Cultures Collide: Native Americans and Europeans 1492-1700 Book

I'm surprised more people haven't read and reviewed this early work by Russell Freedman. Perhaps it gets overshadowed by his Newbery-award-winning Lincoln: A Photobiography which was published the same year.

As always with a Russell Freedman book, I learned a lot! He presents biographies of six Indian chiefs, focusing on their leadership during the time of the conflict in the American West as more and more white people settled on the land and hunting grounds occupied by various Indian tribes. The six Indian chiefs are: Red Cloud (Sioux), Satanta (Kiowa), Quanah Parker (Comanche), Washakie (Shoshoni), Joseph (Nez Perce), and Sitting Bull (Sioux).

With such an emotion-laden topic, I think Freedman made a great attempt at maintaining a neutral voice and presenting facts. It would be very easy to slant the material more to one side or the other. Both sides made mistakes and reacted emotionally, and many times violently, to wrongs done to them. I was especially sad to learn about tribes whose leaders continually tried to keep the peace yet their people were still eventually forced to leave their lands and move to reservations.

And yet you can also understand those who did fight back. Freedman quotes one Sioux chief who said: "The whites were always trying to make the Indians give up their way of life and live like the white men. If the Indians had tried to make the whites live like them, the whites would have resisted, and it was the same with many Indians."

Next I need to read Freedman's The Life and Death of Crazy Horse and Buffalo Hunt, which seem like they would go right along with this one.