BOOK REVIEWS: 'Wild Frontier'

Sloppy Research Is Just One of Many Atrocities in 'Wild Frontier'
 Sunday, March 4, 2001
 

BY MARTIN NAPARSTECK
SPECIAL TO THE TRIBUNE

http://www.sltrib.com/03042001/arts/76424.htm

    The Wild Frontier

    By William M. Osborn;
    Random House, $25.95
 

    A good history book combines at least four attributes: good ideas (new
ones or old ones combined in new ways are best), thorough research, accuracy
and an inviting writing style. William Osborn in The Wild Frontier gets
credit for achieving 1 1/2 of these.
    The Wild Frontier is, as its subtitle says, about "Atrocities During the
American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee." Although none of
Osborn's ideas are new, many are underemphasized in American history and, for
most readers -- although not for those steeped in the subject -- he provides
a narrative that will seem fresh and interesting, even though its very
details are teeming with unpleasantries. Chief among these ideas is that the
series of hundreds of conflicts between Indians and European immigrants is a
single war, that the Europeans were invaders, and that Indians and the
invaders were both ruthless in their treatment of each other. By presenting
the 400 years of fighting as one war, Osborn helps to emphasize how the
Europeans viewed all Indians as one huge cultural group. Of course, the
failure of the 500 actual cultures among American Indians to unify in
repelling the invaders could demonstrate that, from the Indian side, these
were a series of hundreds of wars.
    Calling the Europeans "invaders" contributes to the concept that the
author must be particularly friendly to a view that the Indians were usually
right, the whites usually wrong. Careful never to allow himself to slip too
comfortably into any category, Osborn's closing chapter lambastes writers who
do in fact fit into that category, denouncing them as revisionist. He has
particular scorn for Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the 1970 book
that became a model for American history as seen by Indians. Osborn quotes
other critics approvingly as calling it "polemical literature" and "a
deliberately revisionist history."
    The third concept, that Indians were at least as ruthless as whites, is
not new, but certainly in the past three decades it has been unfashionable.
    Osborn's book is about evenly divided between whites sticking bayonets
into pregnant Indian women and Indians scalping living white men, between
whites burning tepees with Indians inside and Indians throwing white captives
into flames, between whites raping young Indian girls and Indians cutting off
the feet and hands of white children.
    Confronting politically incorrect concepts earns Osborn a point. On
thoroughness of research he earns a half-point. Certainly he covers the
best-known atrocities committed by Indians and whites against each other,
including the Colorado militia's murder of Cheyenne, the elderly and women
and children, at Sand Creek in 1864, the Santee Sioux uprising in Minnesota
in 1862, in which 400 whites were killed in a single day, and the mutilation
of the soldiers killed at Little Big Horn.
    But he has some strange omissions, some of which will be particularly
familiar to Utah readers. He doesn't even mention the 1863 Bear Creek
Massacre in Utah Territory in which at least 200 Shoshoni men, women and
children were murdered by the Army. This failure, as well as numerous
inaccuracies (such as saying, in reference to the Wyoming Massacre in
Pennsylvania during the Revolution, that Wilkes-Barre is near Wyoming Valley
when in fact Wilkes-Barre is in Wyoming Valley), makes it hard to trust his
research.
    Nothing is more damaging than Osborn's writing style. At one point he
tells of a 1965 incident in which Delaware Indians took 150 settlers from a
town, but he doesn't tell us the name of the town (didn't this book have an
editor?). He says that in 1607 "after widespread starvation, some settlers
ate corpses and at least one ate his wife," but doesn't say where this
happened.
    One obvious detail after another is omitted; hundreds that were easily
researchable are not in the book. Consolidation of publishers has resulted
in, among other sins, editors being given less time to work with writers. The
Wild Frontier seems to be part of that trend.
    It's a book that deserves credit for its willingness to state the
politically incorrect. But that's about it.
    ------
    Martin Naparsteck reviews books from and about the West for The Salt Lake
Tribune.
 
 
 

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