Voices of Wounded Knee

[grahamew]

My review first appeared in he English Westerners' Tally Sheet

William S. E. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); xxiii; 434 pages, including bibliography, notes and maps; illustrations; ISBN 0-8032-6422-4 Soft cover - $19.95

This is the kind of book likely to infuriate purists. Following a trip out West to research Buffalo Bill’s career as a showman, William Coleman, a professor emeritus of theatre at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, was inspired to write (or, more properly, edit) this account of the Wounded Knee massacre and the events leading up to it. The publisher’s blurb suggests he brings together ‘all of the available sources’ for the first time, but this must not be mistaken for a complete source book, for he has used excerpts of various accounts (from Indian and white participants) and edited them together with his own – often brief – narrative links. Furthermore, Coleman is quite clear in his introduction, that sources not relevant to his central story were omitted, as were others that duplicated material he felt he already had.

This has clearly been a mammoth, difficult task, and Coleman is to be congratulated for bringing to the reader’s attention some of the more obscure texts on Wounded Knee, such as a letter from Private Walter R. Crickett, held in the collection of the American Museum in Britain at Bath. He had been serving at Pine Ridge, and in a letter sent to relatives living in Bath, he described the events of the morning of December 29. Coleman also unearthed an unpublished account by Short Bull in the Buffalo Bill Museum; indeed these two documents encouraged him to produce a book that would tell the story from both sides, using original testimony from the participants.

The question is: how successful has he been? Readers, like myself, with a more academic bent would be quite happy to plough through accounts by various participants with judicious editing, such as footnotes and an introduction, along the lines of ‘The Wounded Knee Interviews of Eli S. Ricker’, edited by Donald F. Danker and published in Nebraska History 62 in 1981, but Coleman synthesises the accounts into one whole, signposted with his own narrative passages and structured under his own headings, meaning that some accounts are truncated to fit. While Coleman does a creditable job, there is a nagging feeling that an editor more experienced in this particular field would have provided more of a critical commentary on the material used – although, to be fair, this was clearly not his remit.

It is still fascinating, whether reading eyewitness accounts of the Ghost Dance, the story of the massacre and the ensuing fighting as told by Dewey Beard and others, or the political machinations in Washington, particularly during a Senate debate on what was to be done about the situation in the Dakotas. Readers will be struck by the tragic absurdity of the reaction by some of the whites involved (military and otherwise) – a reaction that led to more violence and loss of life than was ever threatened in the first place - and the bigoted, heinous way elements of the press exaggerated incidents (and sometimes fabricated them) in a sensationalist fashion to whip up a war – although the name of Frank L. Baum is missing from the index. The fear that the Lakota could have held out was completely unfounded; American Horse pointed out, ‘Your country is surrounded with a network of railroads; thousands of white soldiers will be here within three days. What ammunition have you? What provisions?’ The outcome was never in doubt, although it is clear its tragic wasteful nature could have been avoided.

For many readers, photographs anchor the text allowing them to visualise people and places in the written accounts. It is unfortunate that the illustrations for this work are disappointingly presented. Firstly, the clarity of several is poor. This cannot be blamed on the original prints or negatives, since the Wounded Knee photographs and the picture of Short Bull have all appeared in better condition many times elsewhere. The worst thing, however, is the mis-labelling of a picture of Bull Head, one of Sitting Bull’s killers, as Kicking Bear. Inaccuracies like this – and to be honest, they are not infrequent and do not just occur in works by newcomers to the subject - infuriate me. It is beyond me how one of the handful of major university presses who have a reputation for publishing the key texts on Plains Indians can make this kind of error.

Kicking Bear was a major player in these events and was hardly the most elusive of subjects: his photograph has appeared in a range of popular as well as specialist works. Who do you blame? Coleman? A picture researcher? The editor? A proofreader? The publisher? This sort of thing does a disservice to the integrity of the text, detracting from its credibility, however well it might be researched. I am sure there will many people reading this who would give their eyeteeth to work in this particular field and who would not have made such a dumb mistake.