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" |