"After the journey of Lewis and Clark through the wilderness of the American West, a venture that might seem to us tentative, imperiled and pursued against all odds, there came unstoppable waves of humanity (and inhumanity), driven by dreams of gold and empire, and sustained by a certain sense of the inevitable, a conviction given the name Manifest Destiny. “Blood and Thunder” is the story of the quest for, and conquest of, the American West. It is, as we know, the most romantic of stories, and arguably the most cherished of America’s myths.
"Early on, Hampton Sides writes of the mountain men:
“As the forerunners of Western civilization, creeping up the river valleys and across the mountain passes, the trappers brought smallpox and typhoid, they brought guns and whiskey and venereal disease, they brought the puzzlement of money and the gleam of steel. And on their liquored breath they whispered the coming of an unimaginable force, of a gathering shadow on the eastern horizon, gorging itself on the continent as it pressed steadily this way.”
This cryptic passage might serve as a bare-bones synopsis of the book. Sides, the author of the best seller “Ghost Soldiers,” has a talent for encapsulation. His thumbnail sketches of character are comprehensive and concise at the same time. There is, for example, a wonderful portrait of Stephen Watts Kearny, who commanded the Army of the West, in which the whole man appears to be contained and defined in a kind of verbal line drawing: “On innumerable occasions he had smoked the pipe with Indians, learning their manner of speaking, their penchant for metaphor; he once flattered a Sioux chief by complimenting him on the ‘soaring eagle of your fame.’ During a council with Oglala Indians, he heartily partook of the local delicacies — boiled dog and blood-tinged river water from the paunch of a buffalo.”
I find this interesting because I was born and raised in South Dakota, and I grew up among people in our Native American Community, namely the Lakota People. I have been a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church here in South Dakota, and about half of our statewide church members live on the indian reservations.
The designation “Sioux” for this distinct group of Native American people is something of a misnomer, when the proper name is either “Lakota” or “Dakota”. The way the story goes is that when some French-Canadian fur trappers came through this region in the mid 19th century, they asked the Ojibway People of Minnesota who their enemies were, and the response that they got was something like this, “Well, it’s those snakes on the other side of the lake”. The word “Sioux” when translated from the original French-Canadian dialect, literally means snakes. And naturally, our Lakota brothers and sisters have never liked being referred to with this kind of moniker.
I have within my library of video tapes a documentary that was produced by PBS about the events that culminated in the driving of the final spike at Promotory Point, Utah, “The Iron Road” It was narrated by David McCullough. In this tape the producers interviewed a gentleman on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and he tells the story of how his people, when they would hear the sound of a steam locomotive whistle, would break down and cry, because it reminded them that their land had been forcefully taken from them by the greedy white man. I had a conversation about this recently with Creighton Robertson, who is the Bishop of the Episcopal Church of South Dakota. Creighton is a full-blooded Lakota Native American, and he told me that he remembers the elders of his tribe talking about this many, many years after it had happened. And indeed, it is a very sad story.
True. It should also be noted that other Indian tribes were lying to, deceiving, robbing and killing peaceful tribes and stealing land from them long before the jolly 'ol times of Custer.
Not only that, I think that the diseases (alcohol included) that the white man brought over from Europe did more to wipe out American Indians than anything else.
One of the biggest mistakes the white man has ever committed with regard to indian tribes all over the country was to introduce them to booze. There is a very high rate of alcoholism on the reservations in this state, and the rate of rescidivism is very high. About half of the homeless bums who panhandle on the streets of downtown Sioux Falls are drunken indians. And I am sure that it’s much the same anywhere you’d go.
CANADIANPACIFIC2816
“There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run, when the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun, long before the white man and long before the wheel, when the green, dark forest was too silent to be real.” Gordon Lightfoot