The journey
Part of the America 1850 reading journey
How it got on the shelf
Last year I finally succumbed to one of the
Folio Society introductory offers and chose this as one of my obligatory books.
As my free gift for subscribing I requested the two-volume Shorter Oxford
English Dictionary which looked quite neat in the advert. On arrival the actual
size came as a surprise but it does double as a useful coffee table. Getting
back to the featured book, it is a lovely hardback edition with numerous
photographs including one inset on the front cover.
The Review
The book tells the heart-rending story of
the final five decades of Native American Indian resistance to the inexorable
pressure of the white man. Dee Brown gives a voice to the Sioux, the Cheyenne
and the Apache, and offers their version of late 19th century
American history – looking east at an invading, or at least invasive, horde
intent on exploiting their ancestral lands.
This is not how the west was won but how the
victory was enforced. Trickery, bribery and cheating were the weapons of
choice; dispossession, destitution and demise were the result, punctuated with
acts of defiance ruthlessly put down.
Meticulously researched and related without
hyperbole, Brown’s possibly selective but undeniably truthful account of events
makes for uncomfortable but compulsive reading.
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