Brutal Wars
THE OVERLOOK
By Tom Clavin
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Next Monday, Americans honor those who have died in wars, or as Lincoln put it in his Gettysburg Address, they “gave the last full measure of devotion.” Traditionally, we think of the soldiers, sailors, flyers, and others in the U.S. military who have perished. What tends to be overlooked on Memorial Day are the other Americans who gave their lives in battles – the original ones, the indigenous population.
You might think that they are not at all overlooked, that if a Native American died while serving in the U.S. military, he is included in the day’s ceremonies and other honors. While that is true, I am thinking of the ones who died while fighting for their America, the one that existed before all us immigrants arrived. From the early 1600s to the Wounded Knee Massacre in December 1890, there was a war of almost three centuries that killed tens of thousands of Indians. We have recognized those killed who were fighting in or for the U.S. military in several ways – incredibly, 20 Medals of Honor were awarded after the Wounded Knee events that murdered hundreds of Sioux men, women, and children -- but not so much the warriors in the Apache, Iroquois, Shawnee, Comanche, Crow, and other tribes who fought for their food, land, and survival against invading forces following the urgings of Manifest Destiny.
I’ve been thinking along these lines because of the publication of a new book by Peter Cozzens, titled A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South. It is another great work by an author who has created a much-respected body of work on American history. The Creek War was one of the most tragic episodes in American history, leading to the greatest loss of Native American life on what is now U.S. soil. It began as a vicious internal conflict among the Creek Indians which metastasized like a cancer. The ensuing 1813-1814 war disrupted Native American presence in the Deep South and led to the infamous Trail of Tears. That disgraceful event featured the forcible removal of southeastern Indians from their homelands.
Before continuing, some background on Peter Cozzens. He is the author or editor of 18 books on the Civil War and the American West. He now writes full-time after an active career that included being a captain in the U.S. Army and a foreign service officer with the U.S. Department of State. His last book, in 2020, was titled Tecumseh and the Prophet, about the great Shawnee warrior and his shaman brother. It won a bunch of awards and was a finalist for the George Washington Prize.
But the one that really put Cozzens on the literary nonfiction map was published in 2016: The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West. There are many good reasons why it made dozens of Top Ten lists that year. This might seem like blasphemy, but I would recommend it over Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for a comprehensive and factual and gripping view of the final phase of the Indian wars.
After the Civil War, those wars would last more than three decades, permanently altering the physical and political landscape of America. In The Earth Is Weeping (love that title!), Cozzens presents both sides in singularly intimate detail. He illuminates the intertribal strife over whether to fight or make peace; explores the dreary, squalid lives of frontier soldiers and the imperatives of the Indian warrior culture; and describes the ethical quandaries faced by generals who often sympathized with their native enemies. In dramatically relating bloody and tragic events as varied as Wounded Knee, the Nez Perce War, the Sierra Madre campaign, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, there is a pageant of fascinating characters, including Custer, Sherman, Grant, and a host of officers, soldiers, and Indian agents, as well as great native leaders such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Red Cloud and the warriors they led. If . . . no, when you read it, you’ll discover that it is a sweeping, definitive history of the battles and negotiations that destroyed the Indian way of life even as they paved the way for the emergence of the United States we know today.
Among Cozzens’s other books are This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga and The Shipwreck of Their Hopes: The Battles for Chattanooga, both of which were chosen for inclusion in Civil War Magazine’s 100 greatest works on the war. This is no small achievement given the zillions of books that have been published about the Civil War. And his five-volume Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars was declared by the History Book Club to be the “definitive resource on the military struggle for the American West.”
And now we have A Brutal Reckoning. As the subtitle indicates, the main white character is Andrew Jackson, more than a decade before he was elected president of the U.S. The Creek War gave him his first real combat leadership role and his path to the White House began with his victories here. Jackson was a brilliant but harsh military commander spurred by unchecked ambition. He was, sadly, against an overmatched foe able to indulge his taste for cruelty. Ironically, Jackson could not have defeated the Creeks without the help of other Indian tribes as allies.
The Creek War was also a struggle among white populations and interests. It had an impact on the British and Spanish, too. An important result of the war was it opened up the Deep South to become the “Cotton Kingdom,” and in that regard it set the stage for the Civil War. Cozzens maintains that “no other single Indian conflict had such a significant impact on the fate of America.” This is quite a statement, but A Brutal Reckoning backs it up.
Maybe for a moment this Memorial Day, think of the indigenous Americans who died for their country too.
Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including the brand-new Follow Me to Hell: McNelly’s Texas Rangers and the Rise of Frontier Justice, and, with Bob Drury, The Last Hill. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.