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 ...

Conflict and cooperation have shaped the American Southwest since prehistoric times. For centuries indigenous groups and, later, Spaniards, French, and Anglo-Americans met, fought, and collaborated with one another in this border area stretching from Texas through southern California. To explore the region’s complex past from prehistory to the U.S. takeover, this book uses an unusual multidisciplinary approach. In interviews with ten experts, Deborah and Jon Lawrence discuss subjects rangi...

A groundbreaking history of the rise and decline of the vast and imposing Native American empire.In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultura...

A masterful reconstruction of one of the worst Indian massacres in American historyIn April 1871, a group of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono O?odham Indians surrounded an Apache village at dawn and murdered nearly 150 men, women, and children in their sleep. In the past century the attack, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, has largely faded from memory. Now, drawing on oral histories, contemporary newspaper reports, and the participants? own accoun...

When considering the history of the Southwest, scholars have typically viewed Apaches, Navajos, and other Athabaskans as marauders who preyed on Pueblo towns and Spanish settlements. William B. Carter now offers a multilayered reassessment of historical events and environmental and social change to show how mutually supportive networks among Native peoples created alliances in the centuries before and after Spanish settlement.Combining recent scholarship on southwestern prehistory ...

*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award**A New York Times Notable Book**Winner of the Texas Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award*This New York Times bestseller and stunning historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West “is nothing short of a revela...

Powerful and passionate, Stolen Continents is a history of the Americas unlike any other. This incisive single-volume report tells the stories of the conquest and survival of five great indigenous cultures—Aztec, Maya, Inca, Cherokee, and Iroquois. Through their eloquent words, we relive their strange, tragic experiences—including, in a new epilogue, incidents that bring us up to the twenty-first century.

The Oatman massacre is among the most famous and dramatic captivity stories in the history of the Southwest. In this riveting account, Brian McGinty explores the background, development, and aftermath of the tragedy.Roys Oatman, a dissident Mormon, led his family of nine and a few other families from their homes in Illinois on a journey west, believing a prophecy that they would find the fertile “Land of Bashan” at the confluence of the Gila and Colorado Rivers. On February 18, 185...

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST | WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE. A landmark history—the sweeping story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians across America, from the time of the conquistadors up to the early twentieth century.Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There w...

This lavishly illustrated volume reassesses and celebrates the life and legacy of the West’s most legendary figure, George Armstrong Custer, from Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lonesome Dove and “one of America’s great storytellers” (The Wall Street Journal), Larry McMurtry.On June 25, 1876, General George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry attacked a large Lakota Cheyenne village on the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. He lost not o...

The story of the Lakota Sioux's loss of their spiritual homelands and their remarkable legal battle to regain itThe Lakota Indians counted among their number some of the most famous Native Americans, including Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Their homeland was in the magnificent Black Hills in South Dakota, where they found plentiful game and held religious ceremonies at charged locations like Devil's Tower. Bullied by settlers and the U. S. Army, they refused to rel...

Here is an intriguing exploration of the ways in which the history of the Spanish Conquest has been misread and passed down to become popular knowledge of these events. The book offers a fresh account of the activities of the best-known conquistadors and explorers, including Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro. Using a wide array of sources, historian Matthew Restall highlights seven key myths, uncovering the source of the inaccuracies and exploding the fallacies and misconceptions behind each m...