One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (History of the American West)

I just kept reading and reading about tribes and peoples and disease and disaster and need-for-land and half-truths etc. etc. It was somehow exhausting, but it also pounded into my mindset what has happened on the same soil I now live on over the, actually, quite recent generations. Very thankful for opening my eyes to the hardships and suffering that paved they way for me to have pavement and the comparatively luxurious life I live. I don't feel like complaining about my petty first world problems any more.

Good

This book is a page turner of breathtaking clarity filled with knowledge and wisdom not often found in such work. The scholar who can mesmerize, the story teller who can make it all work out, the scribe whose language is more than the sum of its parts, Calloway hits a high note up front and never falters. The best history is the greatest of knowledge and this book ranks with Churchill's history of World War II and Weir's chronicles of Europe's monarchs for its ability to take the impossibly complex and weave from it a cloth of rich and interesting and finally explanatory gold well within the reach of even the most casual reader.Calloway has walked the trails of a continent in the fury of discovery and come away with the Golden Fleece, the Grail of getting the story right from everyone's perspective. Tall words but I think the author lives up to the billing. Based on the historical account and the points of view of the primary characters, including the oral historians of generations, Calloway weaves an unmistakably great work of art and wonder, nothing less that the tale of how we all got here to this moment, frozen in time, living on recerved lands, living on trust lands, living on conquered lands that now define all of us together as Americans.This is the book Mann cited as the reason he did not include a chapter on the Western US in his seminal work, 1491. A few chapters in you know the reason why. Mann simply could not have bettered the effort. If history rocks, this history rocks much of what you ever thought you knew about the story of America. This book is bed rock knowledge and should be required reading in any institute of higher education.From the first tentative exploration of the New World to the complexities of how the various tribes came to be at the moment in time when the US calvary found them, fought them, and held them in place, this book is the single most important work of synthesis and original creative scholarship to yet grace the libraries of the best of the Western universities in the History of the Western US.How did the Crow manage to end up on their own lands when the Indian Wars of the 19th century ended? How did we manage to inherit a land full of wild hogs? Where did the Apache come from and why? Who are the Navajo? What wwere the impacts of horses and muskets meeting on the Missouri River and how are we all changed as a result? Did the Mercats really give the Indians plague blankets?Read this book. We can talk more when you're done!

Cet ouvrage ambitieux tente de nous faire connaitre les relations entre Améridiens et Européens dans l'Ouest Américain (l'Ouest pris dans une perspective géographique très vaste : allant du Sud Canada au Nord Mexique). Cette tentative est réussie grâce à une chronologie claire et un style net et concis. Avec une bibliographie très détaillée et actualisée. Bravo!

A good, well informed book about Ameridians and the conquests of America by Europeans throughout the area and ages. Not all time spans were as richly presented i though but this book is surely a mu--tread for all those who think the Americas are only 500 years 'old ….