The Earth Is Weeping Quotes

“I do not wonder, and you will not either, that when Indians see their wives and children starving and their last source of supplies cut off, they go to war. And then we are sent out there to kill them. It is an outrage. All tribes tell the same story. They are surrounded on all sides, the game is destroyed or driven away, they are left to starve, and there remains but one thing for them to do—fight while they can. Our treatment of the Indian is an outrage.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“Put yourself in his place and let the white man ask himself this question: What would I do if threatened as the Indian has been and is? Suppose a race superior to mine were to land upon the shores of this great continent, trade or cheat us out of our land foot by foot, gradually encroach upon our domain until we were finally driven, a degraded, demoralized band into a small corner of the continent, where to live at all it was necessary to steal, perhaps to do worse? Suppose that in a spirit of justice, this superior race should recognize the fact that it was in duty bound to place food in our mouths and blankets on our backs, what would we do in the premises? I have seen one who hates an Indian as he does a snake, and thinks there is no good Indian but a dead one, on having the proposition put to him in this way, grind his teeth in rage and exclaim, “I would cut the heart out of everyone I could lay my hand on,” and so he would; and so we all would.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“Sitting Bill returned from the East with an enlarged worldview that not only made him more independent of the agent but also deepened his contempt of the white way of life. First, Sitting Bull set his people straight on the Great Father. The agents had lied: white men did not hold the Great Father sacred. On the contrary, Sitting Bull told them, “half the people in the hotels were always making fun of him and trying to get him out of his place and some other man into his place.” As for members of Congress, “they loved their whores more than their wives.” And like most white men, they drank too much. Indeed, Sitting Bull told friends, “the soul of a white man is so odored with whiskey that it will have to hang around here on earth for hundreds of years before the winds and storms will so purify it that the people in the other life can endure the smell of it there, and let them in.” Once he was back home at Standing Rock, Sitting Bull occasionally took up women’s work. When asked why, he would say, “I am trying to learn to be as we will all have to be when the white man gets us.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“The Lakota warrior Iron Hawk later explained why he had pounded a trooper’s head into jelly. “These white men wanted it, they called for it, and I let them have it.”16”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“Availing himself of the innate Apache love of fighting, he offered full army pay to warriors willing to turn against their own people (he had plenty of takers).”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“The Pawnees did most of the killing at Summit Springs, and they killed without mercy. The Cheyennes expected as much. “I do not belittle the Pawnees for their killing of women or children because as far back as any of us could remember the Cheyenne and Sioux slaughtered every male, female, and child they could run across of the Pawnee tribe,” said a Dog Soldier survivor. “Each tribe hated the other with a deadly passion and savage hearts [that] know only total war.” Sherman and Sheridan’s notion of total war paled beside that of the Plains Indians.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“The Army and Navy Journal labeled the latest raids simply “one more chapter in the old volume,” the result of alternately feeding and fighting the tribes. “We go to them Janus-faced. One of our hands holds the rifle and the other the peace-pipe, and we blaze away with both instruments at the same time. The chief consequence is a great smoke—and there it ends.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“In a little depression there lay outstretched a stalwart Sioux warrior, stark naked with the exception of a breech clout and moccasins. I could not help feeling a sorrow as I stood gazing upon him. He was within a few hundred yards of his home and family, which we had attempted to destroy and he had tried to defend. The home of the slayer was perhaps a thousand miles away. In a few days the wolves and buzzards would have his remains torn asunder and scattered, for the soldiers had no disposition to bury a dead Indian.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“A furtive light knifed through the fog to reveal a singular mirage: the marching cavalry appeared suspended between earth and sky. Libbie Custer shivered with a presentiment of tragedy. “The future of the heroic band seemed revealed, and already there seemed a premonition in the supernatural translation as their forms were reflected from the opaque mist of the early dawn.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“Major Brown called on them to surrender; the Yavapais responded with hoots of derision—that is, until rocks rained down on them, hurled by soldiers who had clawed up the palisade to the bluff overlooking the cave. From inside came the baleful and monotonous intoning of death songs. Determined to finish the business rapidly, Major Brown ordered his men to ricochet bullets off the roof of the cave into the unseen mass of Indians. In three minutes, the cave fell silent. Lieutenant Bourke stepped inside. “A horrible spectacle was disclosed to view. In one corner eleven dead bodies were huddled, in another four; and in different crevices they were piled to the extent of the little cave.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“peculiar and difficult to gauge,” with eyes that “were really not open and transparent windows to his soul.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“Scattered about were nude, scalped, and beheaded bodies bristling with arrows. Brains had been scooped out, and penises severed and shoved in the victims’ mouths. The evidence of torture was unmistakable. Bowels had been opened while the victims were still alive and live coals placed upon them, and a scorched corpse, chained between two wagons, slumped over a smoldering fire.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“We] picked them up, that is, their internals, and did not know the soldiers they belonged to. So you see, the cavalryman got an infantryman’s guts, and an infantryman got a cavalryman’s guts.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“It is hard to go into a fight and were often afraid," confessed the Cheyenne warrior John Stands in Timber, "but it was worse to turn back and face the women.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“Negotiation appeared the only viable short-term strategy, and to treat with the Indians, the Bureau of Indian Affairs called on Tom Fitzpatrick, a former mountain man turned Indian agent.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“In their westward march across present-day Nebraska and the Dakotas during the early nineteenth century, the Lakotas gradually allied themselves with the Cheyennes and the Arapahos, who had been pushed onto the northern plains in advance of the Lakotas and had already forged an enduring bond, albeit an odd coupling. Their languages were mutually unintelligible, an impediment they overcame with a sophisticated sign language, and their characters could not have been more dissimilar.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“The Lakotas in turn divided into seven tribes: the Oglalas, Brulés, Miniconjous, Two Kettles, Hunkpapas, Blackfeet, and Sans Arcs, of which the Oglalas and the Brulés were the largest. In fact, these two tribes alone outnumbered all the non-Lakota Indians on the northern plains.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“The Lakotas were the true horse-and-buffalo Sioux of popular imagination, and they constituted nearly half the Sioux nation.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

“President George Washington attempted to intercede on behalf of the Indians, to whom, he insisted, full legal protection must be afforded, but his admonitions meant nothing to land-hungry whites living beyond the government’s reach. In order to prevent a mutual slaughter, Washington sent troops to the nation’s frontier.”
― Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West