![]() ![]() Cozzens promises to “bring historical balance” to the story, and he does, but this mostly means demonstrating to readers that not all whites were devils and not all tribes that were not wholeheartedly in resistance were sellouts, the view we have been accustomed to since Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). Still, Cozzens is not without insight-“the Indians who had gone to war against the government had usually done so reluctantly,” he writes, “and they had lost their land and their way of life anyway”-and there is much merit in having a readable history of the Indian Wars in one volume. The author covers all the ground dutifully if without much flair this is a narrative of facts more than ideas, and it sometimes plods. ![]() ![]() His long narrative continues to the shameful massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee a generation later, a compressed period with many set pieces, from the Battle of Little Bighorn to the murder of Crazy Horse and the Geronimo Campaign. Traditional histories set the beginnings of that conflict with the Sioux Uprising of 1862, but Cozzens starts in 1866 with the better-studied war of resistance mounted by Red Cloud. Cozzens ( Battlefields of the Civil War: The Battles that Shaped America, 2011, etc.) turns his attention westward to the combat between invading whites and Natives along the frontier. ![]()
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