Creek Mary's Blood informs the reader about the good and bad of the Cherokee life. The reader becomes part of Mary's family and feels their pain.This is a book I will read over and over.I recommend this book if you have any interest in Native American history. I wish it was recommened reading for high school students.

This novel concerns Mary Musgrove who was the Creek wife of John Musgrove, an Indian Trader who had a trading post near the Savannah River when Oglethorpe brought the first settlers to Georgia in 1731. After Mary's husband was killed, she was eventually forced to abandon her home and people. The novel sets out the problems she encountered and follows her children (Mary's Blood) on the trail of tears westward and ends up with some of her decendants involved in the battle of Little Big Horn. This novel transports the reader into the person of Mary Musgrove and allows us to feel the pains endured by the natives of this country during a period of disgraceful acts committed by some of our forefathers in the name of patriotism.

I read this book for the first time in high school. I have read it a couple times since then. For as long as I can remember I have been interested in the Native-Americans, their beliefs and customs. In this novel, Dee Brown, captures all their feelings from betral of the white man for unmercifully taking their homelands and the fear of being wiped out like the buffalo to the pride in their people and their faith in spirits who guided them through those devastating years. The story pulls you in and you become one of the Native-Americans, experiencing every joy and pain.

If I could read only one writer about the American West, it would be Dee Brown. His Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a landmark. This anthology is exactly what I like - a smorgasboard of fascinating, factually accurate tales that fill in our understanding of the events, people and times of the Old West. Best of all, I feel he's clear-eyed and unencumbered by politics in describing American Indians and the conflicts and interactions with white Americans. Read it and pass it along!

The illustrations are stunning and the poems are simple and spectacular. An amazing read for any child, these poems are especially empowering for young african american children. It's unusual to find a book that doesn't make an issue of being a "minority." I highly, highly recommend it.

I'm glad that I read this book. I have never read about history from this point of view. It was moving! This version was written for young adults, and I feel that students should be required to read this at least in high school. Many people will be moved to tears and heartbroken as I was.

A well written novel focusing on the struggle of the Native American Indians throughout the early years of the white colonization

If you only read one book about Native Americans in your life - read this one! This book belongs on the required reading list of every American student. However, it will never happen because the truth hurts too much. The world's greatest watchdog of democracy, has a past that is so shameful, that it cannot be taught in American school. However, there is more to this book than the accounting of the many injustices inflicted upon America's first inhabitants. The readers of this book will be astonished to learn that Native Americans have always been a very intelligent and generous race; a race of people that only wanted to live in peace and enjoy the fruits of this land. I dream that some day America will discover the values of Native America lifestyles and belief systems. Read this book, be saddened by the past, learn of a great race and be inspired by a noble and gracious people. Then we can truly become the greatest nation in the history of mankind!

I bought and read this book in 1993. It is a wonderfully written history of the Indian struggle. I am still saddened by what I've read of their great loss and the destruction of their country in our inhumane take over. You will not find this boring regardless if you are interested in Native American History or not. The book reads at one point of a valley filled with peach trees estimated at approximately 1,000. Can you imagine what that valley must have smelled like? Where is that valley of trees now? This book really changed my point of view and made me think. I'm buying the book again for my niece to read.

I have read some other books on the American Indians, but I must say that this is the most complete volume of their destruction that I have read. Not only does it give you a destruction time line, but also it does it in a very well written and gripping fashion. The author writes as best he can from the Indians viewpoint and I think this helps the reader get a better grasp of the pain the Indians went through. I knew it was a wonderfully written book by the fact that the pages just kept flowing, I never found myself slowed down or bored. It is just page after page of the US government taking advantage and overrunning the American Indians. The one constant it highlights is that the group with the most power can justify any crime, no matter how egregious in their name.

In the book the authors detail how a common phase came about in America, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian". I have heard that statement before but it did not mean much to me. Now after reading about the constant pressure the Americans put on the Indians and the disgusting about of violence, it has far more meaning. When you read a book like this you just keep asking yourself how can people commit these crimes against women and children? The author has also dug up a number of photos of the Indians he details which makes it even more power to see the people that were so aggressively destroyed. A wonderful book that every American should read to make sure we know the real history of the country.

Bury my heart at wounded Knee is one of those books that literally can cahnge the way you look at the world. I first read this book as a high school freshman, then have read it a half dozen times since. It tells the sory,through the eyes of the Native peoples[or indians,or native americans].having been raised on a steady diet of gen. Custer and kit Carson{niether of whom fare very well here},I was shocked then appalled at what I read. From the forced march of the navajos,to the cheyenne trail of tears,to the magnificentCrazy Horse,to the sad,somewhat co-opted Red Cloud"They made us many promises,more Then I can remember,but they only kept but one:they promised to take our land, and they took it."This was the first place I read of the remarkable chief Joseph of the Nez Perce,and his stunning travail. Or the magnificent apache's...The death of sitting bull is elagaic and very,very sad, as to survive, collaborators joined the occupying force{as is the case in any occupied country}Tragic,and ending horribly with the massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. The final image of the survivors of that massacre being brought into a chruch decorated for Christmas has satyed with me through the years. Searing, brilliant,essential.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a profoundly moving book. It takes you back to a time of new beginnings, when things could've been done right, but were inevitably done wrong. And the original people of the American land who were done wrong by. Wounded Knee is a place, where spirits live, Indian's do the "ghost dance" and inevitably people lay in passing, from war and slaughter.

Dee Brown's novel is a must for anyone who wants insight and understanding into an indigenous culture.

Wounded Knee tells the tale of the "American West" form the other side - the American Indian's perspective. With quotes and chants from famous names that appear synonymous with the "Cowboys & Indians" culture of the American frontier.

An accurate and emotional journey is what the reader will undertake as they take on the naive understandings of these proud people who are inevitably fighting a culture and system of prejudices they can not win. Chieftains like Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Crazy Horse, will inspire and bring feelings of admiration and the sense of oppressing injustice to the forefront of your emotions.

If you are able to read this book without being truly stirred on some emotional level, then you would appear to be super human or perhaps a little more in human than most.

If you seek inspiration and motivation, understanding and sense of being or purpose, I believe you will find these things in Dee Brow's book when you look at and read about the lives of these amazing people.

It is my favorite book!

Before historical author Dee Brown penned his ultimate and most famous work "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee," he was out hiking in the sticks, so to say, with his carefully researched "The Fetterman Massacre."

Formerly known as "Fort Phil Kearny: An American Saga," but re-named "The Fetterman Massacre" to emphasize the most famous battle which took place at the cursed frontier fort, Brown's work is a carefully researched examination of the few fatal years of existence of a small cavalry outpost located in the foothills of the Big Horn mountains in 1865-66. When reading this work today, it is extremely difficult to imagine the terrible conditions these men lived under on a daily basis.

Sent by the U.S. government into a hostile land that belonged to the Sioux and Cheyenne Native Americans, these soldiers built a fort along the Montana Road to protect travelers and prospectors. But harsh weather conditions and the ever-present threat of furious Native American warriors offended by the placement of this fort in the heart of their ancestor's land, eventually led to the infamous massacre.

On the morning of Dec. 21, 1866, Captain William Fetterman led 80 men out of Fort Phil Kearny to rescue woodcutters under assault by Red Cloud's Oglala Sioux. Crazy Horse, among others, set a decoy trap for Fetterman and his doomed troops, and as they rode over a hill were attacked and killed to the man in a furious battle lasting about 20 minutes. This massacre eventually led to the dismantling of the fort, a Congressional investigation, and the destruction of Kearny Commander Henry Carrington's military career.

When reading Brown's novel today, one realizes that the situation Carrington was forced into was an almost impossible responsibility. Fetterman and his men were not the only casualties at this doomed outpost. In fact, after reading "The Fetterman Massacre," one realizes men died on a monthly basis, including woodcutters, settlers, prospectors and soldiers going to a nearby stream to fill water buckets.

Brown's work is fascinating, and he draws from such historical documents as Army records and first-hand interviews to paint a vivid, if not heartbreaking picture of these terrible frontier wars. When one stands today at the desolate, almost gothic location of the fort outside of Sheridan, Wyoming, one can almost hear the trumpet calls, the crack of rifles and the cries of men losing their lives. The battlefield and the fort locations are almost pristine, with only a nearby Interstate visible on the far horizon.

With Brown's painstaking documentation in hand, one can almost step back in time to this lonely place. And perhaps that is the strongest recommendation for this book. It recreates a time and era in frontier history that was brutal, if not alien. "The Fetterman Massacre" is an eye-opening work about a little-known moment in American history.

The Fetterman Massacre occurred right after the Civil War. On the Montana Road, the commander Colonel Carrington was detailed to build and staff three forts in Montana and Wyoming. The Sioux and other Indian tribes led by Red Cloud laid seige to the forts. The Indians laid a trap and when one Captain Fetterman went beyond his orders, he and his troops were killed and their bodies mutilated. Dee Brown doesn't paint a pretty picture of the Army's decision to blaim Carrington or the Indian habit of butchering people. The only one who comes out positively is Colonel Carrington. I would agree with the earlier reviewer that the book starts out slowly, but it builds toward the climax of the battle and the aftermath.

This book finishes with incredible events that were set up at the beginning. It shows that this fight is where all the western stories in Hollywood originated; and is a real page turner as the Indians increase their activities. It will leave you impressed, both by the history you have finally learned, and the hardships endured by all parties involved. This is western history at its best.

Apparently Dee Brown thought the sufferings of 19th-century American Indians weren't ghastly enough to impress hippie readers back in the Age of Aquarius, so he proceeds to fake things. Brown doesn't merely "slant" things to a degree that amounts to a hallucinatory experience, but makes things up outright. Anxious to make G.A. Custer look bad for the Washita attack, he invents casualty figures, claiming that Custer killed 103 Cheyennes, only eleven of whom were men! (As anthropologist John Greenway observed, massacres of Indians, in the neononsense of Brown and his associates, are not indiscriminate, but rigorously discriminate, consisting solely of women and children.) Brown either covers up Indian atrocities (particularly those of the Apaches) or tries to lie his way out of them by providing some bogus excuse; according to him, the Sioux's Minnesota massacre of some 400 white settlers one fine day in 1862 simply never happened.

He can't even get the small parts right, even depicting Custer's men as carrying sabers at the Little Bighorn. One can find out nothing about the American Indians of the West from reading Brown's book, perhaps because he's not really interested in them save as victims for his guilt-stricken white readership.

As for Brown's claim that his book is an "Indian history," based on Indian accounts gathered at treaty councils or immured in obscure government documents, this is but another falsehood. He could have written the thing in two weeks, ripping off standard books in print -- including Custer's memoir "My Life on the Plains"! No original research was involved.

Absolutely one of the most thought provoking books I have read. I enjoyed this book so much I did not want to put it down nor have it end.

This book is essentially a collection of short narrative about the struggles of various Native American cultures in what became the United States. The book is written from the perspective of the Native Americans, and thus has a different emphasis than many of today's high school U.S. History texts (at least not the same emphasis as mine had). I really enjoyed the reading. It was new to hear the side of the story we almost never consider. I would recommend this book to anyone.

Comparisons to "Huckleberry Finn" or "Cold Sassy Tree" are apt. Like these other novels, "The Way to Bright Star" is an adolescent's journey through an America at war. The people met along the way are the book's greatest strength: soldiers, everyday farmers, a girl in disguise. The dialogue is great, and the settings evoke a time when our county was truly the new frontier.

But the jumps from the Civil War era to the early 19th century can be abrupt, and leave you with a sense of an unfulfillment. The ending in particular was very disappointing, both as flashback and in the narration. Is Mr. Brown planning to make this book a series? If so, the ending will leave you hungry for more. But if this is all there is, you're in a for a disappointing letdown.

While the characters are memorable and the story has plenty of dramatic and humorous moments, this was ultimately an unsatisfying book. After setting up numerous scenarios that beg for elaboaration, the author seems to lose interest and flatly conclude the situation.The fate of a main character and long lost love is summed up in one short statement. Several interesting affairs of the heart get started and are never resolved.A supposed orphan discovers a family member and no more is mentioned about the encounter. Even the main point of the titular journey, delivering the camels to Bright Star, abruptly ends with no resolution of their fate. In a way, the book does read like an older person's rememberances. it rambles, touches on points and finally, instead of coming to a conclusion, the author just stops talking. The book has its moments, but be prepared for some frustration.

This book certainly exposes the many untied knots in our lives. How many places have we been, how many people have we met that have only dissolved into our past? Dee Brown does a great job carrying his characters though an historical context. Like our own personal histories there are so many things that we only touched for a brief moment only to realize later that we can only dream about them later. Brown does an admirable job bringing the reader to this stark realization. All of us have traveling as Ben in our own ways. We will continue to do so. My hat is off to Dee Brown for writing such a memorable story.

This book is really a good of short articles and stories (I am assuming here) pulled from other publications. Because of this there is not a consistent theme that runs through the full book other then all the articles do have something to do with the American West - from ranch hands, cattle drivers and Indian's this book has it all. What I found with this lack of consistent theme is that many of the articles just wet you appetite for more information on the given subject.

The book does provide a good overall view of the American west during the settlement days. The book is well written and is easy to get through. If you have just a general interested in the topic or want a refresher course this is probably the book for you. If you are looking for something more in depth you will probably come away disappointed.

Brown's American West book can be difficult to follow at times. But it was worth wading through to read the in-depth details of folks who lived back then. I believe this was such a fascinating era in our history that reading new details is worth the price of the book (which was very nominal). If you like the Old West, you will find more than enough to satisfy you.

With these words the Nez Perce Indians surrendered to the U.S. Army, having fled from Idaho across country, through Yellowstone and north to Montana, only to be cut off just miles from the Canadian border. This and other spectacular stories will quicken the pulse of any red-blooded history buff. We also visit cow ranchers down in Texas and learn the true, unvarnished story of Dodge City and other pestilences. The real thing.