The last significant battle between the American Indian and the white man took place on December 29, 1890, on the banks of Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. It has been called a "battle" and a "massacre," depending on one's bias. Actually, as this book demonstrates, it was mostly a battle, partly a massacre, and entirely a tragic blunder. Of the 350 Indians there, two-thirds were women and children. When the smoke cleared, 84 men and 62 women and children lay dead, their bodies scattered along a stretch of more than a mile where they had been trying to flee. Of some 500 soldiers and scouts, about thirty were dead — some, perhaps, from the crossfire of their own guns.

      Involved in the tragedy or looming behind it was a diverse cast of personalities — the great Sioux chiefs, Sitting Bull and Red Cloud; Wovoca, a Paiute Indian hailed as the Messiah; Buffalo Bill Cody; the artist Frederic Remington; General Nelson Miles, who would later assume supreme command of the U.S. Army; a young second lieutenant, John J. Pershing; and the ghost of George Armstrong Custer. But the tragedy at Wounded Knee was the result of neither individual personalities nor intentions. That it occurred where it did was an accident. That it would occur somewhere was predestined. It was the result of one of those inevitable tides of history that dictate change. It was the death spasm of the stone age hunter, vanquished by the industrial age farmer.

      Although the Indians and whites were poles apart culturally, they were identical in their humanity. Each race contained the same mix of virtue and vice. And the beliefs and cultural conditioning of each side shaped the struggle by dictating the acts each side had to perform. That is the viewpoint of MOON OF POPPING TREES, a unique and important contribution to the literature of Wounded Knee and the end of the Indian Wars.

From Moon of Popping Trees dust jacket.

© 1975 READER'S DIGEST PRESS

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Reviews

“One of the best books of Indian history to be published in this century."
Donald Worcester, President, Western History Association; Chairman, Dep't of History, Texas Christian University.

(On the battle of Wounded Knee) “The most definitive and unbiased book of all."
Alvin Josephy, Jr., Sr. Editor, American Heritage magazine — Testimony to U. S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Feb. 5, 1976

"As an Indian historian I consider MOON OF POPPING TREES triumphantly superb. History in its truest form and untarnished perspective."
D. Chief Eagle, Indian author and historian ~ former Director of United Sioux Tribes of South Dakota.

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