Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,112

This is the grave of Dee Brown.

Born in 1908 in Alberta, Louisiana, Brown mostly grew up in Ouachita County, Arkansas and then Little Rock. The family had enough money to go to Little Rock for better schools as Brown and his siblings grew up, but I don’t think they were loaded or anything. Two things happened to Brown as a teenager that shaped his life. First, he fell in love with the American West and all the myth around it. No great surprise here, that wasn’t uncommon at all in the era when westerns dominated the movies, which to be clear was from the very beginning of movies into the 1960s. So that was true of a lot of kids. But Brown, who was a nerdy kid and spent a lot of time in the library, started reading books on Lewis and Clark. Second, while engaging in his other past time, watching baseball, he was at a game of the local minor league team and he made a friend. The team had a pitcher named Moses Yellowhorse, a Pawnee, who had played for the Pirates in the early 20s and was on the back end of a career undermined by his drinking. Getting to know an actual Native American was fascinating to Brown. Moreover, the kid seems to have listened to Yellowhorse as a serious person telling him a different perspective on the West and the conquest of it by whites.

So Brown grew up and got a job on local newspapers and kept reading. He managed to go to college at the Arkansas State Teachers College, today the University of Central Arkansas. He trained to be a historian and librarian and then went to George Washington University for graduate study. He got a job as a librarian for the Department of Agriculture in 1934 and stayed there until 1942. He was drafted then and worked as a librarian for the military. In 1948, he took a job in the library at the University of Illinois, where he would stay for the rest of his career.

Brown didn’t really want to be a librarian though. He wanted to write. He started writing a combination of historical novels about the West and popular histories about the same topic. He started with a book of fiction about Davy Crockett called Wave High the Banner in 1942. That didn’t do much, but he started working with a guy named Martin Schmitt, who he met in the Army. In 1948, they published a book called Fighting Indians of the West and over the next decade, they put out a bunch of stuff like this–Trail Driving Days in 1954 and Settlers’ West in 1955 were typical. Brown started writing on his home after that and it was the usual pablum for people who loved John Wayne. The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old West (1958), The Fetterman Massacre (1962) and Showdown at the Little Big Horn (1964) were among them. There were a few more novels too, such as 1956’s Yellowhorse and 1958’s Calvalry Scout/

Brown would be forgotten today if it wasn’t for one book. That is, as you know, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published in 1970. It hit right at the time of the American Indian Movement and the general reconsideration of Native history among at least some of the white population. Brown was certainly not the first white to decry the treatment of indigenous people by the colonizers. You can go all the way back to Bartolomé de las Casas in the 1510s for this. In the U.S., defenders of the Cherokee in the early 19th century and later writers such as Helen Hunt Jackson were important precedents. But none of this really hit home with a broad swathe of a reading population like Brown did.

In Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Brown presented the flip side of the stories of western conquest that had so enchanted Americans since the late 19th century. Remember that the western was the most popular form of American entertainment from the 1880s until right about the time of Brown’s publication. Interestingly, he himself had trafficked in many of these traditional narratives earlier in his writing career. The book quickly goes over early American history and attacks on Native Americans and then focuses on the late 19th century and the so-called “winning of the West” by white America. His particular interest are on the Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne, Navajo, and Apache. No one can cover everything and these were all known to the public, with the Lakota and Dakota under the broad umbrella of “Sioux,” as they were known at the time. It really was revelatory to many readers. The New York Times review stated, ”The Indian wars were shown to be the dirty murders they were.”

It’s interesting in that this sorta came out of nowhere. There wasn’t much in Brown’s past that would have suggested a book of this power and anger. Some thought he must be an Indian. He was not. The book certainly isn’t perfect by modern lights. For one, it very much repeats the idea that Native people are of the past and their history is not the present but the history. This ignored all the Native people actually around, many of whom were fighting for their rights at that very time. But this was the norm of writing about the West going back to the 19th century and Brown’s book was pathbreaking in tone and subject, but not conceptually.

The other interesting thing about Brown is that all this made him very famous, but in the aftermath, he just went back to the old timey western books he had written before. The money did give the ability to retire in Little Rock. He wrote Andrew Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans in 1972 and Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, a popular history of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1977. He would occasionally revisit Native themes, including a novel called Creek Mary’s Blood in 1980. He wrote a few novels later in life, including a Civil War novel.

But to be clear, no one reads any of these books except Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which remains a touchstone of Native American Studies, at least popularly. He always saw the West romantically, stating ”The West is a tragedy relieved by interludes of comedy. It is a tale of good and evil, a morality play of personified abstractions. Only an epic poet, a Homer, could encompass the American West and sing its essence into one compact volume.” Maybe.

Brown died in Little Rock in 2002. He was 94 years old.

Dee Brown is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, Urbana, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other authors of the American West, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Zane Grey is in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania and Rudolfo Anaya is in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.