In the centuries of war between Indians and whites one episode is surely epical: the flight of the Nez Perce. Provoked by bad treaties and bitter memories, in 1877 a few Nez Perce raided homesteads in Idaho and killed their inhabitants. The raid quickly escalated into a series of skirmishes, and at last involved Chief Joseph and the ablest Nez Perce warriors in a prolonged chase by the army for over a thousand miles through Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. The band of Nez Perce astonished military experts by their tactical ingenuity, swift maneuvers, daring, and endurance. By the time the chase...

Death on the Prairie is a sweeping narrative history of the Indian wars on the western plains that never loses sight of the individual actors. Beginning with the Minnesota Sioux Uprising in 1862, Paul I. Wellman shifts to conflicts in present-day Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle, and South Dakota, involving, most spectacularly, the Sioux, but also the Cheyennes, Arapahos, Comanches, Kiowas, Utes, and Nez Perces-all being ezed out of their hunting grounds by white settlers. There is never a quiet page as Wellman describes the Sand Creek Massacre (1864), the Fetterman...

The Apache Indians and the white settlers came face to face after the Mexican War, when the migrations across the continent reached the Southwest. In depicting the long, bitter resistance of the Apaches, Death in the Desert reveals incidents that provoked their undying hatred of whites.This rousing narrative history by Paul I. Wellman begins in 1837 with the rise to tribal leadership of Mangas Coloradas and ends in 1886 with the surrender of Geronimo. For a half century the dust never settles as U.S. troops fight the Apaches in Arizona and New Mexico and defeat the single uprisings of the...