An impressive amount of information movingly and handsomely conveyed.
The Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud saw the disintegration of resistance against the United States Cavalry on the Great Plains at the end of the 19th century.
Nelson, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux, explores in the first-person voice of Red Cloud a pivotal series of events in the United States’ relations with Native American nations. Nelson’s ink, watercolor, and colored pencil drawings, done in the style of late-19th-century ledger art, accompany the compact, clear text. His lively illustrations tell the story while interspersed archival photographs offer small windows through the camera’s eye. Red Cloud was both a gifted military strategist and a pragmatic leader. Nelson covers three treaties signed at Fort Laramie securing U.S. interests such as safe passage for white settlers and access to mineral rights. Red Cloud was a reluctant signatory only to the last, a short-lived treaty that established a vast, separate Sioux reservation. Nelson acknowledges the violent nature of war, describing both the Sand Creek Massacre, “bluecoats…brandishing the scalps, severed fingers, and other body parts of the slain innocents,” and skirmishes during Red Cloud’s campaign during which “with angry hearts we scalped [U.S. soldiers] and cut off their arms and legs.” Well-organized backmatter provides a timeline, extensive sources, and notes along with an author’s summary for older readers.
An impressive amount of information movingly and handsomely conveyed. (Biography. 9-12)Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2313-1
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
Bial (A Handful of Dirt, p. 299, etc.) conjures up ghostly images of the Wild West with atmospheric photos of weathered clapboard and a tally of evocative names: Tombstone, Deadwood, Goldfield, Progress, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, the OK Corral. Tracing the life cycle of the estimated 30,000 ghost towns (nearly 1300 in Utah alone), he captures some echo of their bustling, rough-and-tumble past with passages from contemporary observers like Mark Twain: “If a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was appear in public in a white shirt or stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated.” Among shots of run-down mining works, dusty, deserted streets, and dark eaves silhouetted against evening skies, Bial intersperses 19th-century photos and prints for contrast, plus an occasional portrait of a grizzled modern resident. He suggests another sort of resident too: “At night that plaintive hoo-hoo may be an owl nesting in a nearby saguaro cactus—or the moaning of a restless ghost up in the graveyard.” Children seeking a sense of this partly mythic time and place in American history, or just a delicious shiver, will linger over his tribute. (bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-06557-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
After surveying “competing claims” for the first Thanksgiving from 1541 on, in Texas, Florida, Maine, Virginia and Massachusetts, Colman decides in favor of the 1621 event with the English colonists and Wampanoag as the first “because the 1621 event was more like the Thanksgiving that we celebrate today.” She demonstrates, however, that the “Pilgrim and Indian” story is really not the antecedent of Thanksgiving as we celebrate it today. Rather, two very old traditions—harvest festivals and days of thanksgiving for special events—were the origin, and this interesting volume traces how the custom of proclaiming a general day of thanksgiving took hold. Yet, since many Thanksgiving celebrations in towns and schools are still rooted in the “Pilgrim and Indian” story, which the author calls “true and important,” but which many Native Americans find objectionable, a more in-depth discussion of it is warranted here. The solid bibliography does include some fine resources, such as 1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving (2001) by Catherine O’Neill Grace and Margaret M. Bruchac. (author’s note, chronology, index) (Nonfiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8229-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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