Post by flashman on Oct 3, 2015 5:37:19 GMT -5
Another lost opportunity
Books about Indian raids on whites are as old as the white settlement of America. Yet, although they still get published nowadays, the past 50 years have seen increased efforts to do the Indians more justice than has traditionally happened and to at least try to include their experience and perspective in the Big Picture. Some people think that such efforts in turn don't do the settler's perspective enough justice. Broome's "Cheyenne War" aims at rectifying this perceived lack of coverage which centers on white settlers and other civilians in the victim role.
The claimed purpose of Broome's previous book "Dog Soldier Justice" as well as the current follow-up is "to demonstrate that recent scholarship has diminished or discounted the degree of suffering endured by the settlers in favor of emphasizing the horror and despair experienced by the Indians.”
The author's method of rectifying this perceived problem is rather straightforward: to diminish or discount the suffering endured by the Indians in favor of emphasizing the horror and despair experienced by the settlers (most of who never endured an Indian attack and, contrary to the Indians, were never threatened with extermination nor suffered total ethnic cleansing).
The central thesis of the book, if there is any, would probably be that the Cheyenne nation waged a single, more or less continuous war against Euro-American settlers which lasted a full 5 years, from 1864 to 1869. Unfortunately, Broome never quite convincingly argues this case as he lustfully gets lost in countless accounts of screaming Indians and insurance case bean-counting instead.
The source material on which Broome largely bases his work are depredation claim files, i.e. compensation claims filed by white citizens against Indian tribes for alleged depredations perpetrated by Indians of said tribes. While Broome writes in his trademark partisan prose that the “generic idea behind the legislation was to teach the Indian that unwarranted attacks upon settlers must stop” and “to convince depredating Indians to abandon their long-held cultural practice of stealing and raiding against people outside the confines of friendly tribes”, the legislation had in reality been adopted to work both ways. Under the Indian Depredation Claims Act of 1796 both “pioneers” and Indians could apply for indemnity for losses incurred as a result of their dealings with each other. That Indians were entitled to compensations under this legislation as well seems to have been quickly and conveniently forgotten (nobody told them), not least by the author of this book. Another point worth noting is that practically none of the depredation claims against Indians the author has used for this book (usually from Record Group 123) was successful. The author claims that this was mostly due to technicalities. What light that might shed on the reliability of the affidavits in the numerous claims used for this book is one of the many questions that remain unanswered.
Some questions I hoped would get answered by this book were chiefly directed at the bigger picture and would mostly hinge upon processing the vast amount of collected source material into statistics and then analyzing these statistics: How many Indian raids did occur in specific areas in specific periods? How were these attacks generally carried out? What kinds of patterns are discernible? Did these patterns change over time? If yes, why might this have been the case? Broome could have generated statistical overviews out of the wealth of data he has mined (as has Greg Michno in several books which plough the same field). Whenever we talk about wars we sooner or later talk about aggregate body counts. How many settlers were killed, wounded, abducted, raped in specific areas and phases? How many in the overall war? How reliable are the data? What is Broome's methodology to ascertain source reliability? Where is the likely lower and upper end of the statistical range? This would add a specific "price tag" in (white) blood to this chapter of "opening up" the West. It would also answer the question what kind of damage the Cheyennes were able to inflict on the invaders of their land. How effective were they in their resistance? Did they manage to drive settlers from certain areas? If yes, how large was the area affected and how lasting, if at all, was their temporary success of driving back the tide of settler invasion? What did local settlers know and think about the conflict? What patterns can we discern here? Were they largely ignorant of trouble? How many knew about the dangers and just took their chances? What is to be said about their role in transforming Indian hunting lands into farmland? Can we portray them as fearless pioneers in a war over land-use and innocent bystanders at the same time or isn't that an obvious contradiction? How exactly was the frontier pushed further into the Indian domain during the time period covered, and how did the Indians react to this? And what about the Indian-killing "efficiency" of settlers and troops in this conflict? How many plains Indian warriors (I hesitate to say it but why not include their non-combatants as well?) on aggregate were presumably killed and wounded in all these fights and what kind of repercussions did that have on the tribal populations, their social cohesion and their economic or military abilities to survive further? Many more questions come to mind, but I'll leave it at that. I didn't expect all of these questions to be addressed but at least some of them.
Sadly, these bigger picture questions remain largely unanswered by the author. All the reader can try to do is do the analytical work himself while shifting back and forth through the book (a task only worth the effort, however, if the data are to be trusted, more on that later). The book lacks both a narrative arch (which would facilitate reading this 500 page tome) and an analytical framework. It's a mountain of research student finds deserving of a thorough processing by a historian. What is so frustrating about this book is that, for the most part, the latter simply hasn't happened. The author has largely contended himself with bringing a multitude of compensation claims into a more or less chronological order and turning the whole thing into a 500 page piece of tort claims prose.
So, while the book and chapter titles keep using the word "war", this quickly starts feeling like false labeling. The actual contents of the book reads rather like an endless list of mere crime reports: Here we have the plucky white folks in their neat (or often quite crude) homes, there we have these savage gangs who apparently keep perpetrating unwarranted crime after crime against them. Throughout Broome's narrative, Indians keep "murdering" whites. Indians, in turn, never get murdered in this book but always only "killed".
Any reader who wants to get a quick orientation through such a lengthy book, will turn to the table of contents to discern the structure of the book and maybe pick parts of the study which are of particular interest to him. This approach, alas, is largely impossible when confronted with a table of contents like this:
Chapter one
The Beginning of the Denver Trail [okay, an introduction; author focus becomes clear: no bothering about Indians]
Chapter two
The Indian War Begins
Chapter three
The War Is On
Chapter four
The War Continues [Uhm, oh really? Very informative.]
chapter five
More War [This is a satire, or not…?]
Chapter six
The 1865 Indian War [Wait! We just managed to whiz past the Sand Creek massacre, the single greatest slaughter in Cheyenne-White relations. No chapter title for this? Even the most naive reader will sense a distinct bias by now.]
Chapter seven
The 1865 Indian War Continues [Satire alert again…]
Chapter eight
The War Stays Hot [This author is really pulling my leg…]
Chapter nine
Treaty Failures [This could be about the 1865 Treaty of the Little Arkansas… Or Medicine Lodge 1867…?]
Chapter ten
Out of Control [Who? When? How? I'm at a loss what to guess this could be about.]
Chapter eleven
Waging Actual War [Really? What on earth were the ten preceding chapters about then?]
Chapter twelve
Waging Heavy Peace [That could be about… nope, no clue again…]
Chapter thirteen
Colorado Indian War [Oh really? I'm supposed to have read 350 pages about war in Colorado up to this point. This author is making me angry just by inflicting this table of contents on me...]
Chapter fourteen
Fights and More Raids [And now for something completely different. Not.]
chapter fifteen
Tall Bull’s Revenge [Thank you, Lord, the table of contents gives me a name for the first time! May 1869?]
Chapter sixteen
Bury My Heart at Spillman Creek [Quite possibly the tackiest chapter title I have ever read.]
Before turning to methodology and contents, allow me some remarks on formalities. Being self-published, this book hasn't seen a professional editor. Instead, the author had individual chapters proof-read by volunteers recruited via Facebook. The results leave much to be desired. The book is riddled with awkward sentence formulations, malaproprisms (wrong words, not meaning what the author apparently wanted to express), wrong grammar, syntax, tense and sentence construction. We read about people carrying horses or holding mules in their hands. A herd of 400 horses leaves the tracks of 300 horses (did the other 100 fly?). Indians steal white neighbors. When the author claims that Indians didn't say the truth, they don't just tell a lie but a "deceptive lie" (are there also non-deceptive lies?). There is a constant mixing of singular and plural forms when referring to the same thing. Many passages read like early drafts, are repetitive, overly wordy and could easily be trimmed by a third or so without losing one bit of information. This makes for often rather unedifying reading. Add to this the unceasing use of inflammatory language: We always read of "lurking", "swarming", "swooping" and of course "screaming" Indians (what did whites do when attacking? Keep their lips tight?) who are always "viciously" attacking, "brutally" and of course again "viciously gang-raping (do whites rape gently?), then "scamper".
Concerning Broome's methodology, at least 80% of the sources he references are Indian Depredation claim files. This means that the interested reader can't fact-check at least 80% of Broome's footnotes for correct referencing without spending one's holidays and a small fortune on a research trip to the National Archives in D.C. From the reader's point of view, Broome mostly cites from a black box. We have to trust him on this one. One issue his reviewer had with this point is that Broome never gives us an idea what's in these files altogether. We almost never learn what kind of fact-checking on the claims took place, if there were contradictory findings or not etc. All we get is Broome's quote-mining from these nearly unverifiable sources with an implied "trust me!".
Reasons for not easily crossing this bridge are threefold:
1.) Readers of the authors preceding book "Dog Soldier Justice" will be aware of his marked (and well known) bias for settlers and against Indians. However, if his methodology and his fact-checking were sound, that might not have derailed the whole project.
2.) The author's methodology in dealing with depredation claims, however, IS fundamentally flawed (more on this in a moment);
3.) The author's bias also expresses itself in misleading referencing from critical sources even in the minority of footnotes that actually can be fact-checked. They repeatedly turn out to say crucially different things from or the very opposite of what he claims they are saying. This is a reason for serious concern.
Most historical sources have been authored by someone who had a dog in the fight. They have an in-built bias of some sort. The task of the historian is to keep this in mind and critically analyze the source. What are the potential reasons of the author of the source to misrepresent or distort "objective reality" and how strongly could these have been at work? What do other sources on the same event say? Is a source corroborated or contradicted by another source? What does a critical analysis of these alternative sources yield? What are the author's criteria when weighing conflicting sources against each other?
When we look at Indian depredation claim files, one thing is obvious: They have an inbuilt anti-Indian bias. The time period covered in the book was a dangerous one. Not only was there intertribal warfare and war between Indians and whites but also extensive white banditry. White horse rustlers were and would remain a major scourge troubling both white settlers and reservation Indians. Deserters, ruffians, whiskey peddlers (and their customers of various races) would often form gangs that perpetrated depredations (these appear to be entirely non-existent throughout Broome's book although we know they played a significant role in the time and place covered in the book). If settlers became victims of these, they had no recourse under the Indian Depredation Claims Act, and they knew this. The perpetrators had to be Indians (with few or no whites among them) to have a claim to be filed with any chance of success - this inbuilt factor in the claims system created an incentive not only to exaggerate or even fabricate losses but also to make misrepresentations about the identities of the attackers.
This factor is entirely ignored by the author. Astonishingly, he first quotes the warning of Larry Skogen, the preeminent authority on Indian depredation claims who literally "wrote the book" on the subject matter…
"First, a researcher must be prepared to find out a subject lied and tried to fraudulently obtain money through one of the Indian policies. Second, he or she cannot accept these documents at face value. A researcher must remember that these people were motivated to exaggerate their material possessions and to make Native Americans a larger-than-life threat to their well-being. He or she should use corroborating evidence apart from the claims to try to substantiate anything of interest in them."
… only to throw the warning out of the window. Writes Broome:
"This basically applied to the amount of property lost and the value therewith. This is not an indictment against the depredation claims being reliable statements of what occurred, where it occurred, and how it occurred during an Indian raid."
This is obviously false. The question WHO did exactly WHAT could and would often be subject to fraudulent attempts for the reason just mentioned. Broome chooses to simply ignore (and fervently deny) this crucial fact.
Broome goes on and claims that
"There was no need to exaggerate the raid itself, as there was no compensation for injury or death. In fact, often claims completely ignored describing an attack when people were killed or injured—not mentioning those facts—focusing instead merely on the property lost."
It appears that Broome makes these claims against better positive knowledge. Without doubt he is aware of the fact that many claimants were unaware of the legal situation and thus claimed compensation for alleged killings, physical abuse or rape (Broome, of course, eagerly uses these descriptions in his books). For example, anyone who has read the author's previous book Dog Soldier Justice may remember his coverage of the case of Veronika Ulbrich. More than a decades after her release by the Cheyennes in a prisoner exchange, her father filed a depredation claim, claiming 10,000 USD for the death of Veronika's brother and another 5,000 USD for her supposed defloration during captivity. The latter claim had in fact been contradicted by a local newspaper report that came out at the time of her release. Broome quickly dismissed the newspaper version as unreliable, stating supposed financial interests of the newspaper's owners in downplaying Indian depredations (in fact the opposite mechanism is on record; frontier newspapers would even go so far as even blatantly inventing the massacre of a large army unit - which would after some time return all safe and sound - in order to attract more troops and resultant local business). The obvious and precisely tallied financial interest of the claimant in making such claims (15,000 USD) was not discussed by Broome. At any rate, Broome ought to know that claimants would see plenty of potential reason to exaggerate or fabricate the scope and the nature of raids as such as well as the very identity of the attackers.
Yet Broome will have none of it. Writes he: "There is no reason to distrust such detailed statements, and therefore I have freely used these accounts in bringing out this history of Indian raids along the roads to Denver. When possible I have used corroborating statements from other sources to produce a clearer picture."
What he has not done, however, is to use statements from other sources which might CONTRADICT the statements in a depredation claim. Army reports, sometimes full scale investigations, would often dismiss settler complaints as exaggerated or completely unfounded. Contrary to what the author wants to make us believe, plenty of sources of this kind are extant. Alas, little to nothing of this is to be found in this work. The author is not a historian by training, and it is here where this becomes most painfully clear. For the most part, he fails to critically analyze his sources and look for contradictory sources and work with these as well. This is the bread and butter business of every historian. This work, sadly, clearly fails the test of essential historical methodology.
Worse, some random checking of those relatively few footnotes not leading into the black box of Indian depredation claims, reveal a troubling practice of omitting crucial passages that don't fit the author's agenda, or even turning key points in the sources into their exact opposite.
Take, for example, Broome's retelling of the beginning of the Colorado war of 1864 where he writes on page 47 that
“John Powers, a young man married to a Cheyenne, confirmed to [Indian Agent] Colley that the Lakota had come down from the north and smoked the war pipe with the Cheyenne. Robert North’s earlier warning to Governor Evans was proving true. Things indeed were looking ominous.”
However, a check of the source given in the footnote, a report listed in the “Wars of the Southern Rebellion” annals, produces this:
“I sent out John Powers, a trusty young man who lives with a Cheyenne squaw, to learn what he could. He came back a few days since and reports, in substance, that the Sioux have been to the Cheyennes with the war pipe, urging them to join against the whites, but they all disclaim all intention to do so. Two Cheyennes have just come in. They have heard of the trouble on the Platte and are very much frightened. I shall try and keep all that come in here. Please keep me advised.“
So, what the source says is that Powers reports that the Cheyennes declined smoking the war pipe and that frightened Cheyennes come in to Fort Lyon, troubled by the recent news of fighting further north. The source says the exact opposite of what the author claims it says: instead of Indians plotting for war we find Indians desperately trying to avoid one.
The man Robert North mentioned here by Broome plays a classical role in every retelling of the run-up to the Colorado War. In September 1863 it had become clear to Colorado territorial Governor John Evans that his efforts to legalize the mass squatting on Cheyenne and Arapaho lands had failed. The Cheyennes considered the Fort Wise Treaty of 1861 which had been signed by 6 of their 44 council chiefs a fraud (and neither their council of 44 nor the Keeper of the Sacred Arrows had agreed to it, rendering the agreement non-binding, essentially "unratified", according to Cheyenne jurisprudence). The Indians wouldn’t abandon their land. For Evans this rendered the people of the land “hostiles”, war was the logical consequence in his mind. The problem was only that the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, although troubled by white land theft and provocations, wouldn’t do Evans the favor of starting a war. It is in this context that Governor Evans claimed in a letter in November 1863 that North, a “squaw-man” married to an Arapaho woman, had first-hand knowledge that the Arapaho and Cheyenne were in fact plotting an all-out war come next spring. North himself was deemed crazy by some, is said to have participated in the Fetterman fight three years later (on the Indian side) and was hanged together with his Arapaho wife the year after by white vigilantes. Jeff Broome usually dismisses statements of “Squaw-men” as coming from unreliable men – why doesn’t he do so in the case of this particularly shady character? I can’t see any other reason than that North’s story simply fits Broome’s agenda. Broome even isn’t above claiming that the supposed 1863 plot for war would have been confirmed by later information - gathered in August 1864, when the war was already in full swing - that the old men were at this time against war but the young warriors all for war.
Of course it's a non-sequitur that the will of the young warriors to fight a war in August '64, which had been forced upon them in April and May '64 (five Cheyenne camps attacked), would prove that they had been plotting war in the preceding year of ‘63.
Concerning the causes of the war, Broome gives various contradictory ones, the reader is free to take his pick: At one point he states starvation among the Cheyennes beginning in 1864 (wrong, the Arkansas bands already started to starve in 1860), then he claims it was all about the desire of the Dog Soldiers for plunder, then he retreats into murky uncertainty and claims that the causes are overall unclear. Broome’s entire handling of the beginning of the Colorado War is overall disappointing. He constantly jumps back and forth in time for no readily apparent reason; his selection of sources is, even by his standards, annoyingly one-sided and the account is riddled with tendentious language and false factual claims. One can’t quite escape the impression that Broome jumps back and forth in time in order to reverse cause and effect in retelling the descent into open war.
At one point he presents a four page block quote from Aaron Hoel’s Indian Depredation Claim that supposedly “gives one a clear understanding of the beginning of the war“. This block quote, however, only contains a story of freighters transporting mining explosives who lose their flock of unyoked draft animals in a thunderstorm and spend - unsuccessfully - many days trying to recover the stray oxen . At one point they encounter an “Indian buck” who tries to avoid them but is soon overtaken and apparently more or less pressed into service to assist them in looking for the lost stock. We then get bored with lengthy descriptions of how the “buck” asks for a present for his troubles, finally gets it, appears to be nervous all the time and then, after days of common fruitless search for the eloped oxen, finds his own folks and moves off to join them, leaving the teamsters still without their lost stock (and now also scared of Indians) who now discontinue the search and instead turn to fantasies of what to do with all their mining explosives if they should be attacked by Indians. This, however, never happens. This section even makes it into the introductory quote of the chapter. It is indeed revealing how this rather pointless story of teamsters losing their stock not due to hostile Indians but due to bad weather and their own oversight, then engaging in fantasies of hostile Indians and finally even filing a depredation claim (for what actually?) is considered a key document by the author: It takes exactly nothing on the parts of the Indians to be treated as aggressors by the author, which is clarifying indeed.
When handling the first armed clashes of the Colorado War, Broome predictably limits himself to the - naturally one-sided - reports of the volunteer troop commanders and their superiors, together with the sensationalistic and substantially unproven rumors about widespread Indian depredations. Rumors about Indian attacks on ranches turned out to be false. Broome chooses not to clarify this. In reality the Cheyennes and Arapahos had not changed their peacetime behavior of the previous five years at all. It had been a common phenomenon that herders and teamsters would time and again lose stock (this was decades before the introduction of barbed wire), often through oversight (and often conveniently blaming the loss on Indians). Whenever Indians found these stray animals, they rounded them up, cared for them without butchering them (they preferred buffalo meat) and turned them over to the first white claimant turning up against a small gift, usually coffee or sugar.
The origins of the fight at Fremont's orchard, a rather botched affair from the troopers' point of view, follow that exact pattern. A war party of fourteen Dog Soldiers (their numbers and names are known from Cheyenne sources), on their way north to fight against the Crow, found four stray mules and rounded them up. When a Mr. Ripley, the self-professed owner of the animals, turned up at their camp, the warriors agreed to turn the animals over and demanded the customary compensation for their troubles. Ripley, however, was unwilling to compensate the Indians and left the Dog Soldier camp angry and empty-handed. He then turned up at Dunn's post and claimed that Indians were attacking ranches all across the area and that he himself had escaped barely alive (consider this: Ripley entered a Dog Soldier camp for a parlay, obviously not really fearing for his life. Had the warriors wanted to do him harm, he would hardly have made it out of their camp alive).
Broome, predictably, limits his source selection to the official army reports, regurgiating Ripley's false accusations (it's on record that supposedly attacked ranches were visited by troops and turned out to be entirely unscathed) and leaving out the well-known Indian sources that give a very different telling. Unfortunately, Broome then not only cherry-picks between conflicting army reports on the subject, picking those statements that put the Indians in the worst possible light (and brushing the rest under the carpet without even mentioning them) but even misrepresents the contents of the one report he uses: he leaves out the first report by Dunn's superior Downing (recounting an oral report by a trooper sent by Dunn) that the Indians all had come forward to shake hands and parlay, that Dunn's force tried to seize the animals by force and then grabbed the warriors to disarm them (predictably, the warriors resisted and a fight ensued). Instead, Broome writes:
"The Chief replied with 'a scornful laugh' and immediately fired at the troopers.",
crucially leaving out Dunn's very own statement that fighting ensued only when he tried to take one of the Indian's weapons away. Two Army reports agree that the troopers grabbed the weapons of the Indians which triggered their resistance. Broome, instead, talks of a Chief giving a scornful laugh upon a verbal request (there was no interpreter present) and literally invents the immediate shooting by the Chief out of a mere conversation. Broome's version isn't just an unprofessional, agenda-driven, cherry-picking between different army reports, it’s evidently also a falsification of Dunn's own account of the crucial moment that turned confrontation into deadly conflict.
Broome then dutifully recounts Dunn’s claim that of a claimed 15 to 20 Indians (two lines further down they have increased to 25) about 20 were killed or wounded while pursuing them in a running fight for about an hour. A page later he quotes from another depredation claim how Dunn’s troops were, to the contrary, driven back to their post by said Indians (in keeping with this, Cheyenne sources - as usual ignored by Broome - claim three wounded warriors and none killed). The informed reader must wonder how a group of 15 warriors could have lost 20 and still managed to drive Dunn’s reported 15 men from the field and back to their base.
Indian behavior towards whites had not changed from the peaceful years before. What did change in April 1864 was that the Colorado 1st Volunteer cavalry had suddenly adopted a full-blown, indiscriminate "search and destroy" strategy aimed at every group of Cheyennes and Arapahos the troopers came across. Throughout April and early May 1864, volunteer commanders Dunn, Downing and Eyre attacked various Cheyenne and Arapaho camps without warning, prompting the terrified people to run for their lives while looting and destroying the households and earthly possessions of well over a hundred people. In all these raids the troopers encountered virtually no resistance from the bewildered tribesmen (only in one case a lone warrior worked as a rearguard and wounded a trooper when being attacked). Yet Broome manages to retell this campaign of "search and destroy" against the local Indians as a commencement of hostilities by the local Indians against the whites – truly flabbergasting!
Throughout the book the author is simply trying too hard to portray Indians in the worst possible light while giving any act of aggression and breach of trust by the whites a pass. In the course of this he consistently ignores the standards of historical methodology and jumps at every source that portray Indians as treacherous, hostile, plotting for war, starting hostilities, being malicious and brutal - and incredibly inept at fighting, being gunned down by troopers in incredibly large numbers (and, as demonstrated, if none of the sources don't quite delivers, he even doctors one).
Part of this general picture is the author's constant attempts to denigrate well-known peace proponents among the Cheyennes such as Black Kettle and White Antelope. He has White Antelope leading a raiding war party in the summer of '64. His "proof" for this is that a teamster describes the look of a war party leader after the raid to an officer at a nearby fort, the officer then concluding that this would have been "White Antelope". It's not even clear if the officer had ever seen White Antelope before. What's clear is that he hadn't seen the Indians of the war party either. Once again, Broome's urge to paint Indians as bad guys, coupled with his utter disinterest in their culture, produces headshakes. Broome doesn't seem to be bothered by the fact that at a reported age of 75 (!) White Antelope was about twice the Plains warrior retirement age. Also, White Antelope was a peace chief and therefore barred from leading war parties in the first place. Broome's unconvincing character assassination attempt is completed by the rather gleeful statement that his very own great-great-great-granduncle Hugh Melrose would have been the very man who gunned White Antelope down at Sand Creek (before he was mutilated by the mob beyond recognition, his scrotum procured for making a tobacco pouch out of it). That in reality no less than half a dozen different men of the "Bloody Thirdsters" have been credited with having killed the old Peace Chief is one of the many research realities that somehow seem to become victims of space constraints in Broome's otherwise overly long tome.
Having thus reinvented the old peace chief White Antelope as a youthful leader of raiding parties, Broome proceeds to character-assassinate Black Kettle's through guilt by association. Broome's compelling logic: If White Antelope was a baddie, Black Kettle was one as well since he camped together with him. Other attempts by Broome to denigrate Black Kettle are of comparable quality. When Black Kettle initiates peace talks with Major Wynkoop by suggesting a prisoner exchange, Broome jumps at the fact that Black Kettle tells Wynkoop that he bought some captives from other Cheyenne Indians but couldn't get others who were held by Sioux. Broome acknowledges that Sioux captives are not Cheyenne captives but then immediately claims bad faith on Black Kettle's part anyway as he would supposedly have been responsible for effecting the release of other people's captives - because he camped together with Sioux Indians (which he didn't).
Time and again, Broome's disinterest in and ignorance of Cheyenne culture disfigures his writing about them. Writing about the Cheyenne Dog Men and their supposed lust for plunder as the cause of the war, he claims that they "were not led by council chiefs, such as Black Kettle, but rather were guided by their own individual leaders". This is the second Book Jeff Broome writes in which the Hotamitaniu/Dog Men/Dog Soldiers take center stage as the villains, and he has yet to learn that they, being a hybrid warrior society and tribal band, of course WERE led not just by warrior society headmen but also by council chiefs. Obviously, it would mean to ask for too much of Broome to understand the political rifts that existed between Dog Men council chiefs as he even denies their very existence in the first place.
The informed reader will often wonder if this book was meant to be a satire. The author's hyperbolic comparisons and choices of language, often amounting to a faithful reenactment of the literary style of the frontier era, add much to this impression. Here is but one example: In chapter 16, entitled "Bury my heart at Spillman Creek", apparently an in-your-face mimicry of Dee Brown's 1970 revisionist classic "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee", Broome seems to suggests that a series of attacks that claimed 9 settler lives would be equivalent in meaning to the massacre of 350 Lakota people at Wounded Knee in 1890. The turgid pseudo-Victorian verbiage used by the author here adds a peculiar ersatz period charm to this chapter. Quote:
"Memorial Day recognizes those American soldiers whose lives were sacrificed in the preservation of freedom. Before this day was over, the first Americans to enter perpetually into this national recognition were not soldiers but rather Kansas citizens, victims of the Cheyenne war. Nine men, women and children poured their blood out as the price of the prairie. No one would pay a higher toll than did a young pioneer mother, Susanna Alderdice, just 24 years of age. Two of her four children died on this day, a third joining her two brothers three days later. The young mother would enter the eternal sleep of her children in the unknown, six weeks later, at her failed rescue at Summit Springs, bringing the final number of dead Americans in this tragic rampage to 11. One lone child of Susanna's young family would spill as much blood on the prairie as did his siblings, but the uncaring ground would spare demanding his heartbeat."
This is not to denigrate the horrors, the sufferings and the premature deaths of settler/squatter families who fells victims to the last attempts of Cheyenne warriors to defend their land. The question must be asked, though, if Broome's style, which may appear to many readers as involuntarily comical, is really the best way of retelling the history.
Talking about Summit Springs, which Broome covers as both a tragic (because of Susanna Alderdice's death) and triumphal (because of the death of at least 53 Cheyenne people) end to the "Cheyenne War", it is worth noting that Summit Springs, also known as Buffalo Springs, located in the heart of the Cheyenne homeland, used to be a favorite camping ground for generations of Cheyenne people. Twice it became a death trap for the people of the land, the first time in 1864 when troopers of the 1st Colorado cavalry raided a small camp, ignored entreaties for mercy and massacred everyone (four women, two infants, one teenager and three men), the second time in 1869 when Carr's 5th cavalry raided the camp of several hundred people of the Hotamitaniu clan and managed to kill at least 53 people. Only one person killed on this blood-stained ground has ever received a personalized memorial marker - Susanna Alderdice, the only white person ever to be killed amidst all the killings in this place. The instigator of this act of memorialization was author Jeff Broome. He has repeatedly stated in print that the scores of Cheyenne people killed there (may we say murder although they were just Indians?) deserve no pity or regret over their fates.
This is the spirit of presenting balanced history as Jeff Broome understands it. May the reader decide for himself if he agrees or if writing about Indian wars history should aspire to higher standards than presented in this book.
Books about Indian raids on whites are as old as the white settlement of America. Yet, although they still get published nowadays, the past 50 years have seen increased efforts to do the Indians more justice than has traditionally happened and to at least try to include their experience and perspective in the Big Picture. Some people think that such efforts in turn don't do the settler's perspective enough justice. Broome's "Cheyenne War" aims at rectifying this perceived lack of coverage which centers on white settlers and other civilians in the victim role.
The claimed purpose of Broome's previous book "Dog Soldier Justice" as well as the current follow-up is "to demonstrate that recent scholarship has diminished or discounted the degree of suffering endured by the settlers in favor of emphasizing the horror and despair experienced by the Indians.”
The author's method of rectifying this perceived problem is rather straightforward: to diminish or discount the suffering endured by the Indians in favor of emphasizing the horror and despair experienced by the settlers (most of who never endured an Indian attack and, contrary to the Indians, were never threatened with extermination nor suffered total ethnic cleansing).
The central thesis of the book, if there is any, would probably be that the Cheyenne nation waged a single, more or less continuous war against Euro-American settlers which lasted a full 5 years, from 1864 to 1869. Unfortunately, Broome never quite convincingly argues this case as he lustfully gets lost in countless accounts of screaming Indians and insurance case bean-counting instead.
The source material on which Broome largely bases his work are depredation claim files, i.e. compensation claims filed by white citizens against Indian tribes for alleged depredations perpetrated by Indians of said tribes. While Broome writes in his trademark partisan prose that the “generic idea behind the legislation was to teach the Indian that unwarranted attacks upon settlers must stop” and “to convince depredating Indians to abandon their long-held cultural practice of stealing and raiding against people outside the confines of friendly tribes”, the legislation had in reality been adopted to work both ways. Under the Indian Depredation Claims Act of 1796 both “pioneers” and Indians could apply for indemnity for losses incurred as a result of their dealings with each other. That Indians were entitled to compensations under this legislation as well seems to have been quickly and conveniently forgotten (nobody told them), not least by the author of this book. Another point worth noting is that practically none of the depredation claims against Indians the author has used for this book (usually from Record Group 123) was successful. The author claims that this was mostly due to technicalities. What light that might shed on the reliability of the affidavits in the numerous claims used for this book is one of the many questions that remain unanswered.
Some questions I hoped would get answered by this book were chiefly directed at the bigger picture and would mostly hinge upon processing the vast amount of collected source material into statistics and then analyzing these statistics: How many Indian raids did occur in specific areas in specific periods? How were these attacks generally carried out? What kinds of patterns are discernible? Did these patterns change over time? If yes, why might this have been the case? Broome could have generated statistical overviews out of the wealth of data he has mined (as has Greg Michno in several books which plough the same field). Whenever we talk about wars we sooner or later talk about aggregate body counts. How many settlers were killed, wounded, abducted, raped in specific areas and phases? How many in the overall war? How reliable are the data? What is Broome's methodology to ascertain source reliability? Where is the likely lower and upper end of the statistical range? This would add a specific "price tag" in (white) blood to this chapter of "opening up" the West. It would also answer the question what kind of damage the Cheyennes were able to inflict on the invaders of their land. How effective were they in their resistance? Did they manage to drive settlers from certain areas? If yes, how large was the area affected and how lasting, if at all, was their temporary success of driving back the tide of settler invasion? What did local settlers know and think about the conflict? What patterns can we discern here? Were they largely ignorant of trouble? How many knew about the dangers and just took their chances? What is to be said about their role in transforming Indian hunting lands into farmland? Can we portray them as fearless pioneers in a war over land-use and innocent bystanders at the same time or isn't that an obvious contradiction? How exactly was the frontier pushed further into the Indian domain during the time period covered, and how did the Indians react to this? And what about the Indian-killing "efficiency" of settlers and troops in this conflict? How many plains Indian warriors (I hesitate to say it but why not include their non-combatants as well?) on aggregate were presumably killed and wounded in all these fights and what kind of repercussions did that have on the tribal populations, their social cohesion and their economic or military abilities to survive further? Many more questions come to mind, but I'll leave it at that. I didn't expect all of these questions to be addressed but at least some of them.
Sadly, these bigger picture questions remain largely unanswered by the author. All the reader can try to do is do the analytical work himself while shifting back and forth through the book (a task only worth the effort, however, if the data are to be trusted, more on that later). The book lacks both a narrative arch (which would facilitate reading this 500 page tome) and an analytical framework. It's a mountain of research student finds deserving of a thorough processing by a historian. What is so frustrating about this book is that, for the most part, the latter simply hasn't happened. The author has largely contended himself with bringing a multitude of compensation claims into a more or less chronological order and turning the whole thing into a 500 page piece of tort claims prose.
So, while the book and chapter titles keep using the word "war", this quickly starts feeling like false labeling. The actual contents of the book reads rather like an endless list of mere crime reports: Here we have the plucky white folks in their neat (or often quite crude) homes, there we have these savage gangs who apparently keep perpetrating unwarranted crime after crime against them. Throughout Broome's narrative, Indians keep "murdering" whites. Indians, in turn, never get murdered in this book but always only "killed".
Any reader who wants to get a quick orientation through such a lengthy book, will turn to the table of contents to discern the structure of the book and maybe pick parts of the study which are of particular interest to him. This approach, alas, is largely impossible when confronted with a table of contents like this:
Chapter one
The Beginning of the Denver Trail [okay, an introduction; author focus becomes clear: no bothering about Indians]
Chapter two
The Indian War Begins
Chapter three
The War Is On
Chapter four
The War Continues [Uhm, oh really? Very informative.]
chapter five
More War [This is a satire, or not…?]
Chapter six
The 1865 Indian War [Wait! We just managed to whiz past the Sand Creek massacre, the single greatest slaughter in Cheyenne-White relations. No chapter title for this? Even the most naive reader will sense a distinct bias by now.]
Chapter seven
The 1865 Indian War Continues [Satire alert again…]
Chapter eight
The War Stays Hot [This author is really pulling my leg…]
Chapter nine
Treaty Failures [This could be about the 1865 Treaty of the Little Arkansas… Or Medicine Lodge 1867…?]
Chapter ten
Out of Control [Who? When? How? I'm at a loss what to guess this could be about.]
Chapter eleven
Waging Actual War [Really? What on earth were the ten preceding chapters about then?]
Chapter twelve
Waging Heavy Peace [That could be about… nope, no clue again…]
Chapter thirteen
Colorado Indian War [Oh really? I'm supposed to have read 350 pages about war in Colorado up to this point. This author is making me angry just by inflicting this table of contents on me...]
Chapter fourteen
Fights and More Raids [And now for something completely different. Not.]
chapter fifteen
Tall Bull’s Revenge [Thank you, Lord, the table of contents gives me a name for the first time! May 1869?]
Chapter sixteen
Bury My Heart at Spillman Creek [Quite possibly the tackiest chapter title I have ever read.]
Before turning to methodology and contents, allow me some remarks on formalities. Being self-published, this book hasn't seen a professional editor. Instead, the author had individual chapters proof-read by volunteers recruited via Facebook. The results leave much to be desired. The book is riddled with awkward sentence formulations, malaproprisms (wrong words, not meaning what the author apparently wanted to express), wrong grammar, syntax, tense and sentence construction. We read about people carrying horses or holding mules in their hands. A herd of 400 horses leaves the tracks of 300 horses (did the other 100 fly?). Indians steal white neighbors. When the author claims that Indians didn't say the truth, they don't just tell a lie but a "deceptive lie" (are there also non-deceptive lies?). There is a constant mixing of singular and plural forms when referring to the same thing. Many passages read like early drafts, are repetitive, overly wordy and could easily be trimmed by a third or so without losing one bit of information. This makes for often rather unedifying reading. Add to this the unceasing use of inflammatory language: We always read of "lurking", "swarming", "swooping" and of course "screaming" Indians (what did whites do when attacking? Keep their lips tight?) who are always "viciously" attacking, "brutally" and of course again "viciously gang-raping (do whites rape gently?), then "scamper".
Concerning Broome's methodology, at least 80% of the sources he references are Indian Depredation claim files. This means that the interested reader can't fact-check at least 80% of Broome's footnotes for correct referencing without spending one's holidays and a small fortune on a research trip to the National Archives in D.C. From the reader's point of view, Broome mostly cites from a black box. We have to trust him on this one. One issue his reviewer had with this point is that Broome never gives us an idea what's in these files altogether. We almost never learn what kind of fact-checking on the claims took place, if there were contradictory findings or not etc. All we get is Broome's quote-mining from these nearly unverifiable sources with an implied "trust me!".
Reasons for not easily crossing this bridge are threefold:
1.) Readers of the authors preceding book "Dog Soldier Justice" will be aware of his marked (and well known) bias for settlers and against Indians. However, if his methodology and his fact-checking were sound, that might not have derailed the whole project.
2.) The author's methodology in dealing with depredation claims, however, IS fundamentally flawed (more on this in a moment);
3.) The author's bias also expresses itself in misleading referencing from critical sources even in the minority of footnotes that actually can be fact-checked. They repeatedly turn out to say crucially different things from or the very opposite of what he claims they are saying. This is a reason for serious concern.
Most historical sources have been authored by someone who had a dog in the fight. They have an in-built bias of some sort. The task of the historian is to keep this in mind and critically analyze the source. What are the potential reasons of the author of the source to misrepresent or distort "objective reality" and how strongly could these have been at work? What do other sources on the same event say? Is a source corroborated or contradicted by another source? What does a critical analysis of these alternative sources yield? What are the author's criteria when weighing conflicting sources against each other?
When we look at Indian depredation claim files, one thing is obvious: They have an inbuilt anti-Indian bias. The time period covered in the book was a dangerous one. Not only was there intertribal warfare and war between Indians and whites but also extensive white banditry. White horse rustlers were and would remain a major scourge troubling both white settlers and reservation Indians. Deserters, ruffians, whiskey peddlers (and their customers of various races) would often form gangs that perpetrated depredations (these appear to be entirely non-existent throughout Broome's book although we know they played a significant role in the time and place covered in the book). If settlers became victims of these, they had no recourse under the Indian Depredation Claims Act, and they knew this. The perpetrators had to be Indians (with few or no whites among them) to have a claim to be filed with any chance of success - this inbuilt factor in the claims system created an incentive not only to exaggerate or even fabricate losses but also to make misrepresentations about the identities of the attackers.
This factor is entirely ignored by the author. Astonishingly, he first quotes the warning of Larry Skogen, the preeminent authority on Indian depredation claims who literally "wrote the book" on the subject matter…
"First, a researcher must be prepared to find out a subject lied and tried to fraudulently obtain money through one of the Indian policies. Second, he or she cannot accept these documents at face value. A researcher must remember that these people were motivated to exaggerate their material possessions and to make Native Americans a larger-than-life threat to their well-being. He or she should use corroborating evidence apart from the claims to try to substantiate anything of interest in them."
… only to throw the warning out of the window. Writes Broome:
"This basically applied to the amount of property lost and the value therewith. This is not an indictment against the depredation claims being reliable statements of what occurred, where it occurred, and how it occurred during an Indian raid."
This is obviously false. The question WHO did exactly WHAT could and would often be subject to fraudulent attempts for the reason just mentioned. Broome chooses to simply ignore (and fervently deny) this crucial fact.
Broome goes on and claims that
"There was no need to exaggerate the raid itself, as there was no compensation for injury or death. In fact, often claims completely ignored describing an attack when people were killed or injured—not mentioning those facts—focusing instead merely on the property lost."
It appears that Broome makes these claims against better positive knowledge. Without doubt he is aware of the fact that many claimants were unaware of the legal situation and thus claimed compensation for alleged killings, physical abuse or rape (Broome, of course, eagerly uses these descriptions in his books). For example, anyone who has read the author's previous book Dog Soldier Justice may remember his coverage of the case of Veronika Ulbrich. More than a decades after her release by the Cheyennes in a prisoner exchange, her father filed a depredation claim, claiming 10,000 USD for the death of Veronika's brother and another 5,000 USD for her supposed defloration during captivity. The latter claim had in fact been contradicted by a local newspaper report that came out at the time of her release. Broome quickly dismissed the newspaper version as unreliable, stating supposed financial interests of the newspaper's owners in downplaying Indian depredations (in fact the opposite mechanism is on record; frontier newspapers would even go so far as even blatantly inventing the massacre of a large army unit - which would after some time return all safe and sound - in order to attract more troops and resultant local business). The obvious and precisely tallied financial interest of the claimant in making such claims (15,000 USD) was not discussed by Broome. At any rate, Broome ought to know that claimants would see plenty of potential reason to exaggerate or fabricate the scope and the nature of raids as such as well as the very identity of the attackers.
Yet Broome will have none of it. Writes he: "There is no reason to distrust such detailed statements, and therefore I have freely used these accounts in bringing out this history of Indian raids along the roads to Denver. When possible I have used corroborating statements from other sources to produce a clearer picture."
What he has not done, however, is to use statements from other sources which might CONTRADICT the statements in a depredation claim. Army reports, sometimes full scale investigations, would often dismiss settler complaints as exaggerated or completely unfounded. Contrary to what the author wants to make us believe, plenty of sources of this kind are extant. Alas, little to nothing of this is to be found in this work. The author is not a historian by training, and it is here where this becomes most painfully clear. For the most part, he fails to critically analyze his sources and look for contradictory sources and work with these as well. This is the bread and butter business of every historian. This work, sadly, clearly fails the test of essential historical methodology.
Worse, some random checking of those relatively few footnotes not leading into the black box of Indian depredation claims, reveal a troubling practice of omitting crucial passages that don't fit the author's agenda, or even turning key points in the sources into their exact opposite.
Take, for example, Broome's retelling of the beginning of the Colorado war of 1864 where he writes on page 47 that
“John Powers, a young man married to a Cheyenne, confirmed to [Indian Agent] Colley that the Lakota had come down from the north and smoked the war pipe with the Cheyenne. Robert North’s earlier warning to Governor Evans was proving true. Things indeed were looking ominous.”
However, a check of the source given in the footnote, a report listed in the “Wars of the Southern Rebellion” annals, produces this:
“I sent out John Powers, a trusty young man who lives with a Cheyenne squaw, to learn what he could. He came back a few days since and reports, in substance, that the Sioux have been to the Cheyennes with the war pipe, urging them to join against the whites, but they all disclaim all intention to do so. Two Cheyennes have just come in. They have heard of the trouble on the Platte and are very much frightened. I shall try and keep all that come in here. Please keep me advised.“
So, what the source says is that Powers reports that the Cheyennes declined smoking the war pipe and that frightened Cheyennes come in to Fort Lyon, troubled by the recent news of fighting further north. The source says the exact opposite of what the author claims it says: instead of Indians plotting for war we find Indians desperately trying to avoid one.
The man Robert North mentioned here by Broome plays a classical role in every retelling of the run-up to the Colorado War. In September 1863 it had become clear to Colorado territorial Governor John Evans that his efforts to legalize the mass squatting on Cheyenne and Arapaho lands had failed. The Cheyennes considered the Fort Wise Treaty of 1861 which had been signed by 6 of their 44 council chiefs a fraud (and neither their council of 44 nor the Keeper of the Sacred Arrows had agreed to it, rendering the agreement non-binding, essentially "unratified", according to Cheyenne jurisprudence). The Indians wouldn’t abandon their land. For Evans this rendered the people of the land “hostiles”, war was the logical consequence in his mind. The problem was only that the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, although troubled by white land theft and provocations, wouldn’t do Evans the favor of starting a war. It is in this context that Governor Evans claimed in a letter in November 1863 that North, a “squaw-man” married to an Arapaho woman, had first-hand knowledge that the Arapaho and Cheyenne were in fact plotting an all-out war come next spring. North himself was deemed crazy by some, is said to have participated in the Fetterman fight three years later (on the Indian side) and was hanged together with his Arapaho wife the year after by white vigilantes. Jeff Broome usually dismisses statements of “Squaw-men” as coming from unreliable men – why doesn’t he do so in the case of this particularly shady character? I can’t see any other reason than that North’s story simply fits Broome’s agenda. Broome even isn’t above claiming that the supposed 1863 plot for war would have been confirmed by later information - gathered in August 1864, when the war was already in full swing - that the old men were at this time against war but the young warriors all for war.
Of course it's a non-sequitur that the will of the young warriors to fight a war in August '64, which had been forced upon them in April and May '64 (five Cheyenne camps attacked), would prove that they had been plotting war in the preceding year of ‘63.
Concerning the causes of the war, Broome gives various contradictory ones, the reader is free to take his pick: At one point he states starvation among the Cheyennes beginning in 1864 (wrong, the Arkansas bands already started to starve in 1860), then he claims it was all about the desire of the Dog Soldiers for plunder, then he retreats into murky uncertainty and claims that the causes are overall unclear. Broome’s entire handling of the beginning of the Colorado War is overall disappointing. He constantly jumps back and forth in time for no readily apparent reason; his selection of sources is, even by his standards, annoyingly one-sided and the account is riddled with tendentious language and false factual claims. One can’t quite escape the impression that Broome jumps back and forth in time in order to reverse cause and effect in retelling the descent into open war.
At one point he presents a four page block quote from Aaron Hoel’s Indian Depredation Claim that supposedly “gives one a clear understanding of the beginning of the war“. This block quote, however, only contains a story of freighters transporting mining explosives who lose their flock of unyoked draft animals in a thunderstorm and spend - unsuccessfully - many days trying to recover the stray oxen . At one point they encounter an “Indian buck” who tries to avoid them but is soon overtaken and apparently more or less pressed into service to assist them in looking for the lost stock. We then get bored with lengthy descriptions of how the “buck” asks for a present for his troubles, finally gets it, appears to be nervous all the time and then, after days of common fruitless search for the eloped oxen, finds his own folks and moves off to join them, leaving the teamsters still without their lost stock (and now also scared of Indians) who now discontinue the search and instead turn to fantasies of what to do with all their mining explosives if they should be attacked by Indians. This, however, never happens. This section even makes it into the introductory quote of the chapter. It is indeed revealing how this rather pointless story of teamsters losing their stock not due to hostile Indians but due to bad weather and their own oversight, then engaging in fantasies of hostile Indians and finally even filing a depredation claim (for what actually?) is considered a key document by the author: It takes exactly nothing on the parts of the Indians to be treated as aggressors by the author, which is clarifying indeed.
When handling the first armed clashes of the Colorado War, Broome predictably limits himself to the - naturally one-sided - reports of the volunteer troop commanders and their superiors, together with the sensationalistic and substantially unproven rumors about widespread Indian depredations. Rumors about Indian attacks on ranches turned out to be false. Broome chooses not to clarify this. In reality the Cheyennes and Arapahos had not changed their peacetime behavior of the previous five years at all. It had been a common phenomenon that herders and teamsters would time and again lose stock (this was decades before the introduction of barbed wire), often through oversight (and often conveniently blaming the loss on Indians). Whenever Indians found these stray animals, they rounded them up, cared for them without butchering them (they preferred buffalo meat) and turned them over to the first white claimant turning up against a small gift, usually coffee or sugar.
The origins of the fight at Fremont's orchard, a rather botched affair from the troopers' point of view, follow that exact pattern. A war party of fourteen Dog Soldiers (their numbers and names are known from Cheyenne sources), on their way north to fight against the Crow, found four stray mules and rounded them up. When a Mr. Ripley, the self-professed owner of the animals, turned up at their camp, the warriors agreed to turn the animals over and demanded the customary compensation for their troubles. Ripley, however, was unwilling to compensate the Indians and left the Dog Soldier camp angry and empty-handed. He then turned up at Dunn's post and claimed that Indians were attacking ranches all across the area and that he himself had escaped barely alive (consider this: Ripley entered a Dog Soldier camp for a parlay, obviously not really fearing for his life. Had the warriors wanted to do him harm, he would hardly have made it out of their camp alive).
Broome, predictably, limits his source selection to the official army reports, regurgiating Ripley's false accusations (it's on record that supposedly attacked ranches were visited by troops and turned out to be entirely unscathed) and leaving out the well-known Indian sources that give a very different telling. Unfortunately, Broome then not only cherry-picks between conflicting army reports on the subject, picking those statements that put the Indians in the worst possible light (and brushing the rest under the carpet without even mentioning them) but even misrepresents the contents of the one report he uses: he leaves out the first report by Dunn's superior Downing (recounting an oral report by a trooper sent by Dunn) that the Indians all had come forward to shake hands and parlay, that Dunn's force tried to seize the animals by force and then grabbed the warriors to disarm them (predictably, the warriors resisted and a fight ensued). Instead, Broome writes:
"The Chief replied with 'a scornful laugh' and immediately fired at the troopers.",
crucially leaving out Dunn's very own statement that fighting ensued only when he tried to take one of the Indian's weapons away. Two Army reports agree that the troopers grabbed the weapons of the Indians which triggered their resistance. Broome, instead, talks of a Chief giving a scornful laugh upon a verbal request (there was no interpreter present) and literally invents the immediate shooting by the Chief out of a mere conversation. Broome's version isn't just an unprofessional, agenda-driven, cherry-picking between different army reports, it’s evidently also a falsification of Dunn's own account of the crucial moment that turned confrontation into deadly conflict.
Broome then dutifully recounts Dunn’s claim that of a claimed 15 to 20 Indians (two lines further down they have increased to 25) about 20 were killed or wounded while pursuing them in a running fight for about an hour. A page later he quotes from another depredation claim how Dunn’s troops were, to the contrary, driven back to their post by said Indians (in keeping with this, Cheyenne sources - as usual ignored by Broome - claim three wounded warriors and none killed). The informed reader must wonder how a group of 15 warriors could have lost 20 and still managed to drive Dunn’s reported 15 men from the field and back to their base.
Indian behavior towards whites had not changed from the peaceful years before. What did change in April 1864 was that the Colorado 1st Volunteer cavalry had suddenly adopted a full-blown, indiscriminate "search and destroy" strategy aimed at every group of Cheyennes and Arapahos the troopers came across. Throughout April and early May 1864, volunteer commanders Dunn, Downing and Eyre attacked various Cheyenne and Arapaho camps without warning, prompting the terrified people to run for their lives while looting and destroying the households and earthly possessions of well over a hundred people. In all these raids the troopers encountered virtually no resistance from the bewildered tribesmen (only in one case a lone warrior worked as a rearguard and wounded a trooper when being attacked). Yet Broome manages to retell this campaign of "search and destroy" against the local Indians as a commencement of hostilities by the local Indians against the whites – truly flabbergasting!
Throughout the book the author is simply trying too hard to portray Indians in the worst possible light while giving any act of aggression and breach of trust by the whites a pass. In the course of this he consistently ignores the standards of historical methodology and jumps at every source that portray Indians as treacherous, hostile, plotting for war, starting hostilities, being malicious and brutal - and incredibly inept at fighting, being gunned down by troopers in incredibly large numbers (and, as demonstrated, if none of the sources don't quite delivers, he even doctors one).
Part of this general picture is the author's constant attempts to denigrate well-known peace proponents among the Cheyennes such as Black Kettle and White Antelope. He has White Antelope leading a raiding war party in the summer of '64. His "proof" for this is that a teamster describes the look of a war party leader after the raid to an officer at a nearby fort, the officer then concluding that this would have been "White Antelope". It's not even clear if the officer had ever seen White Antelope before. What's clear is that he hadn't seen the Indians of the war party either. Once again, Broome's urge to paint Indians as bad guys, coupled with his utter disinterest in their culture, produces headshakes. Broome doesn't seem to be bothered by the fact that at a reported age of 75 (!) White Antelope was about twice the Plains warrior retirement age. Also, White Antelope was a peace chief and therefore barred from leading war parties in the first place. Broome's unconvincing character assassination attempt is completed by the rather gleeful statement that his very own great-great-great-granduncle Hugh Melrose would have been the very man who gunned White Antelope down at Sand Creek (before he was mutilated by the mob beyond recognition, his scrotum procured for making a tobacco pouch out of it). That in reality no less than half a dozen different men of the "Bloody Thirdsters" have been credited with having killed the old Peace Chief is one of the many research realities that somehow seem to become victims of space constraints in Broome's otherwise overly long tome.
Having thus reinvented the old peace chief White Antelope as a youthful leader of raiding parties, Broome proceeds to character-assassinate Black Kettle's through guilt by association. Broome's compelling logic: If White Antelope was a baddie, Black Kettle was one as well since he camped together with him. Other attempts by Broome to denigrate Black Kettle are of comparable quality. When Black Kettle initiates peace talks with Major Wynkoop by suggesting a prisoner exchange, Broome jumps at the fact that Black Kettle tells Wynkoop that he bought some captives from other Cheyenne Indians but couldn't get others who were held by Sioux. Broome acknowledges that Sioux captives are not Cheyenne captives but then immediately claims bad faith on Black Kettle's part anyway as he would supposedly have been responsible for effecting the release of other people's captives - because he camped together with Sioux Indians (which he didn't).
Time and again, Broome's disinterest in and ignorance of Cheyenne culture disfigures his writing about them. Writing about the Cheyenne Dog Men and their supposed lust for plunder as the cause of the war, he claims that they "were not led by council chiefs, such as Black Kettle, but rather were guided by their own individual leaders". This is the second Book Jeff Broome writes in which the Hotamitaniu/Dog Men/Dog Soldiers take center stage as the villains, and he has yet to learn that they, being a hybrid warrior society and tribal band, of course WERE led not just by warrior society headmen but also by council chiefs. Obviously, it would mean to ask for too much of Broome to understand the political rifts that existed between Dog Men council chiefs as he even denies their very existence in the first place.
The informed reader will often wonder if this book was meant to be a satire. The author's hyperbolic comparisons and choices of language, often amounting to a faithful reenactment of the literary style of the frontier era, add much to this impression. Here is but one example: In chapter 16, entitled "Bury my heart at Spillman Creek", apparently an in-your-face mimicry of Dee Brown's 1970 revisionist classic "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee", Broome seems to suggests that a series of attacks that claimed 9 settler lives would be equivalent in meaning to the massacre of 350 Lakota people at Wounded Knee in 1890. The turgid pseudo-Victorian verbiage used by the author here adds a peculiar ersatz period charm to this chapter. Quote:
"Memorial Day recognizes those American soldiers whose lives were sacrificed in the preservation of freedom. Before this day was over, the first Americans to enter perpetually into this national recognition were not soldiers but rather Kansas citizens, victims of the Cheyenne war. Nine men, women and children poured their blood out as the price of the prairie. No one would pay a higher toll than did a young pioneer mother, Susanna Alderdice, just 24 years of age. Two of her four children died on this day, a third joining her two brothers three days later. The young mother would enter the eternal sleep of her children in the unknown, six weeks later, at her failed rescue at Summit Springs, bringing the final number of dead Americans in this tragic rampage to 11. One lone child of Susanna's young family would spill as much blood on the prairie as did his siblings, but the uncaring ground would spare demanding his heartbeat."
This is not to denigrate the horrors, the sufferings and the premature deaths of settler/squatter families who fells victims to the last attempts of Cheyenne warriors to defend their land. The question must be asked, though, if Broome's style, which may appear to many readers as involuntarily comical, is really the best way of retelling the history.
Talking about Summit Springs, which Broome covers as both a tragic (because of Susanna Alderdice's death) and triumphal (because of the death of at least 53 Cheyenne people) end to the "Cheyenne War", it is worth noting that Summit Springs, also known as Buffalo Springs, located in the heart of the Cheyenne homeland, used to be a favorite camping ground for generations of Cheyenne people. Twice it became a death trap for the people of the land, the first time in 1864 when troopers of the 1st Colorado cavalry raided a small camp, ignored entreaties for mercy and massacred everyone (four women, two infants, one teenager and three men), the second time in 1869 when Carr's 5th cavalry raided the camp of several hundred people of the Hotamitaniu clan and managed to kill at least 53 people. Only one person killed on this blood-stained ground has ever received a personalized memorial marker - Susanna Alderdice, the only white person ever to be killed amidst all the killings in this place. The instigator of this act of memorialization was author Jeff Broome. He has repeatedly stated in print that the scores of Cheyenne people killed there (may we say murder although they were just Indians?) deserve no pity or regret over their fates.
This is the spirit of presenting balanced history as Jeff Broome understands it. May the reader decide for himself if he agrees or if writing about Indian wars history should aspire to higher standards than presented in this book.
