Warriors and Pioneers (In Their Own Words series) - Softcover

As Stiles says in his preface, "Personal history is almost always history at its most gripping." This may be true but-despite the inclusion of names like Francis Parkman, Theodore Roosevelt, Chief Joseph, George Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody-this collection of 26 writers describing the 19th-century American West is often less than gripping. In fact, the most charged writing is "The Final Reckoning," Emmett Dalton's recollection of the massacre of his gang in Coffeyville, Kans., that concludes the anthology. But most of the stories don't pack that wallop. The experiences of two of the four Native Americans in the book, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce and the Chiricahua Apache Geronimo, have often been told before. Theodore Roosevelt's "The Making of the Cattle Country" is tinged with jingoism. Still, for the history buff delving into this era, this is an informative, entertaining primer. The book's only woman writer, Fanny Kelly, describes being a Sioux captive. General William T. Sherman remembers California's Gold Rush, and William F. Cody recalls his buffalo hunts. Footnotes, maps, Stiles's narratives and an introduction by historian Richard Maxwell Brown weave together these stories of conflict and conquest, putting them in a broader context of turbulent social, economic and political forces that absorbed the Old West into mainstream America.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

How the West was won--rather conquered--constitutes the theme of these vibrant and violent excerpts from memoirs by eyewitnesses. Constant conflict informs the pieces, which the editor arranges into two groups: the army's wars against the resisting tribes and the wars among the newcomers that eventuated in the legends about Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, and others. The popular mythology surrounding them and other figures Stiles hopes to dispel by presenting the unmediated words of the soldiers, chiefs, and pioneer women. He begins with one man's recollection of traveling the Oregon Trail and pulls out a woman's hitherto obscure chronicle of her captivity by the Lakota, before warming up to the warfare that raged constantly from the 1860s to the Great Sioux War of 1876. The generals--Sheridan, Miles, Custer--describe their campaigns and justifications; and the defeated Indians who survived, like Chief Joseph and Geronimo, record their last stands. Accounts of an intra-white civil war in New Mexico end this interesting volume's view that the Old West was a pretty violent, racist, and class-ridden place. Gilbert Taylor