Historians have to make strategic decisions before they even pick up their pens. The most freighted of them is whether to tell a story or advance an argument. The two can be done simultaneously, as Edward Gibbon long ago proved, but it’s hard to pull off. Academic historians have preferred argument over narrative; writers of history have felt more comfortable with tale-telling alone. Both need to come part-way toward the others. But contrary to a widespread view that academics are obtuse in adhering to a clotted style at the risk of losing readers, writers of history are the ones who most often refuse to bow to at least some of the strengths of the academics—such as putting forth an argument or adopting a particular vantage to organize and understand the swarm of facts that make up the past. A book like this one is often the result.
Cozzens is a gifted writer and his subject—the Indian wars that covered the Northern and Southern plains (as well as sometimes the Northwest) from the 1860s on—is central to United States history after the Civil War. In fact, it’s central to all American history. Anyone who’s read or taught widely about the American past knows that the native tribes turn up throughout this hemisphere’s record from the moment Europeans got within sight of land and ventured to place feet upon it. And of course, the tribes had their own long history with each other before Europeans encountered and forever altered them. Their presence and agency in the panorama of American history can’t be avoided, and Cozzens helps us see why.
The details of his narrative of just about every encounter between Americans and natives are dizzying, and it’s often hard to keep them straight. Readers will come across a well-known cast of characters—George Armstrong Custer, Philip Sheridan, William Tecumseh Sherman, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, Cochise, Geronimo—and all the other major figures who’ve long stood out for their roles in the bloody struggles over control of the western territories. And there are many you haven’t heard of before: tribes like the Modoc and figures like Lean Bear, Little Wolf, Dull Knife, and Edward R. S. Canby. The battles they fought—at, among other places, Little Bighorn, Pine Ridge, and Wounded Knee—and the political and military complexities faced by each side take up much of the text.
Among the thousands—Americans (black and white) and natives alike—who fought to control the western American land mass were some who had moral scruples, were wise in military warfare, dampened their ardor for revenge, and managed to work with others in common purpose. But an overwhelming proportion of the Americans involved in trying to “tame the West” seem to have been, at least in Cozzens’s telling, fools, incompetents, and men of bad faith. As for the natives, they, too, had their share of hotheads, lone wolves, men of ill judgment, and turncoats. You come away from The Earth Is Weeping shaking your head at the misunderstandings, futile efforts at conciliation, and downright brutality on all sides. It may be that all human societies are composed of more flawed characters than whole ones, but the Indian wars seem to have attracted an overabundance of men, especially on the American side, who were obtuse and ill-intentioned.
It’s one of the strengths of the book that Cozzens lets none of his cast of characters—Euro-Americans, Native Americans, political figures, military officers, and all the rest—off the hook for responsibility for what happened. Since we know the outcome of the Indian wars, it’s difficult to read the story except through the lens of its supposedly inevitable, sad outcome. But Cozzens is too skilled a writer to allow the end of it all to seem foreordained: If it’s difficult to imagine the tribes retaining authority over their lands, Cozzens allows us to see why some battles went their way and how, sometimes, their leaders were wiser and more farseeing than their opponents. Cozzens also keeps before his readers how contingent on particular circumstances was each step of the natives’ way from freedom to defeat and virtual imprisonment on reservations.
The question, however, is: How to tell the tale? Cozzens has chosen to be comprehensive and exhaustive. His Indian wars in the West—they stretched from no later than 1861 until 1891 (if we forget, as Cozzens does, earlier conflicts throughout all parts of the vast western territories)—follow each other in close succession. Cozzens leaves out no pertinent detail of causes, leadership, politics, strategy, or battlefield events. No one but the most devoted specialist will want to know more of each of the wars to feel secure in basic knowledge of it.
Yet this way of proceeding is wearying. Yes, we learn of all the great Indian chiefs, American military officers from generals to lieutenants, every failure of American command and Indian warfare. But narrative without theme or argument leaves a reader adrift. Only a single, short chapter—”Warrior and Soldier,” comparing the fighters’ cultures—breaks into the narrative to provide a moment of calm perspective. It reviews both sides’ different concepts of battle, fighting, honor, and the like: “The Indians of the American West,” Cozzens comments there, “might have been among the best soldiers man for man in the world, but their tactics, developed over decades of intertribal warfare, were poorly suited to open combat against a disciplined regular army unit.” One wishes for more such reflectiveness, and some threading of such themes throughout the book.
Without emphasizing the point, Cozzens brings before us the great cost of settling the continent—and not measured only by lives lost. The Indian wars destroyed the natives’ way of life; they deepened Americans’ ignorant hatred of people of different ways; they loosed indiscriminate slaughter upon the land. But what did they mean for the nation’s history? And how does Cozzens believe that we should understand them now? It’s one thing to believe, as many Americans do, that Euro-American settlers are to blame for the disasters that befell the tribes, that many Americans had genocidal intent, and that there were other ways to deal with native populations than those failed policies that the United States adopted. But the assignment of blame and the attribution of motives are political and moral matters, not historical ones.
How might a historian view what Cozzens writes about rather than avoid asking historical questions? If, as I think has to be done, one adopts a tragic view of the extermination of the natives and their ways of life, how are we to understand the cold-blooded savagery, the miscomprehension on all sides, and thus the “slow strangulation” (as Cozzens terms it) of tribal life, a result of the Indian wars whose consequences we continue to face? It’s difficult not to conclude that tribal and American societies confronted each other over nearly unbridgeable and irreconcilable cultural differences. Americans, for example, were tied to individual land ownership. Indians had no such concept of possession; they wandered the land, with none of the tribes native to the territories they occupied at the time they encountered European settlers. Many Americans knew that their own actions were unconscionable. George Crook, an unusually competent senior military officer, was of that view:
The outcome of the confrontation between different cultures couldn’t be known in advance, but surely some adaptation of one to the other would be necessary if both were to occupy the same continent. That didn’t happen; the original, less populous American cultures had to adapt to the invasive one. But why? That’s the historical question, and its answer lies in matters that Cozzens doesn’t touch at any length—such as the sheer size of the European population and its comparatively advanced technology. And while he’s well aware of the cost of inter-tribal enmities—the Sioux, Pawnees, and Crows, for instance, cooperated with the Americans against the Cheyennes, who themselves bitterly fought the Comanches and Kiowas—he never stands back to ask whether, in the absence of divisions within native culture, a different outcome for the tribes might have been reached.
My pointing out the limitations of The Earth Is Weeping is not meant to disparage its strong qualities: Written briskly, it draws you in; its maps are unusually numerous and clear; its comprehensiveness, making it useful to anyone wishing to know the facts of the many, distinct Indian wars, is unlikely to be surpassed. If it possesses some of the unfortunate characteristics of much nonacademic history today, it also reveals some of the best—snappy prose, a strong narrative cadence, and admirable clarity. For those wishing to learn the story of the Indian wars of the American West, this is the book to turn to.
James M. Banner Jr. is a historian in Washington.
