Surrender at Appomattox Book

Powers's history is about more than the death of one man. Many men and women were killed in the period of the Sioux wars of the 1860s and 70s. In using the death of the iconic warrior chief as a kind of hub, Powers relates the history of those years made up of dispute and open warfare which ended in the death of the old, traditional hunting and raiding life of the Plains Sioux. It's a history written with the aid of the rich resources left by participants of both sides but most interestingly from the point of view of the Indians because it's a portrayal of primitives told with an anthropological precision giving us a detailed picture of every aspect of Indian life, not only warfare but also ceremonial practices, social structure, dress, food, ways of thinking about and dealing with death, and marriage customs. It's as clear a picture of what the Plains peoples were like as I remember reading. We understand the motives of the white men and the westward movement. Powers addresses that but to his credit spends even more time explaining the intellectual disciplines of the Indians and their understanding of the several powers in the nature around them, how they related to and used them. And also to his credit, as a history of the spiritual impulses of the tribes as well as the political, which was a thick stew of shifting fortunes and allegiances, it's told not in the stereotypical way of Indian oral histories but in the modern language in which this history has come down to us. This is probably the best book I've read at describing that seam where the Indians and white men met.

The story itself is full of self-serving motive and misunderstanding. Powers demonstrates the friction caused by the contact of 2 culturally diverse and technologically imbalanced societies. His story is analysis which brilliantly isn't analysis but is comprehensive in its glaringly hostile attitudes these 2 cultures in collision had of each other. Without actually saying so, he shows why they couldn't co-exist.

The prime mover of Powers's story may be Crazy Horse but this is a larger history of the displacement of a people which is human, tragic, and utterly fascinating, and which the author follows well into the twentieth century.