THE FOLIO SOCIETY

‘Calculated to make the head pound, the heart ache and the blood boil’
THE TIMES

‘The whites told only one side… Only his own best deeds, only the worst deeds of the Indians, has the white man told’ Yellow Wolf.

‘One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk’ Crazy Horse.

It is axiomatic that history is written by the winners, but for this searing and visceral account, Dee Brown devoted a lifetime of study to the American Indians: the defeated, the massacred, the exiled. From the first displacement of the Navahos and Apaches as California was settled, to the final slaughter of Sioux prisoners at Wounded Knee, the catalogue of broken promises, treaties and battles is a tragic but essential story. It took only thirty years, between 1860 and 1890, for the ‘opening’ of the American West to destroy the culture and civilisation of the American Indian. Dee Brown charts that destruction through a series of wars, battles and retreats: Little Big Horn, the Powder River, Red River Country and the Black Hills. The names of chiefs like Geronimo, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull still reverberate, but their compelling stories were rarely recounted in their own words or written with a sympathetic pen.

From memoirs, trials, government records and treaties, we hear the authentic voices of chiefs and braves – intelligent, articulate, sometimes angry, often sad and puzzled – as they sought to save first the land they loved and, finally, their very existence, from encroaching miners, farmers, saloon-keepers and soldiers. Translated into 17 languages and a bestseller worldwide, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee shattered our vision of how the West was really won and awakened a new understanding of America’s past.