Reviews for The Grand Old Man of Maine: Selected Letters of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, 1865-1914

The average rating for The Grand Old Man of Maine: Selected Letters of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, 1865-1914 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-18 00:00:00 Edward Augusto "The officer of the guard, Lieutenant Henry Lemly, was inside the building. There were two rooms. Turning Bear, leading the way, entered the first room through the door that had been ajar with the rest close on his heels. To the right was a door into a second room. In the door was a window with bars. The door opened. In the second room were several men. It was said later that these men were wearing chains. Their feet were attached to iron balls. The chains could be heard rattling…Charging First heard a shout from inside the building. Turning Bear shouted out, 'It's the jail!' He shouted, 'Turn back!' He rushed back out through the door that had been ajar. Charging First heard the man rushing out say, 'There are bodies hanging in that room…' In this instant, Crazy Horse lost his weakness. 'When the inner door was opened to pass Crazy Horse in,' Billy Garnett said later, 'it dawned on him that he was a prisoner…' With tremendous force Crazy Horse lunged back, pulling away from the door…" - Thomas Powers, The Killing of Crazy Horse Mount Rushmore is one of the purest tourist traps yet devised by the hand of man. The four presidential faces carved into the granite prominence have little or no connection at all to South Dakota. Of the three, only Teddy Roosevelt ever set foot on the land, or even knew South Dakota as a State. Still, it serves its purpose, which is to get people to come to South Dakota. And it works, to the tune of three million people a year, all of whom come to see - and be disappointed by - the skulls of four white presidents blasted onto the side of a mountain sacred to the Lakota. Less than twenty miles away, and quite a bit less finished, is the Crazy Horse Monument. Developed in the same vein as Rushmore (that is, making men out of mountains), it has been under construction for 63 years, and at its present pace, will be completed sometime before the end of the world, but long after our own deaths. The historical ironist can make quite a day out of the two monuments: the four gleaming heads jutting from sacred rock, representative of 150 years of American history; the steamrolling crush of Anglo-Saxon civilization as it swept westward from the Atlantic; and the unfinished Indian on horseback, the defender of the Black Hills, who was lied to by the Federal Government, betrayed by his own people, and then stabbed in the back by a United States soldier. You got your winner and your loser, right there, just seventeen miles apart. Reflect, if you will. And don't forget to take a picture of yourself in which you use perspective to make it seem like you are picking Jefferson's nose. In terms of name recognition, Crazy Horse is the most famous Indian in history. Tecumseh and Pontiac had grander visions and commanded more hearts and minds, but the travails of the Eastern woodland tribes have been long eclipsed by the romantic plight of the great horse tribes of the plains. Sitting Bull is widely known, but he was a spiritual leader, and therefore harder to understand than Crazy Horse's distilled warrior essence. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were as fierce of fighters in their primes as Crazy Horse was in his, but they are hampered the intertribal politics in which they were snagged, following their surrender to the U.S. Government. Crazy Horse is the most famous because he was unreconstructed right up to the end. The Indian Wars are complicated. Crazy Horse is simple. He was a warrior and the way of the warrior is death. He fought all his life; he didn't suffer white men; he didn't wear white men's clothes; he didn't involve himself in white men's politics; he never allowed his picture to be taken; and in the end, he chose death over a jail cell. There is something eminently noble about him, so much so that 71 years after we murdered him, we decided to carve him into a mountainside. Right in the middle of the place he believed the world began. Just like he would've wanted. Thomas Powers' The Killing of Crazy Horse purports to tell the story of Crazy Horse's death, and the wild, swirling, scheming characters and events that brought him to his end. In May 1877, less than a year after the stunning defeat of George Custer at the Little Big Horn, Crazy Horse arrived at Camp Robinson, Nebraska, as a prelude to a formal surrender. For the next few months, Crazy Horse camped near Camp Robinson while poisonous rumors filled the air: rumors that Crazy Horse was going to slip away; rumors that Crazy Horse was going to resume his war against the whites; rumors that Crazy Horse intended to assassinate General George Crook. Crook ordered Crazy Horse's arrest, and sent soldiers against his village. The village scattered and Crazy Horse escaped to nearby Spotted Tail Agency. After meeting with a sympathetic officer, Lieutenant Jesse Lee, Crazy Horse agreed to return to Camp Robinson. Unbeknownst to him, Crazy Horse's arrest had been ordered. When Crazy Horse arrived at Camp Robinson, he was led to the guardhouse. When he saw the iron bars, he tried to escape. His own people, chief among them Little Big Man, tried to hold him down. A soldier stabbed him in the back once, perhaps twice, mortally wounding him. Powers does a great job with Crazy Horse's last few months of life. To be sure, it is a controversial period of time. The sheer number of myths, rumors, half-truths and lies orbiting his murder makes any retelling particularly fraught. However, Powers carefully parses all the primary sources, searches for corroborating testimony, and weighs the motivations and competing interests of each witness. The result is a thorough, comprehensive, staggeringly detailed story, one that reads like Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as filtered through the lens of John Ford. The problem, though, is that the last few months of Crazy Horse's life is only told in the final quarter of what is a nearly 500 page book. Don't let the title fool you. This is more than the story of a single man's death. Rather, it is a sprawling, lumpy, oft-disjointed history of the Great Sioux War of 1876-77. It is both fun and frustrating. The Killing of Crazy Horse begins, appropriately enough, with a short biography about Crazy Horse. Unfortunately, this mini-biography is terrible. It is riddled with gaps (no mention of Crazy Horse's presence at the Grattan Massacre, or his fight against General Sumner), marred by falsehoods and factual inaccuracies (Powers claims, like so many others, that Crazy Horse was among the decoys at the Fetterman Fight, despite no primary sources to this end), and is a chronological nightmare, with almost no attempt to place the events of Crazy Horse's life on some kind of timeline. As clunky and unhelpful as this introduction was, I was even more disturbed by what happens to Crazy Horse next: he disappears. Yes, in a book in which his name adorns the title, the central character is unseen and unheard for exasperatingly long stretches. Partially this is due to the essential nature of Crazy Horse: he was reclusive, even among his own people. Partially, though, it is a fault of this book's structure, which is mostly no discernible structure at all. Like the characters on Season 5 of Lost, Powers keeps jumping forward and backward through time. For example, Powers doesn't deliver a chapter on the Little Big Horn until well after discussing the Battle of Slim Buttes, which occurred several months after Custer's death. I assume this was done for dramatic purposes, but there are better ways to convey drama than dicing the chronology like a carrot beneath a Ginsu. The Crazy Horse-free interstices are filled with characters secondary to the ultimate drama of Crazy Horse's death: Red Cloud; the interpreter William Garnett; the half-breed frontiersman Frank Grouard; Lieutenant Philo Clark; and General Crook, the much maligned but fundamentally decent soldier who helped precipitate Crazy Horse's murder. The events that are covered include Custer's 1874 expedition into the Black Hills (which discovered gold, which necessitated our breaking the Laramie Treaty of 1868, which led to the Great Sioux War, which allowed us to dynamite presidential visages into Dakota granite, which allows me to come full circle), the Battle of the Rosebud, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and the Battle of Slim Buttes. At its core, my critique is one of focus, not quality. Indeed, I believe this is a case in which the parts are greater than the whole. For instance, I thought the mini-biographies on Red Cloud and General Crook were well-done (I especially liked Powers' reliance on Crook's unfinished, unpublished autobiography). The West was full of incredible characters, with ready-made nicknames, and I can't fault Powers for lingering on as many as possible. Powers also delivers some great set pieces. Despite a desperately-needed map, his account of the Battle of the Rosebud is judicious in both analysis and conclusion. I also liked his retelling of Slim Buttes, which was an emblematic encounter of the Indian Wars: a small number of participants; a lot of shooting; a small number of casualties; but somehow very brutal, and very ugly. Surprisingly, I even liked Powers' chapter on the Little Big Horn, despite my doubts (I strongly believe that it is nearly impossible to give a reasoned description of the Little Big Horn in anything less than book-length form). Powers was able to give a dramatic, reasonable reconstruction of the battle that highlights Crazy Horse's contribution while resisting the temptation to credit him with the Indians' victory. (Crazy Horse's role at the Little Big Horn has always been overhyped. The second time I went to the battlefield, the ranger's interpretive talk posited that Crazy Horse overwhelmed Custer by executing a massive charge that swept around to the north of Custer's position and took him from behind. Because that's how Indians fight. Like the British at Balaclava. Needless to say, while listening to this ranger, I had to count slowly to one-hundred in my head, to keep from interrupting). The problem, as I see it, is that these parts fail to merge into a coherent narrative. There is a very obvious starting point to this book: Crazy Horse's birth. And there is a very obvious ending point to this book: Crazy Horse's death. But somehow, despite the inherent linearity of a man's life and death, all the skipping around, the chronological rearrangements, and the odd inclusions and elisions create a plot that is harder to follow than the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. My hypothesis is that the confused through-line is the result of too much research. It's plain to see, both by reading the text, the notes, and the bibliography, that Powers did his homework. It's also relatively plain that he wanted to show this knowledge off like a new car. His narrative is crammed with long, sometimes repetitive digressions on topics as varied as the contents of a Lakota medicine bag, the trials of the Sun Dance, and the construction of a shield. Oftentimes, these are interesting digressions. Other times, they are just pointless. For instance, Powers spends somewhere in the neighborhood of six pages discussing General Crook's peevishness with General Sheridan over a perceived slight at the Battle of Winchester during the Civil War. Really? Maybe you could've stuffed that little gem into a footnote, while spending a little more time fleshing out Crazy Horse. (Though, I hasten to add, hard evidence on Crazy Horse is hard to find). There is a taut, rigidly constructed, two-hundred page thriller lost somewhere in this unwieldy, 470-page tome. Disappointment lurks for those who value brevity, conciseness, and clockwork pacing. On the other hand, there are pleasures awaiting for those who don't mind the work of studied raconteur.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-05-22 00:00:00 Meagan Parker 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.