The taming of the Wild West and its prejudices

“IN the Shadow of Wounded Knee” is a scrap of a history book, touching in the amateurishness of its writing and bracing in its definition of certain moral challenges faced by an exuberant new nation spilling over its colonial boundaries in full flood a hundred and more years ago.

Its subject is the tail-end of the Indian Wars. By the time they had petered out with the massacre of at least 150 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, the Indian Wars had become an embarrassment to most white Americans. For Native Americans, they resulted in generation after generation of humiliation, degradation and tragedy.

Roger L. Di Silvestro, an editor at National Wildlife magazine and author of eight books, is obviously intrigued by the currents and counter-currents of American whites’ attitudes toward Native Americans, and he tries hard to convey these complexities to readers more than a century later. He mostly succeeds, though his narrative skill does not match his zeal.

Initially, the reader is left wandering in circles through the history of relations between the bewildered Lakota and the whites pouring into the Dakota territory.

Presently, though, Di Silvestro grabs hold of his story. It is, in a word, haunting. Its supernatural elements arrive with the ghost dance, a mystical religion that swept Native Americans near the end of the 19th century -- with tragic consequences.

An amalgam of Christian and native religious elements, the ghost dance -- actually a series of dances accompanied by ceremonial cleansing, meditation and prayer -- excited white settlers with fear while giving the Indians a tragic sense of invulnerability.

They came to believe that under the power of the ghost dance, their shirts could stop white men’s bullets.

That the shirts had no such power the Indians learned to their sorrow and a white nation to its shame and outrage when, on Dec. 29, 1890, the U.S. 7th Cavalry herded about 300 Indians in the cold and the snow of their pathetically poor South Dakota reservation and demanded their guns.

One Indian shouted, “No”; a shot, fired by which side no one knows, rang out. Firing commenced and continued for four hours.

By the end of it, at least 150 men, women and children lay dead along the creek.

Afterward, much of the fear and hatred of the Indian, which began in the late 16th century in New England, had disappeared from the standard American repertory of emotions, replaced by pity and shame. So it was that in a chance encounter on Jan. 7, 1891, when a young Lakota warrior fatally shot a West Point soldier from New England in the back of the head at close range, white public opinion no longer automatically took the white man’s side.

Plenty Horses was arrested in the murder of Lt. Edward Casey, but he was acquitted at trial because his white civilian lawyers successfully argued that a state of war existed between the Lakota and the United States, and that therefore, Plenty Horse’s act was justifiable under the rules of war.

According to newspapers of the day that Di Silvestro cites, the verdict was generally approved by public opinion in both East and West.

This grave and civilized verdict was not, probably, what devotees of the Western myth as present on a thousand movie screens might have expected, but it was a sign of the political and emotional maturing of the American republic at that stage in its growth.

The nation, however, was not entirely grown up. Shortly afterward, a band of scruffy and generally despised white brothers killed three Indians on the Western plains. Some that American justice had advanced so much that the brothers might be convicted, but it was not to be. As the newspapers of the day pointed out, a white jury wouldn’t convict white men of killing Indians.

Yet Di Silvestro’s story is encouraging to a student of the American character. Deep prejudices can -- and have been -- overcome.

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Anthony Day, a former editor of The Times’ editorial pages, is a regular contributor to Book Review.