Posted 30 September 2003

An obituary for Dee Brown in The Guardian (17 December 2002) opens by stating: ‘If one book demolished for ever the heroic myth of America’s conquest of the west, it was Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History Of The American West.’ Unfortunately this sentiment is not embraced by everyone, as shown by Thomas Goodrich in Scalp Dance.

Goodrich has amassed an impressive number of first-hand accounts from the writings of soldiers, settlers, their wives and others. From Custer and Sheridan to regulars and homesteaders these are stories of battle, torture, captivity and atrocities encountered during the era of westward expansion in the post-Civil War period and particularly, as the title suggests, of conflict between whites and Indians. Goodrich links these accounts with his own sparse narrative portraying a very traditional story of ‘the winning of the West’, which he describes as ‘one of the most romantic dramas the world had ever known’ (110). 

Although the book opens with a short account of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 the focus is almost entirely on attacks undertaken and atrocities performed by Indians. Only accounts by white people are reproduced in the book with Goodrich providing no analysis, interpretation or critical assessment of these stories, and even overtly racist descriptions of Indian ‘nature’ are included without comment (178-9). Goodrich himself adopts nineteenth-century racial stereotyping of Indians in his own narrative: he describes them as ‘fierce’ (7), ‘wild’ (27, 305), ‘hostiles’ (218) and ‘hangs-around-the-forts’ (40) and writes that it is in the Indians’ ‘nature’ to be ‘warlike’ (185). Oversimplifying the complexity of the relations between the US state and Indians at the end of the ‘Indian Wars’, he writes that ‘hardly a generation passed’ before the Americans, having no time to bear ‘grudges’, had ‘buried the hatchet’ (307) – that would presumably be at Wounded Knee in 1890. 

As the Introduction to the book accurately states, ‘Scalp Dance does not pretend to offer any startling new facts or interpretations.... What it does is present the story in the words of those who lived it and sometimes died in it’ (xi). This book is valuable for the individual accounts which it contains, but its overall presentation of the history of the period is unsophisticated and overly romanticised. 

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