The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

Painting by Maynard Dixon

(NYTimes) Seldom does a nonfiction book pack the cultural wallop that Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” did in 1970. Just months before its publication a group of Native American activists calling themselves Indians of All Tribes had occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, demanding that the former prison outpost be deeded back to them by the United States government. So when Brown — a white novelist and historian from Arkansas with a degree in library science — published his searing account of westward expansion, accusing the Army of annihilating Indians between 1860 and 1890, his timing was explosive. While Brown’s book contained factual errors, it dramatically succeeded in changing the attitudes of the Vietnam War generation about how the West was really won.

Now, 46 years later, the military historian Peter Cozzens counters Brown with “The Earth Is Weeping” — a largely chronological march with an Army viewpoint of the same era, a work reminiscent in scope and approach to James McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom” (about the Civil War). Continued