Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1970

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-6

Chapters 7-11

Chapters 12-14

Chapters 15-19

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 12 Summary: “The War for the Black Hills”

In its 1868 treaty negotiated with Red Cloud, the US had pledged to hold the Black Hills inviolate as a permanent part of Sioux territory, not even to be entered by a white person. The Black Hills were the sacred center of the vast Sioux range, the place where they went to receive visions from the Great Spirit. In 1874, however, rumors emerged that there was gold in the Black Hills, and suddenly white miners were breaking the treaty to stake out claims in the hills. Instead of preserving its treaty obligations, the US sent in army divisions under Colonel George Custer (called “Long Hair” by the Sioux). By this time Red Cloud’s influence was waning—as an older chief now settled beside an Indian agency, his perspective did not carry as much weight with the younger generation of Sioux—and other leaders, like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, were becoming the dominant voices. In 1875, a set of US commissioners arrived to persuade the Sioux to give up the Black Hills, or at least to negotiate the mineral rights to the land. The Sioux stood firm in their refusal, so the commissioners returned to Washington and advised Congress to proceed with purchasing the land anyway. “Thus was set in motion,” Brown writes, “a chain of actions which would bring the greatest defeat ever suffered by the US Army in its wars with the Indians, and ultimately would destroy forever the freedom of the northern Plains Indians” (284).

The US government issued orders for all Sioux not on reservations to report to their designated Indian agencies or be considered hostile and hunted down. By February of 1876, the US undertook a military campaign against the free bands of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Most of the free Sioux and their allies gathered around Sitting Bull’s band at Rosebud River, where Crazy Horse used new tactics to win a significant victory. His group of allies, now numbering some ten thousand people, removed to the Valley of the Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn). Custer and his soldiers followed the Sioux into the valley, and on June 24, 1876, the US troops were overwhelmed in battle. The Sioux won such a resounding victory that news of the battle was recounted in the eastern United States as a massacre, and the government angrily declared all the Sioux treaties to be void. In this way, the United States claimed the entirety of both the Powder River Basin and the Black Hills for themselves. Despite their victory over Custer at Little Bighorn, it became apparent to the free Sioux that they could not continue to succeed against such odds. In 1877 Sitting Bull took his band north, beyond the Canadian border. Crazy Horse was captured, arrested, and murdered. All the remaining Sioux were reduced to the strictures of a reservation life.

Chapter 13 Summary: “The Flight of the Nez Percés”

The Nez Percé had a long and friendly history with Euro-Americans from the United States, running all the way back to the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804. In the 1850s and 1860s, however, white settlement in their territory (in and around present-day Idaho) had increased to such a degree that they were being pressed to give up land rights and to consign themselves to reservations. Although some leaders agreed to this, others resisted. One leader named Old Joseph pointed out “that no man owned any part of the earth, and a man could not sell what he did not own” (317). In 1873, one such forced treaty gave away their home, the Wallowa Valley. Old Joseph’s successor, his son Young Joseph, protested in writing to President Grant. Grant responded by issuing an order protecting the Wallowa Valley, but this order was rescinded a mere two years later.

In 1877, Young Joseph was told that he had to remove his people to the Lapwai Reservation. Partway through the difficult journey there, desperation led to a breakout of violence, with war against US forces the only possible result. Joseph and his band knew they could never return to the Wallowa Valley or go to the Lapwai Reservation after the violent flare-up; escape to Canada was the only option. The pursuing US forces cut them off, however, so they turned southward toward the newly established Yellowstone National Park. With fewer than 300 warriors, Joseph’s Nez Percé group beat and evaded US forces for more than a thousand miles, but with the bitterness of winter setting in, Joseph decided that they had to give up: “I am tired of fighting. […] It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. […] I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever” (328-29). A few of the Nez Percé fighters managed to slip away on foot and escape across the Canadian border, where they were taken in by Sitting Bull’s Sioux nation. Joseph and the other Nez Percé were sent away to reservations.

Chapter 14 Summary: “Cheyenne Exodus”

In the aftermath of the Sioux alliance’s collapse and the US seizure of the Black Hills, many of the northern Cheyenne bands who had ridden with Crazy Horse turned themselves in. They expected to be given a place with the Sioux in reservations near their homeland, but instead were transferred to Indian Territory in the south, where the remaining southern Cheyenne now were. The northern Cheyenne suffered from a wave of deadly diseases in the southern territory. An even more pressing problem was that the government’s Indian agency was not providing enough food for the reservation’s population, and the Cheyenne were starving to death.

A small group of about 300, led by Little Wolf and Dull Knife, resolved in September of 1878 to travel back north to their former territories, even though they knew the US army would almost certainly hunt them down. They informed their reservation agent of their intent and then marched away: “We are going north […]. We intend to go peaceably, if possible, without injuring or destroying any property of any white man on the way, and we will attack no one unless we are first molested” (341). They were chased and harassed by US troops and white vigilantes all through Kansas and Nebraska, where Little Wolf and Dull Knife decided to separate their bands, with Little Wolf trying to reach the old Cheyenne territory at Tongue River, and Dull Knife seeking help at Red Cloud’s reservation. However, Red Cloud could not help Dull Knife, who was forced to give himself up. Dull Knife and his people were made prisoners and were subjected to torture to convince them to go back south. They tried to escape, but they were hunted down, with some killed and others reimprisoned. Little Wolf remained free until entering negotiations with an agent he knew and trusted, who brought his band to Fort Keogh and enrolled most of them to work as scouts. Life as US scouts, however, stripped them of the last vestiges of their cultural pride, and many succumbed to alcoholism before the northern Cheyenne were finally granted a tiny reservation on their Tongue River lands.

Chapters 12-14 Analysis

Chapters 12-14 return to the long narrative arc of the Sioux-Cheyenne alliance and their attempts to make a last stand against the dispossession of their territories. The Sioux and northern Cheyenne’s resistance ended with a shattered remnant of their people consigned to an ever-dwindling share of reservation lands. Brown pairs their stories with the account of the Nez Percé (Chapter 13), who faced a similar end to their resistance, consigned to reservations after a long, heartbreaking attempt to escape the US army.

One of the most prominent figures in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee rises to prominence in Chapter 12: Sitting Bull, who became the new leader of the Sioux after Red Cloud’s influence faded with his acceptance of reservation life. Together with a charismatic war leader, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull became the focal point for a new alliance that sought to resist white incursions into the sacred Black Hills. Whereas Red Cloud’s approach to relations with the US was marked by resistance and then gradual accommodation, Sitting Bull’s approach was one of resistance to the point of complete exile. Like Black Kettle and Red Cloud, however, Sitting Bull was unsuccessful in the end.

Brown’s intentional upending of conventional perspectives on the history of the American West is seen most clearly in his descriptions of the Battle of Little Bighorn (Chapter 12), which he refers to using Native American nomenclature: the Battle of the Greasy Grass. Of all the events in the saga of the United States’ so-called “Indian Wars,” the defeat of Colonel George Custer and his men at Little Bighorn loomed largest in the American popular imagination, as it was almost always portrayed as a heroic last stand by a brave army regiment tricked into a duplicitous trap. By this point in the book, though, the reader already knows that this mythologized portrayal is false—Brown has already shown Custer to have been one of the most violent, bigoted, and unprincipled characters in the history of US aggression against the Indigenous nations of the Great Plains. The Battle of the Greasy Grass is thus presented neither as a massacre, nor as a courageous sacrifice by an American folk hero, but as a resounding military triumph won by Indigenous freedom fighters through sound tactics and battlefield strength. To Brown’s initial readership in the 1970s, this was a dramatic revision of a familiar story that many of them thought they knew as the tale of “Custer’s Last Stand.”

Despite the victory at Little Bighorn, the Native American alliance won no lasting reprieve, and the familiar theme of the Tragedy of Cultural Eradication rises again. The Black Hills, which are the absolute center of Sioux culture and religion, were eventually lost to white encroachment, and the last members of the Indigenous resistance were either forced to flee as exiles or give themselves up as prisoners. Similar stories of cultural loss pervade the accounts of the Nez Percé and northern Cheyenne, who were forced to relinquish most of the lands that shaped their ancestral identity. The theme of the United States’ Deceitful Treaty Practices also reappears, primarily associated with the dissolution of the reservation lands which had been promised to the Sioux. The Black Hills—guaranteed to the Sioux in language that clearly designated this land to be the inviolate inheritance of their nation forever, so much so that no white person was even to be allowed to set foot in them—were rapidly given over to white settlement as soon as rumors of gold in the hills spread. Rather than stemming the tide of settlers and miners trespassing on Sioux land, the US authorities immediately set out to renegotiate the previous treaty and to force the Sioux to relinquish their most precious territory to commercial exploitation. This pattern ties in to a third theme, that of the Irony of Accusations of Barbarism. Whereas Native American peoples were frequently described as savage or uncivilized, in every account of treaty negotiations, they emerge as principled, honest, and straightforward, whereas the US officials, constantly going back on their word, appear just the opposite. If nobility of character is a mark of a civilized person, then such stories show the Indigenous leaders to have been far more civilized than their white counterparts.