FORT LARAMIE AND THE SIOUX INDIANS

Fort Laramie actively existed from 1834 to 1889, first as a post in the fur trade for dealing with Indians, later as a cavalry post for resisting the Indians. Abandoned, it fell into private hands, but now is under the National Park Service. Nadeau's history is somewhat more lively than the instalments in the The Forts of America Series, but it is still more scholarly than inspired in style. Occasionally, one wishes that the author had expanded some incident or brought new light to bear on it with original research, as in the massacre upon the Sioux at Wounded Knee. Some 146 braves, women and children were murdered in dead of winter and cast into a common pit, an act which was the final eclipse of the Sioux Nation. As ever, the early life of the Plains Indians as buffalo hunters is vastly more interesting than the story of their degradation by alcohol and the rape of their herds. The white men's treks toward Oregon and California dismayed the Indians. Soon the endlessly breached treaties by the whites resulted in the Indian wars which lasted nearly forty melancholy years. That tragedy comes through strongly as the disasters accumulate page by page herein.