Killing Crazy Horse by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard

 

Killing Crazy Horse by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard

 

The Indian Wars are almost forgotten by Americans, covered mostly by a blanket of fiction of how the west was won, and a few bits and pieces known only by their labels, such as The Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee.  Sure, we know some Indian names:  Crazy Horse, Cochise, and Geronimo, and a few Indian tribes: Apache, Comanche, Sioux.  We either forget, or never knew there were thousands of Indian tribes and thousands of years of those tribes controlling what we now call the United States of America.

 

O’Reilly and Dugard tell the exciting, bloody, and historic story of how the west was really won. And, it’s not a pretty story.  In a quest for land, and gold, gradually and persistently, the tribes were literally wiped out.  Yes, there are still Native American tribes, but now they are only faint shadows of what they were and how they ruled from sea to shining sea. While European Americans fought for land and gold, Native Americans fought for their very existence and their way of life.

 

Nevertheless, O’Reilly and Dugard’s book, in my opinion, is evenhanded. The most brutal massacres were perpetrated by both sides; acts so heinous as to be very difficult to read and even harder to comprehend.

 

Promises, compromises, treaties became mere words floating in the winds of war.  Meanwhile, the American Civil War cleaved the nation in two, and after the War Between the States settled its bloody dispute, the Indian wars took on a new vengeance. 

 

Killing Crazy Horse leads the reader not only through the Indian Wars, but through the making of America, the politics, the self-sacrifice of the Civil War, and the raging battle, not just for the west, but for all of what is now the United States.  The book is so clearly written and its bloody tale so exciting that even the slowest reader will be mesmerized and shocked and will come away with a new and more balanced view of America.  This book is history as it should be told, clearly, evenhandedly, without apology or bias.

 

There’s a deeper lesson here. We assume that the United States will always be as it is today. More likely, it will go the way of the Native American tribes, whose vast regions and civilizations now live only in memory, and the United States will be, like them, be relegated to the history books.