The Frontier Newspapers And The Coverage Of The Plains Indian Wars

This book offers a revealing look at how newspapers covered the key events of the Plains Indian Wars between 1862-1891--reporting that offers some surprising viewpoints as well as biases and misrepresentations. The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars takes readers back to the late 19th century to show how newspaper reporting impacted attitudes toward the conflict between the United States and Native Americans. Emphasizing primary sources and eyewitness accounts, the book focuses on eight watershed events between 1862 and 1891--the Great Sioux Uprising in Minnesota, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Flight of the Nez Perce, the Cheyenne Outbreak, the Trial of Standing Bear, and the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and its aftermath. Each chapter examines an individual event, analyzing the balance and accuracy of the newspaper coverage and how the reporting of the time reinforced stereotypes about Native Americans.

"Originally published as The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars by Praeger Publishers, Santa Barbara, CA. 2010."

This book offers a revealing look at how newspapers covered the key events of the Plains Indian Wars between 1862-1891—reporting that offers some surprising viewpoints as well as biases and misrepresentations. The Frontier Newspapers and the Coverage of the Plains Indian Wars takes readers back to the late 19th century to show how newspaper reporting impacted attitudes toward the conflict between the United States and Native Americans. Emphasizing primary sources and eyewitness accounts, the book focuses on eight watershed events between 1862 and 1891—the Great Sioux Uprising in Minnesota, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Flight of the Nez Perce, the Cheyenne Outbreak, the Trial of Standing Bear, and the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and its aftermath. Each chapter examines an individual event, analyzing the balance and accuracy of the newspaper coverage and how the reporting of the time reinforced stereotypes about Native Americans.

During the nineteenth century, Anglo-Americans inflicted cultural and economic devastation on Native people. The fight over Indian Country sparked spiritual crises for both Natives and Settlers. In the end, the experience of intercultural encounter and conflict over land produced religious transformations on both sides.

Custer, Sitting Bull and Little Bighorn are familiar names in the history of the American West. Yet the Great Sioux War of 1876 was a less notorious affair than earlier events in Minnesota during 1862 when, over a few bloody weeks, hundreds of white settlers were killed by Sioux led by Little Crow. The following three years saw military thrusts under generals Sibley and Sully onto the Western Plains where hundreds of Indians, as innocent as the white victims, were cut down by American soldiers. From this carnage Sitting Bull first emerged as a military leader. This history reexamines the facts behind Sitting Bull's legend and that of the white captive, Fanny Kelly.

The defeat of George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn was big news in 1876. Newspaper coverage of the battle initiated hot debates about whether the U.S. government should change its policy toward American Indians and who was to blame for the army’s loss—the latter, an argument that ignites passion to this day. In Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud, James E. Mueller draws on exhaustive research of period newspapers to explore press coverage of the famous battle. As he analyzes a wide range of accounts—some grim, some circumspect, some even laced with humor—Mueller offers a unique take on the dramatic events that so shook the American public. Among the many myths surrounding the Little Bighorn is that journalists of that time were incompetent hacks who, in response to the stunning news of Custer’s defeat, called for bloodthirsty revenge against the Indians and portrayed the “boy general” as a glamorous hero who had suffered a martyr’s death. Mueller argues otherwise, explaining that the journalists of 1876 were not uniformly biased against the Indians, and they did a credible job of describing the battle. They reported facts as they knew them, wrote thoughtful editorials, and asked important questions. Although not without their biases, journalists reporting on the Battle of the Little Bighorn cannot be credited—or faulted—for creating the legend of Custer’s Last Stand. Indeed, as Mueller reveals, after the initial burst of attention, these journalists quickly moved on to other stories of their day. It would be art and popular culture—biographies, paintings, Wild West shows, novels, and movies—that would forever embed the Last Stand in the American psyche.

Custer’s Last Stand remains one of the most iconic events in American history and culture. Had Custer prevailed at the Little Bighorn, the victory would have been noteworthy at the moment, worthy of a few newspaper headlines, but only a few among the many battles with the Plains Indians. In defeat, however tactically inconsequential in the larger conflict, Custer became legend. In Inventing Custer, Edward Caudill and Paul Ashdown bridge the gap between the Custer who truly existed and the one we’ve immortalized and mythologized into legend in our generally accepted reading of American history and his significance to it.

Although cross-cultural encounter is often considered an economic or political matter, beauty, taste, and artistry were central to cultural exchange and political negotiation in early and nineteenth-century America. Part of a new wave of scholarship in early American studies that contextualizes American writing in Indigenous space, Literary Indians highlights the significance of Indigenous aesthetic practices to American literary production. Countering the prevailing notion of the "literary Indian" as a construct of the white American literary imagination, Angela Calcaterra reveals how Native people's pre-existing and evolving aesthetic practices influenced Anglo-American writing in precise ways. Indigenous aesthetics helped to establish borders and foster alliances that pushed against Anglo-American settlement practices and contributed to the discursive, divided, unfinished aspects of American letters. Focusing on tribal histories and Indigenous artistry, Calcaterra locates surprising connections and important distinctions between Native and Anglo-American literary aesthetics in a new history of early American encounter, identity, literature, and culture.