In the aftermath of the December 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, U.S. Army troops braced for retaliation from Lakota Sioux Indians, who had just suffered the devastating loss of at least two hundred men, women, and children. Among the soldiers sent to guard the area around Pine Ridge Agency, South Dakota, was twenty-two-year-old Private Hartford Geddings Clark (1869–1920) of the Sixth U.S. Cavalry. Within three days of the massacre, he began keeping a diary that he continued through 1891. Clark’s account—published here for the first time—offers a rare and intimate view of a soldier’s daily life set against the backdrop of a rapidly vanishing American frontier. According to editor Jerome A. Greene, Private Clark was a perceptive young man with wide-ranging interests. Although his diary begins in South Dakota, most of its entries reflect Clark’s service at Fort Niobrara, located amid the sand hills of north-central Nebraska. There, beginning in February 1891, five troops of the Sixth Cavalry sought to protect area citizens from potential Indian disturbances. Among his hard-drinking fellow soldiers, “Harry,” as Clark was called, stood out as a teetotaler. He was also an avid horse racer, huntsman, and the leading pitcher on Fort Niobrara’s baseball team. Beyond its descriptions of a grueling training regimen and off-duty entertainment, the diary reveals Clark’s evolving perception of Native peoples. Although he initially viewed them as savage enemies, Private Clark’s attitude softened when the army began enlisting Indian men and he befriended a Lakota soldier named Yellow Hand, who shared Clark's love of sports. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of nineteenth-century military history, Greene offers a richly annotated version of Private Clark’s remarkable original text, replete with information on the U.S. Army’s final occupation of the American West.

Documents the Army massacre of 150 Native Americans in December, 1890, along Wounded Knee Creek in the Lakota reservation, detailing its link to an assassination and the murders of three Native Americans that rallied politicians, soldiers, and citizens to condemn the events at Wounded Knee and fight for Native American rights during two sensationalized trials. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

In the aftermath of the December 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, U.S. Army troops braced for retaliation from Lakota Sioux Indians, who had just suffered the devastating loss of at least two hundred men, women, and children. Among the soldiers sent to guard the area around Pine Ridge Agency, South Dakota, was twenty-two-year-old Private Hartford Geddings Clark (1869–1920) of the Sixth U.S. Cavalry. Within three days of the massacre, he began keeping a diary that he continued through 1891. Clark’s account—published here for the first time—offers a rare and intimate view of a soldier’s daily life set against the backdrop of a rapidly vanishing American frontier. According to editor Jerome A. Greene, Private Clark was a perceptive young man with wide-ranging interests. Although his diary begins in South Dakota, most of its entries reflect Clark’s service at Fort Niobrara, located amid the sand hills of north-central Nebraska. There, beginning in February 1891, five troops of the Sixth Cavalry sought to protect area citizens from potential Indian disturbances. Among his hard-drinking fellow soldiers, “Harry,” as Clark was called, stood out as a teetotaler. He was also an avid horse racer, huntsman, and the leading pitcher on Fort Niobrara’s baseball team. Beyond its descriptions of a grueling training regimen and off-duty entertainment, the diary reveals Clark’s evolving perception of Native peoples. Although he initially viewed them as savage enemies, Private Clark’s attitude softened when the army began enlisting Indian men and he befriended a Lakota soldier named Yellow Hand, who shared Clark's love of sports. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of nineteenth-century military history, Greene offers a richly annotated version of Private Clark’s remarkable original text, replete with information on the U.S. Army’s final occupation of the American West.

The story of the last deaths in the American Indian wars and their far-reaching ramifications The massacre of at least 150 Indians by the U.S. Army along Wounded Knee Creek in the Lakota reservation on December 29, 1890 generally is considered the closing salvo in America's Indian Wars. But as Roger L. Di Silvestro reveals in startling detail, the fight was hardly over. Two tragic events in the weeks immediately following would reignite the conflict and forever color its legacy. In the Shadow of Wounded Knee is the first book to chronicle the senseless killings that riveted the country in 1891: the assassination of Lieutenant Edward Casey by the young Brulé Lakota warrior Plenty Horses, and the ambush of Few Tails and two other Indians by rancher Pete Culbertsons and his brothers. According to frontier justice of the day, Plenty Horses would have been summarily hanged and the Culbertsons would never have been tried. Yet in the aftermath of Wounded Knee--a slaughter that had horrified politicians, soldiers, and citizens alike--the trial of Plenty Horses made headlines nationwide as a cause célèbre. Soon prosecutors faced a quandary: if Plenty Horses were convicted, then the Army itself would have to be held accountable for its actions at Wounded Knee. How Plenty Horses--a "civilized" Indian who was educated in a school back east--was ultimately exonerated, and the Culbertsons were forced to stand trial, forms a fascinating closing chapter in the Indian Wars and in the last days of the Old West.

FINALIST FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Named a best book of 2019 by The New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post, NPR, Hudson Booksellers, The New York Public Library, The Dallas Morning News, and Library Journal. "Chapter after chapter, it's like one shattered myth after another." - NPR "An informed, moving and kaleidoscopic portrait... Treuer's powerful book suggests the need for soul-searching about the meanings of American history and the stories we tell ourselves about this nation's past.." - New York Times Book Review, front page A sweeping history—and counter-narrative—of Native American life from the Wounded Knee massacre to the present. The received idea of Native American history—as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee—has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative. Because they did not disappear—and not despite but rather because of their intense struggles to preserve their language, their traditions, their families, and their very existence—the story of American Indians since the end of the nineteenth century to the present is one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention. In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes' distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don't know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.

The “fascinating” #1 New York Times bestseller that awakened the world to the destruction of American Indians in the nineteenth-century West (The Wall Street Journal). First published in 1970, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee generated shockwaves with its frank and heartbreaking depiction of the systematic annihilation of American Indian tribes across the western frontier. In this nonfiction account, Dee Brown focuses on the betrayals, battles, and massacres suffered by American Indians between 1860 and 1890. He tells of the many tribes and their renowned chiefs—from Geronimo to Red Cloud, Sitting Bull to Crazy Horse—who struggled to combat the destruction of their people and culture. Forcefully written and meticulously researched, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee inspired a generation to take a second look at how the West was won. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Dee Brown including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

One gunshot by a single person could be powerful enough to move a whole nation. Well known are the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, William McKinley, and Martin Luther King Jr., and their long-lasting consequences. History, however, is littered with lesser-known gunshots that have had equally echoing outcomes. Some were small mistakes or misjudgments, others intentional acts that sparked events documented in our history textbooks. A single bullet serves as the catalyst for each of the stories in this book. We may or may not know who fired it but we know each bullet's end point and the effects it had on America's trajectory: the wars, social movements, and political and economic paradigm shifts. The names of those involved may not to many be recognizable but the events their acts precipitated are etched in American history.