its been long its been a massacre its been unjust its been irrevocable the natives must be given the title First Citizen of USA on their Ids passport and in real life next what ever concessions must returned but with a mutual understanding the black hills etc
Probably the worst book you can buy for accuracy and thoroughness. This is half-assed hit and run cashing in on people who are interested in an era but know nothing about it. With people like that you can not know anything about it yourself and convince them you do, but it's not ethical. These two disgraced the story, God only knows what they do to other subjects they write on.
Hi, First I’ll offer up a quote from a scathing review I found after I’d left mine, which was written in the anger at myself for buying a book I knew was going to be bad, but I’m ever the optimist. The Stringer Independent News is a multi-award winning investigative journalism paper, here is part of their (very long) review of the book: “…the authors have missed the mark on more things in one book than in any single Indian text I have seen, save perhaps the entire series of Little House on the Prairie, now known as an exemplar in anti-Indian history (Wilder, 2006), with mistakes about social structure, role of women, inherent values, war-based cultures, individualism, art, the Sun Dance, the Black Hills, spiritual beliefs, health and hygiene and more…As much as I want to expose the falsities of the remaining ten false or misleading statements from our two authors of the Red Cloud history, I have run into my word limit.” I promise had I read that first I would have never bought the book and I didn’t finish the book, I didn’t even finish the 2nd chapter if I recall correctly, but just in those my blood was already boiling at it. They claim the Lakota are patriarchal society when they are and always have been matriarchal. The men lead the battles and the hunts, this is common in all matriarchal societies around the world, but men go to live with their wive's families and bands when they marry. It’s not even debated that they are matriarchal. Pretty big mistake if you’re going to write a book about a people. I’ve read that they just assume the Lakota were unhealthy, do not bath, had bad teeth and were shorter than the white soldiers, when they were extremely physically healthy and had better teeth than the whites they were interacting with at the time and they bathed everyday even in the winter. The Cheyenne’s even more so were the icons of health, they were at that time the tallest people in the world. Yes, the anthropologists and medical researchers of the day loved to measure the Indians, from their height to their skulls and the Cheyenne averaged 66.8”, the Crow 68.1. the Arapaho (heavily mixed with Cheyenne 68.03, the Sioux 67.9, the average American was 66.4”. Be careful if you look this up, there is the average ‘height of a people’, this includes women and the ‘average height of soldiers’ will be all men. So then the average American male in the Civil War was 68”, the average Cheyenne warrior was 72”, that’s 6ft the Sioux was at least 70 inches. Even today scientists still use height as a measurement of a people’s overall physical health and nutrition, there was even a recent study confirming that the equestrian plains Indians of the 19th century were the tallest in the world. Scandinavians unsurprisingly came second and Australians were 3rd I believe. Did they make this up about the Sioux? Probably not, but they just guessed and went with something they’d read somewhere else probably on the Comanche and Apache, who WERE short, dirty and more primitive compared to the northern plains peoples. In other words the authors were just being f***ing lazy. So just little things like commenting on the fly using assumptions, as opposed to spending a chapter or a couple of paragraphs at least on a subject you actually researched, tends to be the way false statements are peddled, this book does that a lot, then it takes someone a lot of time to find the quotes and the stats to be able to share them with others to demonstrate what they mean when they say ‘this book is terrible’. It’s like these half ass ‘history’ books have a built in defense that is just spraying the reader with a ton of unrelated comments about the subject, in which 60% of them are false. It’d take a week to track down all the proof to show others that it is false. So they are dead wrong on health, height and cleanliness. The Lakota are nothing like the picture the authors paint, especially not their close friends the Cheyenne, whom they intermarried with to the point that several Cheyenne bands had (and still have) heavy Sioux intermarriage and one was considered half-breed Sioux, the Masikota, which literally merged with the Dog Soldier society of the Southern Cheyenne creating the first hybrid band/warrior society on the plains! Their early comment that the Sioux had ‘bested even the famous Cheyenne Dog Soldiers’ or something like that, that’s when the book was ended for me. The ‘Sioux’ never fought the Dog Soldiers. They fought with them because they were part of them and they fought with them because they were allied. Period. If the Sioux and Cheyenne ever battled it was in the early 1700’s. Grinnell and other authorities from the 1800’s claim that any rumor of conflict between the two is false. There are some claims of fights in the early 1700’s, but the Cheyenne themselves have no record of this. The Cheyenne gave the Sioux their first horses and saved them from starving when they crossed the Missouri and arrived in the Black Hills region. The Sioux and Cheyenne shared the Black Hills from then on while fighting the Crow, Mandan, Hidatsa, Pawnee, Comanche, Shoshone, Kiowa, Blackfeet and others TOGETHER. Their coexistence and intermarriage was of such a level that when the Southern Cheyenne went to the Powder River country in 1864, the first time in 40 years, they thought the Northern Cheyenne had become much more like the Sioux and the Sioux more like the Northern Cheyenne. Yet the Dog Soldiers just randomly fought the Sioux (they don’t even mention who, Lakota or the other two) and lost? That’s like saying, while telling the story of WWII, that the ’US 82nd airborne division whipped the British 6th Para.’ Would any WWII enthusiast keep reading? I didn’t need to hear anymore than that and then after reading the long and brutal review I posted part of above, I wished I had read it before. If I had the time I’d like to read the whole book and counter all their wild and inaccurate claims line by line and send the letter to the authors and publisher an tape it up over the book at book stores, but I’m too busy writing a historical FICTION novel about the Northern Cheyenne in this same time period that will be more accurate than this supposed non-fiction garbage. Btw, they can’t even spell Ft. Kearny right, they spell it Ft. Kearney, unless they confused it with the other… one hundreds of miles away. Here is another review I just found that points out more idiot statements and lazy lies that I didn’t know about by thankfully stopping the book very early on. muse.jhu.edu/article/570728 "The story of Red Cloud, the powerful chief of the Oglala Sioux, is a familiar part of western history. Historians such as George Hyde, followed by R. Eli Paul and Robert Larson, documented his role as a leader of his people and a perennial thorn in the side of the United States government. His part in the Bozeman Trail War is well told by John D. McDermott and others. Now the eastern publishing house of Simon and Schuster would lead us to believe that this new history by authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin presents the “untold story” of this great figure of the American West. Granted, the work is an interesting read. One could question, however, whether a good story is necessarily good history. A closer examination exposes the authors’ lack of knowledge of western history and geography, casting doubt on the book’s value to the reader. The Heart of Everything contains a number of careless statements. For example, on page 7 we read, “It was not unusual for Red Cloud to confuse his pursuers by planning and executing simultaneous attacks on civilian wagon trains and army supply columns.” If this did occur it was by pure coincidence. On page 22 [End Page 118] we read that by 1851, because of increased attacks, travelers passed “the skulls and bones of their predecessors,” with five thousand deaths, which we are to infer were caused by hostile warriors, in 1850 alone. Actually the number of immigrants killed by resisting tribesmen in 1850 was forty-eight. One could go on. Likewise on page 206 we learn that after the 1865 Platte River Bridge battle, the small army post there was renamed Fort Caspar in honor of Lieutenant Caspar Collins who was killed in the fight. But what we never knew is that the renamed post was “eventually the site of Wyoming’s state capital.” This book is loaded with inaccuracies, ranging from the armament of the Regiment of Dragoons (no, they did not carry the Hawken rifle), to Scotts Bluff being the highest point in Nebraska (sorry, it is not). One could go on here too. It is too bad that the authors or the press did not have a capable historian review the manuscript before publication. Any work that ignores known historical fact to fit its narrative does not warrant a place in the literature of the American West. Unfortunately, this book is no exception. Thomas R. Buecker Nebraska History Museum Lincoln, Nebraska" See what I mean? This book is mainstream boilerplate McDonalds/History Channel level garbage that is guaranteed to sell, and it did yay for them. These two authors decided to jump into a topic they thought would be easy and cheesy to do, but it is one that takes years to research and know and if you don't have that it shows badly.
The NYT has an entire staff that fact checks articles and the book review section has a similar staff that is the most thorough in the world. You are obviously a disenchanted Comanche who lost the seventh game of the series to Mackenzie. Red Cloud is the ‘72 Dolphins of Native Americans.
Great videography!
This was a great narration of the Red Cloud legacy.
its been long its been a massacre its been unjust its been irrevocable the natives must be given the title First Citizen of USA on their Ids passport and in real life next what ever concessions must returned but with a mutual understanding the black hills etc
All emotion. Too much bullshit.
Probably the worst book you can buy for accuracy and thoroughness. This is half-assed hit and run cashing in on people who are interested in an era but know nothing about it. With people like that you can not know anything about it yourself and convince them you do, but it's not ethical. These two disgraced the story, God only knows what they do to other subjects they write on.
Mike,
Curious what the inaccuracies are??
Hi, First I’ll offer up a quote from a scathing review I found after I’d left mine, which was written in the anger at myself for buying a book I knew was going to be bad, but I’m ever the optimist.
The Stringer Independent News is a multi-award winning
investigative journalism paper, here is part of their (very long) review of the book:
“…the authors have missed the mark on more things in one book than in any single Indian text I have seen, save perhaps the entire series of Little House on the Prairie, now known as an exemplar in anti-Indian history (Wilder, 2006), with mistakes about social structure, role of women, inherent values, war-based cultures, individualism, art, the Sun Dance, the Black Hills, spiritual beliefs, health and hygiene and more…As much as I want to expose the falsities of the remaining ten false or misleading statements from our two authors of the Red Cloud history, I have run into my word limit.”
I promise had I read that first I would have never bought the book and I didn’t finish the book, I didn’t even finish the 2nd chapter if I recall correctly, but just in those my blood was already boiling at it.
They claim the Lakota are patriarchal society when they are and always have been matriarchal. The men lead the battles and the hunts, this is common in all matriarchal societies around the world, but men go to live with their wive's families and bands when they marry. It’s not even debated that they are matriarchal. Pretty big mistake if you’re going to write a book about a people.
I’ve read that they just assume the Lakota were unhealthy, do not bath, had bad teeth and were shorter than the white soldiers, when they were extremely physically healthy and had better teeth than the whites they were interacting with at the time and they bathed everyday even in the winter. The Cheyenne’s even more so were the icons of health, they were at that time the tallest people in the world. Yes, the anthropologists and medical researchers of the day loved to measure the Indians, from their height to their skulls and the Cheyenne averaged 66.8”, the Crow 68.1. the Arapaho (heavily mixed with Cheyenne 68.03, the Sioux 67.9, the average American was 66.4”.
Be careful if you look this up, there is the average ‘height of a people’, this includes women and the ‘average height of soldiers’ will be all men.
So then the average American male in the Civil War was 68”, the average Cheyenne warrior was 72”, that’s 6ft the Sioux was at least 70 inches.
Even today scientists still use height as a measurement of a people’s overall physical health and nutrition, there was even a recent study confirming that the equestrian plains Indians of the 19th century were the tallest in the world. Scandinavians unsurprisingly came second and Australians were 3rd I believe.
Did they make this up about the Sioux? Probably not, but they just guessed and went with something they’d read somewhere else probably on the Comanche and Apache, who WERE short, dirty and more primitive compared to the northern plains peoples. In other words the authors were just being f***ing lazy.
So just little things like commenting on the fly using assumptions, as opposed to spending a chapter or a couple of paragraphs at least on a subject you actually researched, tends to be the way false statements are peddled, this book does that a lot, then it takes someone a lot of time to find the quotes and the stats to be able to share them with others to demonstrate what they mean when they say ‘this book is terrible’. It’s like these half ass ‘history’ books have a built in defense that is just spraying the reader with a ton of unrelated comments about the subject, in which 60% of them are false. It’d take a week to track down all the proof to show others that it is false.
So they are dead wrong on health, height and cleanliness. The Lakota are nothing like the picture the authors paint, especially not their close friends the Cheyenne, whom they intermarried with to the point that several Cheyenne bands had (and still have) heavy Sioux intermarriage and one was considered half-breed Sioux, the Masikota, which literally merged with the Dog Soldier society of the Southern Cheyenne creating the first hybrid band/warrior society on the plains!
Their early comment that the Sioux had ‘bested even the famous Cheyenne Dog Soldiers’ or something like that, that’s when the book was ended for me. The ‘Sioux’ never fought the Dog Soldiers. They fought with them because they were part of them and they fought with them because they were allied. Period.
If the Sioux and Cheyenne ever battled it was in the early 1700’s. Grinnell and other authorities from the 1800’s claim that any rumor of conflict between the two is false. There are some claims of fights in the early 1700’s, but the Cheyenne themselves have no record of this.
The Cheyenne gave the Sioux their first horses and saved them from starving when they crossed the Missouri and arrived in the Black Hills region. The Sioux and Cheyenne shared the Black Hills from then on while fighting the Crow, Mandan, Hidatsa, Pawnee, Comanche, Shoshone, Kiowa, Blackfeet and others TOGETHER.
Their coexistence and intermarriage was of such a level that when the Southern Cheyenne went to the Powder River country in 1864, the first time in 40 years, they thought the Northern Cheyenne had become much more like the Sioux and the Sioux more like the Northern Cheyenne.
Yet the Dog Soldiers just randomly fought the Sioux (they don’t even mention who, Lakota or the other two) and lost?
That’s like saying, while telling the story of WWII, that the ’US 82nd airborne division whipped the British 6th Para.’ Would any WWII enthusiast keep reading?
I didn’t need to hear anymore than that and then after reading the long and brutal review I posted part of above, I wished I had read it before.
If I had the time I’d like to read the whole book and counter all their wild and inaccurate claims line by line and send the letter to the authors and publisher an tape it up over the book at book stores, but I’m too busy writing a historical FICTION novel about the Northern Cheyenne in this same time period that will be more accurate than this supposed non-fiction garbage.
Btw, they can’t even spell Ft. Kearny right, they spell it Ft. Kearney, unless they confused it with the other… one hundreds of miles away.
Here is another review I just found that points out more idiot statements and lazy lies that I didn’t know about by thankfully stopping the book very early on.
muse.jhu.edu/article/570728
"The story of Red Cloud, the powerful chief of the Oglala Sioux, is a familiar part of western history. Historians such as George Hyde, followed by R. Eli Paul and Robert Larson, documented his role as a leader of his people and a perennial thorn in the side of the United States government. His part in the Bozeman Trail War is well told by John D. McDermott and others.
Now the eastern publishing house of Simon and Schuster would lead us to believe that this new history by authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin presents the “untold story” of this great figure of the American West. Granted, the work is an interesting read. One could question, however, whether a good story is necessarily good history. A closer examination exposes the authors’ lack of knowledge of western history and geography, casting doubt on the book’s value to the reader.
The Heart of Everything contains a number of careless statements. For example, on page 7 we read, “It was not unusual for Red Cloud to confuse his pursuers by planning and executing simultaneous attacks on civilian wagon trains and army supply columns.” If this did occur it was by pure coincidence. On page 22 [End Page 118] we read that by 1851, because of increased attacks, travelers passed “the skulls and bones of their predecessors,” with five thousand deaths, which we are to infer were caused by hostile warriors, in 1850 alone. Actually the number of immigrants killed by resisting tribesmen in 1850 was forty-eight. One could go on.
Likewise on page 206 we learn that after the 1865 Platte River Bridge battle, the small army post there was renamed Fort Caspar in honor of Lieutenant Caspar Collins who was killed in the fight. But what we never knew is that the renamed post was “eventually the site of Wyoming’s state capital.” This book is loaded with inaccuracies, ranging from the armament of the Regiment of Dragoons (no, they did not carry the Hawken rifle), to Scotts Bluff being the highest point in Nebraska (sorry, it is not). One could go on here too. It is too bad that the authors or the press did not have a capable historian review the manuscript before publication.
Any work that ignores known historical fact to fit its narrative does not warrant a place in the literature of the American West. Unfortunately, this book is no exception.
Thomas R. Buecker
Nebraska History Museum
Lincoln, Nebraska"
See what I mean? This book is mainstream boilerplate McDonalds/History Channel level garbage that is guaranteed to sell, and it did yay for them. These two authors decided to jump into a topic they thought would be easy and cheesy to do, but it is one that takes years to research and know and if you don't have that it shows badly.
Mike What inaccuracies ?
The NYT has an entire staff that fact checks articles and the book review section has a similar staff that is the most thorough in the world. You are obviously a disenchanted Comanche who lost the seventh game of the series to Mackenzie. Red Cloud is the ‘72 Dolphins of Native Americans.