Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award. One of the American West’s bloodiest—and least-known—massacres is searingly re-created in this generation-spanning history of native-white intermarriage. At dawn on January 23, 1870, four hundred men of the Second U.S. Cavalry attacked and butchered a Piegan camp near the Marias River in Montana in one of the worst slaughters of Indians by American military forces in U.S. history. Coming to avenge the murder of their father—a former fur-trader named Malcolm Clarke who had been killed four months earlier by their Piegan mother’s cousin—Clarke ’s own two sons joined the cavalry in a slaughter of many of their own relatives. In this groundbreaking work of American history, Andrew R. Graybill places the Marias Massacre within a larger, three-generation saga of the Clarke family, particularly illuminating the complex history of native-white intermarriage in the American Northwest.
Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award. One of the American West’s bloodiest—and least-known—massacres is searingly re-created in this generation-spanning history of native-white intermarriage. At dawn on January 23, 1870, four hundred men of the Second U.S. Cavalry attacked and butchered a Piegan camp near the Marias River in Montana in one of the worst slaughters of Indians by American military forces in U.S. history. Coming to avenge the murder of their father—a former fur-trader named Malcolm Clarke who had been killed four months earlier by their Piegan mother’s cousin—Clarke ’s own two sons joined the cavalry in a slaughter of many of their own relatives. In this groundbreaking work of American history, Andrew R. Graybill places the Marias Massacre within a larger, three-generation saga of the Clarke family, particularly illuminating the complex history of native-white intermarriage in the American Northwest.
Winner of Columbia University's 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History 2024 Spur Award Winner Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations. Unprecedented exploration uncovered the West's extraordinary resources, beginning with the discovery of gold in California within days of the United States acquiring the territory following the Mexican-American War. As those resources were developed, often by the most modern methods and through modern corporate enterprise, half of the contiguous United States was physically transformed. Continental Reckoning guides the reader through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life. As the West was acquired, integrated into the nation, and made over physically and culturally, the United States shifted onto a course of accelerated economic growth, a racial reordering and redefinition of citizenship, engagement with global revolutions of science and technology, and invigorated involvement with the larger world. The creation of the West and the emergence of modern America were intimately related. Neither can be understood without the other. With masterful prose and a critical eye, West presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history.
Winner of the Western Writers of America “SPUR Award” and the Western Association of Women Historians “Gita Chaudhuri Prize”! Born a slave in eastern Tennessee, Sarah Blair Bickford (1852–1931) made her way while still a teenager to Montana Territory, where she settled in the mining boomtown of Virginia City. Race and the Wild West is the first full-length biography of this remarkable woman, whose life story affords new insight into race and belonging in the American West around the turn of the twentieth century. For many years, Sarah Bickford’s known biography fit into a single paragraph. By examining her life in all its complexity, Arata fills in what were long believed to be unrecoverable “silent spaces” in her story. Before establishing herself as a successful business owner, we learn, she was twice married, both times to white men. Her first husband, an Irish immigrant, physically abused her until she divorced him in 1881. Their three children all died before the age of ten. In 1883, she married Stephen Bickford and gave birth to four more children. Upon his death, she inherited his shares of the Virginia City Water Company, acquiring sole ownership in 1917. For the final decade of her life, Bickford actively preserved and promoted a historic Virginia City building best known as the site of the brutal lynching in 1864 of five men. Her conspicuous role in developing an early form of heritage tourism challenges long-standing narratives that place white men at the center of the “Wild West” myth and its promotion. Bickford’s story offers a window into the dynamics of race in the rural West. Although her experiences defy easy categorization, what is clear is that her navigation of social norms and racial barriers did not hinge on exceptionalism or tokenism. Instead, she built a life that deserves to be understood on its own terms. Through exhaustive research and nuanced analysis, Laura J. Arata advances our understanding of a woman whose life embodied the contradictory intersections of hope and disappointment that characterized life in the early-twentieth-century American West for brave pioneers of many races.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER New York Times Book Review • 100 Notable Books of 2022 Best Books of 2022 — New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence “I can only wish that, when I was that lonely college junior and was finishing Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I’d had Hämäläinen’s book at hand.” —David Treuer, The New Yorker “[T]he single best book I have ever read on Native American history.” —Thomas E. Ricks, New York Times Book Review A prize-winning scholar rewrites 400 years of American history from Indigenous perspectives, overturning the dominant origin story of the United States. There is an old, deeply rooted story about America that goes like this: Columbus “discovers” a strange continent and brings back tales of untold riches. The European empires rush over, eager to stake out as much of this astonishing “New World” as possible. Though Indigenous peoples fight back, they cannot stop the onslaught. White imperialists are destined to rule the continent, and history is an irreversible march toward Indigenous destruction. Yet as with other long-accepted origin stories, this one, too, turns out to be based in myth and distortion. In Indigenous Continent, acclaimed historian Pekka Hämäläinen presents a sweeping counternarrative that shatters the most basic assumptions about American history. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the Revolution, and other well-trodden episodes on the conventional timeline, he depicts a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals. From the Iroquois in the Northeast to the Comanches on the Plains, and from the Pueblos in the Southwest to the Cherokees in the Southeast, Native nations frequently decimated white newcomers in battle. Even as the white population exploded and colonists’ land greed grew more extravagant, Indigenous peoples flourished due to sophisticated diplomacy and leadership structures. By 1776, various colonial powers claimed nearly all of the continent, but Indigenous peoples still controlled it—as Hämäläinen points out, the maps in modern textbooks that paint much of North America in neat, color-coded blocks confuse outlandish imperial boasts for actual holdings. In fact, Native power peaked in the late nineteenth century, with the Lakota victory in 1876 at Little Big Horn, which was not an American blunder, but an all-too-expected outcome. Hämäläinen ultimately contends that the very notion of “colonial America” is misleading, and that we should speak instead of an “Indigenous America” that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial. The evidence of Indigenous defiance is apparent today in the hundreds of Native nations that still dot the United States and Canada. Necessary reading for anyone who cares about America’s past, present, and future, Indigenous Continent restores Native peoples to their rightful place at the very fulcrum of American history.
Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University This iconic description of the interaction between the vast central plains of the continent and the white Americans who moved there in the mid-nineteenth century has endured as one of the most influential, widely known, and controversial works in western history since its first publication in 1931. Arguing that "the Great Plains environment . . . constitutes a geographic unity whose influences have been so powerful as to put a characteristic mark upon everything that survives within its borders," Walter Prescott Webb identifies the revolver, barbed wire, and the windmill as technological adaptations that facilitated Anglo conquest of the arid, treeless region. Webb draws on history, anthropology, geography, demographics, climatology, and economics in arguing that the 98th Meridian constitutes an institutional fault line at which "practically every institution that was carried across it was either broken and remade or else greatly altered." This new edition of one of the foundational works of western American history features an introduction by Great Plains historian Andrew R. Graybill and a new index and updated design.
The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America’s history This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty†‘first century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas’ roots as marginal hunter†‘gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America’s great commercial artery, and then—in what was America’s first sweeping westward expansion—as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. Hämäläinen’s deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.
In Colonial Complexions, historian Sharon Block examines how Anglo-Americans built racial ideologies out of descriptions of physical appearance. By analyzing more than 4,000 advertisements for fugitive servants and slaves in colonial newspapers alongside scores of transatlantic sources, she reveals how colonists transformed observable characteristics into racist reality. Building on her expertise in digital humanities, Block repurposes these well-known historical sources to newly highlight how daily language called race and identity into being before the rise of scientific racism. In the eighteenth century, a multitude of characteristics beyond skin color factored into racial assumptions, and complexion did not have a stable or singular meaning. Colonists justified a race-based slave labor system not by opposing black and white but by accumulating differences in the bodies they described: racism was made real by marking variation from a norm on some bodies, and variation as the norm on others. Such subtle systemizations of racism naturalized enslavement into bodily description, erased Native American heritage, and privileged life history as a crucial marker of free status only for people of European-based identities. Colonial Complexions suggests alternative possibilities to modern formulations of racial identities and offers a precise historical analysis of the beliefs behind evolving notions of race-based differences in North American history.
The adoption of firearms by American Indians between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries marked a turning point in the history of North America’s indigenous peoples—a cultural earthquake so profound, says David Silverman, that its impact has yet to be adequately measured. Thundersticks reframes our understanding of Indians’ historical relationship with guns, arguing against the notion that they prized these weapons more for the pyrotechnic terror guns inspired than for their efficiency as tools of war. Native peoples fully recognized the potential of firearms to assist them in their struggles against colonial forces, and mostly against one another. The smoothbore, flintlock musket was Indians’ stock firearm, and its destructive potential transformed their lives. For the deer hunters east of the Mississippi, the gun evolved into an essential hunting tool. Most importantly, well-armed tribes were able to capture and enslave their neighbors, plunder wealth, and conquer territory. Arms races erupted across North America, intensifying intertribal rivalries and solidifying the importance of firearms in Indian politics and culture. Though American tribes grew dependent on guns manufactured in Europe and the United States, their dependence never prevented them from rising up against Euro-American power. The Seminoles, Blackfeet, Lakotas, and others remained formidably armed right up to the time of their subjugation. Far from being a Trojan horse for colonialism, firearms empowered American Indians to pursue their interests and defend their political and economic autonomy over two centuries.
2022 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize Finalist Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many African Americans moved westward as Greater Reconstruction came to a close. Though, along with Euro-Americans, Black settlers appropriated the land of Native Americans, sometimes even contributing to ongoing violence against Indigenous people, this migration often defied the goals of settler states in the American West. In Black Montana Anthony W. Wood explores the entanglements of race, settler colonialism, and the emergence of state and regional identity in the American West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By producing conditions of social, cultural, and economic precarity that undermined Black Montanans' networks of kinship, community, and financial security, the state of Montana, in its capacity as a settler colony, worked to exclude the Black community that began to form inside its borders after Reconstruction. Black Montana depicts the history of Montana's Black community from 1877 until the 1930s, a period in western American history that represents a significant moment and unique geography in the life of the U.S. settler-colonial project.
