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History Of The American Western Frontier Through Narratives, Testimonies, And Primary Documents

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Unlike other historical books, this book offers a different angle on viewing the history of the American western frontier—through narratives, testimonies, and primary documents that capture the true voices of the Native Americans. Spanning across the 1860s to the 1890s, Dee Brown tells the plight of the Native Americans after their contact with the American settlers and the United States government. The repetitive stories of the Native American groups during the second half of the nineteenth century— the welcoming of white men, the attempt to assimilate or resist, and eventually the displacement or slaughter of the aboriginals— had been told tendentiously by the very people who drove the Native Americans to the ground. Most historical writings of the west were "great myths"— tales of "fur traders, mountain men, steamboat pilots, missionaries, schoolmasters, and homesteaders". Described by Christopher Columbus as "decorous and praiseworthy," the aboriginal population has been pacifistic and open-armed ever since the first contact between the New and the Old World. One can even say that they were naïve in the way they embraced the first people that appeared on their shores in the seventeenth century.

The Native Americans had long inhabited the North America region before the white men arrived. Each of these thousands of groups had established their diverse culture, social structure and technology. Although the sheer diversity of these people was astonishing to the
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