A ten-thousand-year war
H.W. Brands writes compellingly of how the United States conquered the West.
I’ve come across a book that tells me the ending of a story I’ve been pursuing for years.
It’s the story of this country’s westward expansion. My books on the nineteenth century have forced me to confront different parts of it, especially its displacement of native nations. The complexities of the story are amazing.
Jacksonland told of a twenty-year conflict between Andrew Jackson and the Cherokee chief John Ross. It was the prelude to the Trail of Tears of 1838, when Cherokees were forced westward across the Mississippi, leaving Georgia and surrounding states as white settlers took their land. We learn of the Cherokees as victims, which they were—but the story of John Ross shows something more. Ross fought for his people through the democratic process. Cherokees claimed agency, asserted themselves, and added to our democratic tradition even though, in the end, they lost.
Imperfect Union told of John Charles Fremont’s wanderings in the West in the 1840’s and 1850’s, mapping trails and publicizing the routes for white settlement. He usually traveled peacefully among indigenous people, traded with them, dined with them, and even proudly included them among the diverse groups of men who accompanied his explorations. But when attacked by Indians (in one case) or when he imagined a threat from them (in at least one other), he called them “savages,” torched villages, and led his men in killing all the people they could find.
Differ We Must, my new book out October 3, takes the story forward one more chapter. The book tells Lincoln’s life story through his meetings with people who disagreed with him. One was a Cheyenne leader named Lean Bear, who traveled to the White House in 1863 and warned Lincoln that white settlers were bound to cause trouble in the modern-day state of Colorado.
If I were to suggest a book that would complete the story, it would be The Last Campaign, published in 2022 by the historian H.W. Brands. Brands has been very supportive of my books, but hardly could do me a better favor than writing this one so that people like me could read it. It’s an account of the wars for control of the continent after the Civil War, from roughly 1866-1886.
This history encompasses data points that I have known since I was a kid, such as the Battle of Little Bighorn, where General George Custer was killed with more than 200 of his men in 1876. It includes many famous native figures and soldiers; Geronimo shares the cover with William T. Sherman, the Civil War hero who directed the Indian wars that followed.
Brands weaves in stories and perspectives I never knew at all, forming a riveting narrative. We first learn of the Battle of the Little Bighorn neither from the soldiers’ perspective nor from that of the coalition of warriors who confronted them, but from a young native woman who saw and heard the fight.
The narrative is often filled with suspense, as when federal troops surround the last of the Modoc people in Oregon. A young Modoc woman learns that her people are plotting to murder an Army general at the next peace conference. She warns him. The general dismisses the warning and goes ahead to the meeting.
It’s not easy to illuminate the native perspective: people of many tribes were not literate, and their stories, when available at all, have often been filtered through white people. Yet Brands manages it whenever the source material allows. We travel, for example, beside a boy who turns sixteen while his band of Apaches is on the run with Geronimo. We learn the boy’s agonizing conflicts: he wants to be a warrior like the men, even though he’s filled with sadness because the warriors killed and stole the boots of a man who had played with him as a child.
In the same way, Brands illustrates the dilemma of U.S. soldiers, who had a legal obligation to protect the tribes but frequently failed to guard them from rapacious white settlers. Outside Tucson, white settlers massacred many people from an Apache village under federal protection. The settlers felt they were meting out vigilante justice for past Indian crimes. The army did its duty and arrested the white culprits, and an all-white jury acquitted them. One of the killers was later elected mayor of Tucson, and boasted all his life of his role in a mass murder.
When they were in a proper battle, people on both sides showed extraordinary grit, creativity and courage—as well as brutality. General Nelson Miles led troops on campaigns through harsh winter months, knowing he could destroy the tribes at their weakest moments. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce fought his way across the brand-new Yellowstone National Park, killing tourists his men encountered.
Generals like George Crook insisted to native leaders that if they fought, the army would stop at nothing to kill or capture them—and if they stayed at peace, he would be their best friend. An underlying dynamic assured the soldiers would never be too friendly. White Americans had more numbers and power. They assumed their civilized way of life was superior, and that it inevitably would prevail. More than that, many white leaders assumed that Indians inevitably would die out. They rarely negotiated with native leaders as equals, instead offering them scraps of land in exchange for vast territories they must surrender, and frequently the whites came also for the scraps. The repeated forced relocation of Apaches is excruciating to read about, and must have been intolerable to endure.
Brands speaks of this phase as the end of a “ten thousand year struggle” for supremacy in North America, which is a provocative way to frame it. Various tribes had been at war with each other for generations. Many were forced into new homelands, or forced their way into other people’s homelands. Finally, Brands writes, a tribe came from Europe and forced all to submit. But the indigenous tribes did not die out, and remain part of our national fabric. They are citizens of the United States, as they usually were not in the nineteenth century—which gives them a say, as voters and sometimes as political leaders, in the governance of the land that was wrested from their ancestors. I said earlier that this was the end of the story; but in a larger sense, this story is not over at all.
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