A short life of the author
Dorris Alexander “Dee” Brown (28 February 1908 – 12 December 2002) was an American historian, novelist, and librarian who spent decades writing about the American West before publishing, at the age of sixty-two, the book that changed how America understood its own frontier history: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), a work that told the story of the West from the perspective of the people who were conquered, dispossessed, and destroyed.
Early Life and Career
Brown was born in Alberta, Louisiana, and grew up in Stephens, Arkansas. He worked as a librarian for most of his career — at the U.S. Department of Agriculture library and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — while writing prolifically about the American West in his spare time.
His early books include Grierson’s Raid (1954), about a Union cavalry expedition during the Civil War; The Galvanized Yankees (1963), about Confederate prisoners who agreed to fight Indians on the Western frontier; The Fetterman Massacre (1962), about the annihilation of a U.S. Army detachment near Fort Phil Kearny in 1866; and The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West (1958). These books established Brown as a solid, readable popular historian of the frontier, but they attracted modest audiences.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970)
Brown’s masterwork is a narrative history of the American West from 1860 to 1890, told entirely from the Native American perspective — using Native American testimony, council records, autobiography, and oral history. Chapter by chapter, the book chronicles the destruction of one people after another: the Navajo, the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Nez Perce, the Apache, and dozens of others, each chapter ending in defeat, exile, and death.
The book’s power lies in its method: Brown lets the Native American participants speak for themselves, quoting their speeches, their protests, and their descriptions of broken treaties and unprovoked attacks with a cumulative force that is overwhelming. The title comes from a poem by Stephen Vincent Benét — “American names, the sharp names that never get fat, / The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims, / The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, / Tucson and Deadwood and Tombstone. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.”
The book was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1970 — at the height of the Vietnam War and the counterculture — and it struck a nerve. It sold over four million copies and remained on bestseller lists for over a year. It was translated into seventeen languages and adapted into an HBO film in 2007.
Impact
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee did not invent the revisionist history of the American West — academic historians had been challenging the triumphalist frontier narrative for decades — but it brought that revision to a mass audience with an emotional and moral force that academic writing rarely achieves. The book helped catalyse the Native American rights movement of the 1970s and permanently altered the way the “winning of the West” was taught and understood.
Other Works
Brown continued to write about the West after Bury My Heart. Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow (1977) is a history of the transcontinental railroad. Creek Mary’s Blood (1980) is a historical novel spanning two centuries of Native American experience. Killdeer Mountain (1983) is a novel set during the Civil War. Wondrous Times on the Frontier (1991) is a collection of humorous anecdotes from Western history.
Legacy
Brown is a one-book author in the sense that Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee so overshadows everything else he wrote that his other works are almost unknown. But the one book is a landmark — one of those rare works of popular history that actually changed public consciousness. It remains essential reading for anyone interested in American history.
Collecting Brown
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970, Holt, Rinehart and Winston) in first edition with dust jacket is the primary collectible, valued at $200–$800. Brown’s earlier Western histories in first edition are scarce and modestly valued. Signed copies are uncommon.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West Brown's landmark narrative of the systematic destruction of Native American peoples between 1860 and 1890 — told for the first time from the Native perspective, using their own words from council records, treaty negotiations, and personal testimony — transformed American understanding of westward expansion from a story of progress into a story of conquest, dispossession, and betrayal. | 1970 | Holt, Rinehart & Winston | English |
| Creek Mary's Blood Brown's historical novel follows five generations of a Creek Indian family from the American Revolution through the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the wars of the Great Plains to the massacre at Wounded Knee — a fictional counterpart to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee that gives individual faces and voices to the collective tragedy of Native dispossession. | 1980 | Holt, Rinehart & Winston | English |
| Grierson's Raid Brown's account of Colonel Benjamin Grierson's 600-mile cavalry raid through Mississippi in April 1863 — a diversionary operation that drew Confederate forces away from Grant's crossing of the Mississippi below Vicksburg and demonstrated that the Deep South's interior was defenseless against mounted raids, fundamentally altering Union strategy in the Western theater. | 1954 | University of Illinois Press | English |
| Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroads Brown's history of the transcontinental railroad — from the first proposals through the Credit Mobilier scandal and the golden spike at Promontory Summit — tells the story not as a triumph of American enterprise but as a chronicle of corruption, exploitation of immigrant labor, environmental destruction, and the deliberate extermination of the buffalo herds that sustained Plains Indian life. | 1977 | Holt, Rinehart & Winston | English |
| The American West Brown's late-career synthesis of Western American history draws on a lifetime of research to cover the full sweep from Lewis and Clark through the closing of the frontier — encompassing exploration, the fur trade, the Gold Rush, the cattle drives, the railroad era, and the Indian wars in a single accessible narrative that embodies the revisionist perspective Brown pioneered. | 1994 | Scribner | English |
| The Fetterman Massacre Brown's account of the December 1866 annihilation of Captain William Fetterman's command of 81 soldiers by a combined force of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors near Fort Phil Kearny — the Army's worst defeat on the Plains before Little Big Horn, and a battle that exposed the fundamental arrogance of the military's assumption that Native warriors could not outfight trained troops. | 1962 | G.P. Putnam's Sons | English |
| The Galvanized Yankees Brown's account of the approximately 6,000 Confederate prisoners of war who enlisted in the Union Army to escape prison camps, then were sent to the Western frontier to fight Indians and guard wagon trains — men despised by both sides, forgotten by history, and caught in an extraordinary moral predicament that illuminates the nature of loyalty, survival, and pragmatism in wartime. | 1963 | University of Illinois Press | English |
| The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West Brown's social history of women on the American frontier — from the earliest overland emigrants through army wives, teachers, missionaries, ranchers, prostitutes, suffragists, and homesteaders — was one of the first popular histories to center women's experiences in the Western narrative, documenting their roles as agents of social transformation rather than passive participants in male adventures. | 1958 | G.P. Putnam's Sons | English |
| The Year of the Century: 1876 Brown's portrait of the American centennial year encompasses the Philadelphia Exposition, Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn, the disputed Hayes-Tilden presidential election, the end of Reconstruction, the rise of industrial capitalism, and the nation's contradictory attempts to celebrate its democratic ideals while systematically violating them — a year that encapsulated every tension in Gilded Age America. | 1966 | Scribner | English |
| Wondrous Times on the Frontier Brown's collection of humor, tall tales, and anecdotes from the American frontier — drawn from newspapers, diaries, letters, and oral histories of the nineteenth-century West — reveals the comic imagination of frontier communities and challenges the grim seriousness of most Western historiography with evidence that people in desperate circumstances maintained their wit, their capacity for absurdity, and their talent for exaggeration. | 1991 | August House | English |