If You Only Read One Book On The American Indian Wars

The Old West wasn’t won. At least not in Dee Brown’s version.

Every treaty came with an expiration date. Every promise had an escape clause. Every time a tribe packed up and moved, somebody in Washington wanted the next piece of land.

So they moved again.

Brown takes you from the Sand Creek Massacre to the Little Bighorn, from the Long Walk of the Navajo to Wounded Knee. Along the way you meet Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, and dozens of others. They negotiate, surrender, and keep their word.

The government usually doesn’t.

There’s no melodrama here. Brown simply keeps piling the evidence on the table. Army reports. Newspaper accounts. Letters. Eyewitnesses. By the halfway point, you stop wondering who’s telling the truth.

You start wondering how this ever became the version of history most of us grew up with.

Forget the Hollywood West. Forget the noble cavalry charging over the hill. This is a story about people watching their world disappear one broken promise at a time.

It’s not an easy read. It’s not supposed to be.

More than fifty years after it first appeared, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee still has the power to change the way you look at the American frontier. And once it does, there’s really no going back.

I first read the book when it came out in 1972. I was in his school then, but it turned the table on the way I looked at history. Maybe it’ll do the same for you.

Why Saving Money After World War I Was A Patriotic Duty

 

Colorized version of a black and white poster printed in the 
Davenport Democrat and Leader. May 11, 1919.

By 1919, the guns had fallen silent.

American soldiers were coming home from Europe. Victory parades filled the streets. People were ready to get on with their lives.

There was just one problem. The war had cost a staggering amount of money.

The government had borrowed billions to build ships, equip soldiers, feed armies, and keep supplies flowing across the Atlantic. Winning the war was only half the battle. Now the government had to pay for it.

Instead of raising taxes, the Treasury doubled down on something it had already introduced during the war—the War Savings Stamp program.

The idea was brilliantly simple. Almost anyone could afford a stamp. Buy one when you had a few extra cents. Buy another the next week. Eventually you’d have enough to exchange them for a Treasury Savings Certificate that earned interest.

It wasn’t just about financing the government.

James Younger Gang: The Corydon Iowa Bank Robbery

 

The James-Younger Gang spent several days scouting Wayne County, Iowa, before setting their sights on the Ocobock Brothers Bank. The gang’s first choice was the Wayne County Treasurer’s office. They’d learned that it held over $40,000 in receipts and figured it’d be a nice, easy score, but when Jesse, Frank, and Cole Younger walked into the office, the clerk didn’t have a key to the safe. He told them the treasurer had it, and he was away at a town meeting.

 

The boys left, intent on finding the treasurer. But as they rode down the empty streets, they saw the Ocobock Brothers Bank and decided it fit the bill.

Jesse couldn’t have picked a better day to rob the bank. Missouri orator Henry Clay Dean was giving a speech at the Methodist church that afternoon, and most of the businesses in town had closed for the day so they could attend the meeting. 

 

The robbers hitched their horses across the street and walked to the bank. One man waited outside to watch the horses. The other three entered the bank and pointed their Navy Colts at the cashier, Ted Wock. One robber handed Wock a wheat sack and walked him to the safe.

 

“Get up, walk easy, don’t say a damned word,” he said. “Unlock that safe.”

 

The cashier scooped all the money into the sack and handed it to Jesse. Afterward, they bound and gagged the man and left him sitting by the safe. As they walked out, one robber wished Wock a “good day.”

After the robbery, Jesse couldn’t help taunting the crowd gathered to hear Dean speak. A man working at Brant & Dillon’s meat market and grocery store said Jesse interrupted the meeting to tell Dean they had just robbed the bank. As he left, Jesse couldn’t resist adding, “Catch us if you can.”

James-Younger Gang: The Gallatin Bank Robbery

 

Jesse James shooting John W. Cashier Sheets  during Gallatin Bank Robbery

Tuesday, December 7, 1869, was a cloudy, misty day. As two lone horsemen rode into town, the nearby hills were concealed behind a dense fog. The riders hitched their horses outside the Daviess County Savings Bank between 12:30 and 1:00.

Inside the bank, Frank James asked Cashier John W. Sheets to change a one-hundred-dollar bill. As Sheets sat down to write a receipt, Jesse shot him twice—in the head and chest. Sheets fell to the floor, dead.

Bank clerk William McDowell ran out the door. Frank fired two shots. One shot tore through McDowell’s arm, but didn’t slow him down. Once outside, McDowell sounded the alarm. The townspeople grabbed their guns and began firing, but they were too late to slow the robbers down.

The bandits took what they found in the cash drawer and rode away. Initial reports put their take at $60,000. However, a few days later, it was reported that they might have gotten as little as five dollars. 

Afterward, McDowell remembered the robber muttering something about Sheets and Cox killing their brother, [Bloody] Bill Anderson, but he wasn’t clear on the details.

James-Younger Gang Robberies, Clay County Savings Association & Nimrod, Long & Co.

 

Jesse James

At about 2 p.m. on February 13, 1866, ten or twelve men dressed in tattered Union army apparel rode into Liberty, Missouri. Three guarded the city’s outskirts, and the others went to the Clay County Savings Association. Two men went inside while the others waited outside.

The men warmed their hands by the stove while checking out the bank. They quickly decided there was nothing to worry about here, just two employees, one of them an old man, and no guards or guns. One of them asked the clerk, William Bird, to change a ten-dollar bill. As he did, the man pointed a gun at Bird’s head. The other man jumped over the counter and stuck his revolver in cashier Greenup Bird’s face.

After that, they forced William Bird to open the vault and put all the valuables into a seed bag. When he finished, they asked for the key to the vault. Then they slammed the vault door shut, locking the clerk and cashier inside. “No doubt, [they] thought they had locked the door,” The Daily Journal of Commerce reported. But something went wrong, and it didn’t lock. The Birds pushed on the door, and to their surprise, it opened.

Greenup Bird waited a moment, then raised the window and shouted an alarm that the bank had been robbed.

Meet the James-Younger gang

Jesse James

The James-Younger Gang was fluid, changing with the needs of the job and who was available. The core members of the original gang were Jesse and Frank James, Cole Younger, Arthur McCoy, Clell Miller, and Bill Chadwell, men battle-hardened in the Civil War. Most of them had joined Bloody Bill Anderson or William Clarke Quantrill in their teens and had taken part in the raids on Lawrence and Centralia, Kansas.

Jesse James was the face of the gang. He was tall, thin, wiry, good-looking, and craved publicity. Jesse had sandy-brown hair (some said reddish), a big, bushy beard, and steely-blue eyes that could cut you to the core. His brother, Frank James, stood an inch or two taller than Jesse, was quiet, reserved, and preferred to stay out of the limelight.

 

Most people go back and forth, deciding which brother ran the gang. Some credit Frank as the genius behind it, carefully planning their every move. Others, like J. T. Buell, an early authority on western outlaws, called Jesse the “administrative leader,” saying he managed its finances, carried out its diplomacy, and devised its strategies.

 

Others say Cole Younger was the leader, at least when Jesse and Frank rode with him. Cole was a meticulous planner and thought out every move he made, and unlike Jesse James, Cole Younger had a heart. He “hated murder,” said The Kansas City Times, “and yet he killed ruthlessly,” doing what was right at the moment. In short, Cole lived by his own code of ethics.

Cole Younger Never Stopped Defending Himself

Cole Younger in 1876

Most outlaws get the last word from a newspaper reporter. Cole Younger got twenty-five years to prepare his own version. 

That’s the thing that makes him different from Jesse James.

 

Jesse died in 1882 with a bullet in his back and a growing legend attached to his name. Cole survived the gunfights and prison, living long enough to watch the Old West become history.

 

Then he wrote a book.

 

Reading The Story of Cole Younger, By Himself is a little like listening to a defense attorney’s closing argument. Again and again, Cole returns to the same point.

 

He was a soldier first, and then an outlaw. Everything started in Missouri during the Civil War.

 

Missouri wasn’t like Virginia or Pennsylvania. The war there wasn’t fought by organized armies. A good portion of it was fought by guerrillas, bushwhackers, jayhawkers, and men settling personal grudges under the cover of military service.