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Laddar... Finding Sand Creek: History, Archeology, and the 1864 Massacre Siteav Jerome A. Greene
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Gå med i LibraryThing för att få reda på om du skulle tycka om den här boken. Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken. Last night I finished Finding Sand Creek, by Jerome Greene and Douglas Scott, published in 2004. This was a book about the National Park Service search to verify the location of the site of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre. This is a fairly technical book. The subtitle is, "History, Archeology, and the 1864 Massacre Site." Congress directed the parks service to verify this site as a step towards creating a national historic site. I'm not sure who the audience for this book is. It doesn't seem to be the general reader, one who has an interest in the subject. I found it to be very dry and plodding. However, I suppose that the authors did what they set out to do, so for that reason I'll give it 3 stars instead of 2. My disappointment with the book was with the first chapter where the authors told the story of the Sand Creek Massacre (it's been termed a "Massacre" ever since December of 1864). It seems to me that the authors had a conclusion and wrote backwards to meet that conclusion. There was no sense that their discussion was meant to be anything other than a presentation of the standard storyline that a person could get from watching the 1970 movie, Soldier Blue, the Hollywood production that came out same year that the My Lai Massacre occurred. I believe the truth of the story of Sand Creek is far more complex than the one-sided standard apologetic treatment presented here. One place where I've found a different story of Sand Creek is in Irving Howbert's 1925 book, Memories of a Lifetime in the Pike's Peak Region. Howbert gives a 2-chapter discussion of Sand Creek, and his description of the events puts a completely different spin on what happened that day. I plan also plan to read a book by Gregory Michno, Battle at Sand Creek: The Military Perspective. I'll say here that I don't ever expect the official standard story line to change: that the evil, stupid U.S. soldiers mindlessly butchered the kind, peaceful Native Americans. However, it's distrubing to me that Greene and Scott in this "History," which I'm sure is sold in every National Park gift shop, is so one-sided, when they had available to them hundreds of records, including first-hand accounts, that suggest to the fair-minded that there is another side to the story of Sand Creek. On second thought, I'm going to give the book 2 stars. inga recensioner | lägg till en recension
The 1864 Sand Creek Massacre is one of the most disturbing and controversial events in American history. While its historical significance is undisputed, the exact location of the massacre has been less clear. Because the site is sacred ground for Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, the question of its location is more than academic; it is intensely personal and spiritual. In 1998 the National Park Service, under congressional direction, began a research program to verify the location of the Sand Creek site. The team consisted of tribal members, Park Service staff and volunteers, and local landowners. In Finding Sand Creek, the project?s leading historian, Jerome A. Greene, and its leading archeologist, Douglas D. Scott, tell the story of how this dedicated group of people used a variety of methods to pinpoint the site. Drawing on oral histories, written records, and archeological fieldwork, Greene and Scott present a wealth of evidence to verify their conclusions. Greene and Scott?s team study led to legislation in the year 2000 that established the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
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Google Books — Laddar... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)978.8004History and Geography North America Western U.S. ColoradoKlassifikation enligt LCBetygMedelbetyg:
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After the massacre, Chivington’s troops were ordered to burn and destroy as thoroughly as possible. The area had been combed for years by souvenir hunters and metal detectionists. What maps were available were drawn years after the event, from memory. One breakthrough came when a previously unknown military logbook turned up in the Chicago Public Library; the archaeological work had no such dramatic finds but a fairly scanty collection of artifacts; some bullets, some arrowheads, some shell fragments, a few odds and sods of military equipment, and bits and pieces of things that might have been used in a Cheyenne and Arapahoe encampment.
The evidence for the location of the teepee camp is pretty conclusive; the approach route and positions of the Colorado cavalry less so but still reasonably inferred. The authors have to be quite circumspect when dealing with the Cheyenne and Arapahoe, and note with as much respect as they can muster that native oral tradition and native spiritual experience put the battle site elsewhere than the NPS location. The spiritual experiences (voices, a “dome of light”, and “spirit animals” (badgers and eagles)) indicated the site was at the traditional location (the sharp bend); the oral histories were most useful (in my opinion; the authors have to stay politically correct) in illustrating the fallibility of oral histories, as the massacre site was said to be in Kit Carson (about 21 miles northwest), Fort Collins (200 miles northwest) and Estes Park (also about 200 miles northwest, and in the mountains).
This is not a popular history; it’s a report on archaeological and historical research. It has all the immediacy and vividness of a refrigerator repair manual. On the other hand, just as immediacy and vividness are not of much use if your refrigerator is broken, so the detail and careful analysis are just the thing if you want to see how this sort of research is done. ( )