The First Sioux War was a vitally important conflict that helped define Lakota Sioux / white relations; created a closer national unity among the Sioux; and allowed the United States Army to develop new military tactics, which would eventually be used to defeat the Plains Indians. This book analyzes this conflict and its influence on future Sioux leaders like Crazy Horse, Spotted Tail, and Sitting Bull.

In previous accounts, the U.S. Army’s first clashes with the powerful Sioux tribe appear as a set of irrational events with a cast of improbable characters—a Mormon cow, a brash lieutenant, a drunken interpreter, an unfortunate Brulé chief, and an incorrigible army commander. R. Eli Paul shows instead that the events that precipitated General William Harney’s attack on Chief Little Thunder’s Brulé village foreshadowed the entire history of conflict between the United States and the Lakota people. Today Blue Water Creek is merely one of many modest streams coursing through Sioux country. The conflicts along its margins have been overshadowed by later, more spectacular confrontations, including the Great Sioux War and George Custer’s untimely demise along another modest stream. The Blue Water legacy has gone largely underappreciated—until now. Blue Water Creek and the First Sioux War, 1854-1856 provides a thorough and objective narrative, using a wealth of eyewitness accounts to reveal the significance of Blue Water Creek in Lakota and U.S. history.

This unique, day-by-day compilation of important events helps students understand and appreciate five centuries of Native American history. Encompassing more than 500 years, American Indian History Day by Day: A Reference Guide to Events is a marvelous research tool. Students will learn what occurred on a specific day, read a brief description of events, and find suggested books and websites they can turn to for more information. The guide's unique treatment and chronological arrangement make it easy for students to better understand specific events in Native American history and to trace broad themes across time. The book covers key occurrences in Native American history from 1492 to the present. It discusses native interactions with European explorers, missionaries and colonists, as well as the shifting Indian policies of the U.S. government since the nation's founding. Contemporary events, such as the opening of Indian casinos, are also covered. In addition to accessing comprehensive information about frequently researched topics in Native American history, students will benefit from discussions of lesser-known subjects and events whose causes and significance are often misunderstood.

A concise and engrossing account of the Lakota and the battle to regain their homeland. The Lakota Indians made their home in the majestic Black Hills mountain range during the last millennium, drawing on the hills' endless bounty for physical and spiritual sustenance. Yet the arrival of white settlers brought the Lakotas into inexorable conflict with the changing world, at a time when their tribe would produce some of the most famous Native Americans in history, including Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse. Jeffrey Ostler's powerful history of the Lakotas' struggle captures the heart of a people whose deep relationship with their homeland would compel them to fight for it against overwhelming odds, on battlefields as varied as the Little Bighorn and the chambers of U.S. Supreme Court.

Merciless killing in the nineteenth-century American West, as this unusual book shows, was not as simple as depicted in dime novels and movie Westerns. The scholars interviewed here, experts on violence in the West, embrace a wide range of approaches and perspectives and challenge both traditional views of western expansion and politically correct ideologies. The Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Battle of the Washita, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre are iconic events that have been repeatedly described and analyzed, but the interviews included in this volume offer new points of view. Other events discussed here are little-known today, such as the Camp Grant Massacre, in which Anglo-Americans, Mexican Americans, and Tohono O'odham Indians killed more than a hundred Pinal and Aravaipa Apache men, women, and children. In addition to specific events, the interviews cover broader themes such as violence in early California; hostilities between the frontier army and the Sioux, including the Santee Sioux Revolt and Wounded Knee; and violence between European Americans and Great Basin tribes, such as the Bear River Massacre. The scholars interviewed include academic historians, public historians, an anthropologist, and a journalist. The interview format provides insights into the methodology and tools of historical research and allows questions and speculations often absent from conventional, written accounts. The scholars share their latest thoughts on long-standing controversies, address the political uses often made of history, and discuss the need to incorporate multiple viewpoints. Scholars and students of history and historiography will be fascinated by the nuts-and-bolts information about the practice of history revealed in these interviews. In addition, readers with specific interests in the events discussed will gain much new information and many fresh insights.

This four-volume encyclopedia chronicles the historical roots of the United States' current military dominance, documenting its growth from continental expansionism to hemispheric hegemony to global empire. This groundbreaking four-volume encyclopedia offers sweeping coverage of a subject central to American history and of urgent importance today as the nation wrestles with a global imperial posture and the long-term viability of the largest military establishment in human history. The work features more than 650 entries encompassing the full scope of American expansionism and imperialism from the colonial era through the 21st-century "War on Terror." Readers will learn about U.S.-Native American conflicts; 19th-century land laws; early forays overseas, for example, the opening of Japan; and America's imperial conflicts in Cuba and the Philippines. U.S. interests in Latin America are explored, as are the often-forgotten ambitions that lay behind the nation's involvement in the World Wars. The work also offers extensive coverage of the Cold War and today's ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, and the Middle East as they relate to U.S. national interests. Notable individuals, including American statesmen, military commanders, influential public figures, and anti-imperialists are covered as well. The inclusion of cultural elements of American expansionism and imperialism—for example, Hollywood films and protest music—helps distinguish this set from other more limited works.

On August 19, 1854, U.S. Army lieutenant John L. Grattan led a detachment of twenty-nine soldiers and one civilian interpreter to a large Lakota encampment near Fort Laramie to arrest an Indian man accused of killing a Mormon emigrant’s cow. The terrible series of events that followed, which became known as the Grattan Massacre, unleashed the opening volley in the First Sioux War—and marked the beginning of a generation of Indian warfare on the Great Plains. All Because of a Mormon Cow tells, for the first time, the full story of this seminal event in the history of the American West. Where previous accounts of the Grattan Massacre have made do with limited primary sources, this volume includes eighty contemporary, annotated accounts of the fight and its aftermath, many newly discovered or recovered from obscurity. Recorded when the events were fresh in their narrators’ memories, these documents bring a sense of immediacy to a story more than a century and a half old. Alongside the voices heard here—of the Indian leaders Little Thunder and Big Partisan, of Mormons from passing emigrant trains, and of government officials charged with investigating the massacre, among many others—the editors include a substantial and thorough introduction that underscores the significance of the Grattan Massacre in all its depth and detail. All Because of a Mormon Cow offers a better understanding even as it evokes the drama of a highly controversial episode in the history of relations between Indians and non-Indians in the American West.