant trains out of an expectation of reward from the government and not from fear, because they had not felt "our power and know nothing of our greatness and resources." They would not feel that power for some time to come; the government lacked anything resembling a coherent Indian policy, and the small regular army needed time to build forts in the West. In any case, the commissioner of Indian affairs need not have feared any great, concerted resistance to the white deluge. For one thing, the Indians did not perceive the white onslaught for the apocalyptic threat to their way of life that it was. But even if they had, the Indians of the American West had no common identity--­no sense of "Indianness"--­and were too busy fighting one another to give their undivided attention to the new threat. And this was their Achilles' heel. Only in the Pacific Northwest were the Indians able to unite against the sudden and vigorous white expansion. Few tribes in the West proved able to maintain the internal unity necessary to oppose the white advance. Nearly every tribe broke into two factions, one advocating peaceful accommodation with the whites and adopting white ways, the other holding fast to the traditional ways, resisting the government's enticements to go peaceably onto reservations. The government grew adept at exploiting these rivalries, giving the army a potent fifth column in its battles to bring the "hostile" Indians to heel. The army would also come to benefit immeasurably from the intertribal warfare that lay at the very foundation of the culture of the Indians of the West. That the army needed Indian allies in order to prevail would prove axiomatic. In the relations between tribes, there was nothing subtle; outsiders were either allies or enemies. The most intense intertribal conflict occurred on the northern plains, where warfare was fluid and continuous, as tribes struggled to conquer or protect hunting grounds. Tribes everywhere in the West survived and prospered by entering into alliances; those that went it alone suffered horribly. Open battles were rare; wars normally took the form of endless small raids and counterraids that chipped away at the loser's domain. On the Great Plains, the foundation of the Indian way of life was the American bison, commonly known as the buffalo. Buffalo meat was a staple. From the hide, the Indians fashioned robes for warmth and trade, containers for transport and storage, and skins for the distinctive conical tipi--­also known as a lodge. No part of the animal was wasted. Not only did the buffalo undergird the economy, but it also shaped the Plains Indians' religion and culture. Well before the first American ventured beyond the Mississippi River, the European gifts of horses, guns, and disease had radically altered Plains and Rocky Mountain Indians' cultures. In the sixteenth century, the Spaniards had introduced the horse to the New World. As the Spanish frontier pushed into the present-­day southwestern United States, horses fell into the hands of Indians. Afterward, through theft and barter, the horse culture spread rapidly from tribe to tribe. In 1630, no tribe was mounted; by 1750, all of the Plains tribes and most of the Rocky Mountain Indians rode horses. The horse did not create the buffalo culture, but it made hunting infinitely easier. Horses also increased the frequency and fury of intertribal clashes, because warriors were able to range over distances previously unimaginable on foot. The gun, introduced to the Indians by French trappers and traders, made the hostile encounters far more deadly. White man's diseases were deadlier yet, decimating western tribes just as they had ravaged those east of the Mississippi. No one knows precisely how many succumbed, but in 1849 alone cholera carried off half the Indian population of the southern plains. A grand irony of the Great Plains is that none of the tribes with which the army would clash were native to the lands they claimed. All had been caught up in a vast emigration, precipitated by the white settlement of the East. This Indian exodus had begun in the late seventeenth century and was far from over when the Oregon Trail opened in 1843. As the dislocated Indians spilled onto the plains, they jockeyed with native tribes for the choicest hunting lands. In a very real sense, then--­and this cannot be overemphasized--­the wars that were to come between the Indians and the government for the Great Plains, the seat of the longest and bloodiest struggles, would represent the displacement of one emigrant people by another, rather than the destruction of a deeply rooted way of life. The most powerful newcomers before the whites spilled onto the plains were the Sioux, formerly a woodlands people of the present-­day upper Midwest. As it shifted west, the Sioux nation separated into three divisions: the Dakotas, a semisedentary people who clung to the Minnesota River; the Nakotas, who settled east of the Missouri River; and the Lakotas, who wrestled their way onto the northern plains. The Lakotas were the true horse-­and-­buffalo Sioux of popular imagination, and they constituted nearly half the Sioux nation. The Lakotas in turn divided into seven tribes: the Oglalas, Brulés, Miniconjous, Two Kettles, Hunkpapas, Blackfeet, and Sans Arcs, of which the Oglalas and the Brulés were the largest. In fact, these two tribes alone outnumbered all the non-­Lakota Indians on the northern plains. In their westward march across present-­day Nebraska and the Dakotas during the early nineteenth century, the Lakotas gradually allied themselves with the Cheyennes and the Arapahos, who had been pushed onto the northern plains in advance of the Lakotas and had already forged an enduring bond, albeit an odd coupling. Their languages were mutually unintelligible, an impediment they overcame with a sophisticated sign language, and their characters could not have been more dissimilar. The Arapahos tended to be a kindly and accommodating people, whereas the Cheyennes evolved into fearsome warriors. The first contact between the Lakotas and the Cheyenne-­Arapaho combination was hostile, because they competed for the game-­rich Black Hills country. "Peace would be made," a Cheyenne chief recounted. "They would hold out the pipe to us and say, 'Let us be good friends,' but time and again treacherously broke their promises." Not until the 1840s did the Lakotas keep their word. By then, many of the Cheyennes and Arapahos, fed up with the duplicity of the Lakotas and lured by white traders, had migrated south, forming the Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho tribes and leaving the Lakotas the undisputed suzerains of the northern plains. The Lakotas and the Cheyennes and Arapahos who remained on the northern plains had the same tribal enemies--­the badly outnumbered but hard-­fighting Crows of present-­day central Montana and northern Wyoming and the semi-­agricultural Pawnees who dwelled along the Platte River in Nebraska. The basis of the rivalry was both a relentless drive by the Lakota-­Northern Cheyenne-­Northern Arapaho alliance to expand their hunting lands and the warrior culture common to all Plains tribes. Geographically separated from each other, the Crows and the Pawnees never formed an alliance, but being badly in need of friends--­or enemies of their enemies conceived of as friends--­both tribes instead eventually cast their fate with the whites. Similar jostling had occurred on the southern plains. The Kiowas, expelled from the Black Hills by the Lakotas, had retreated southward into the country known as Comancheria, where they first fought and then concluded an alliance with the Comanches. The uncontested lords of the southern plains and the most accomplished horsemen in the West, the Comanches were a fierce and cruel people who roamed and raided at will from the Arkansas River deep into Texas. They warred sporadically with Mexico but got along well enough with the Americans until settlers threatened their hunting grounds. The Republic of Texas treated the Comanches even worse than had the Mexican government, pursuing a policy of betrayal and brutality that culminated in the slaughter of a Comanche peace delegation. The Comanches afterward counted Texans as their bitterest enemies, and they regarded depredations against Texas settlers as both just retribution for the murder of their peace chiefs and good sport. Excerpted from The Earth Is Weeping: The Indian Wars for the American West, 1866-1891 by Peter Cozzens All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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