Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War

Amazon.com Price: $12.89 (as of 10/11/2019 16:07 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

The epic clash of two American legends―their brutal war and a battle of ideas that defined The usa after Reconstruction.

Oliver Otis Howard thought he used to be a man of destiny. Chosen to lead the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War, the Union Army general used to be entrusted with the era’s most the most important task: helping millions of former slaves claim the rights of citizens. He used to be energized by the belief that abolition and Reconstruction, the country’s great struggles for liberty and equality, were God’s plan for himself and the nation. To honor his righteous commitment to a new American freedom, Howard University used to be named for him.

But as the nation’s politics curdled in the 1870s, General Howard exiled himself from Washington, D.C., rejoined the army, and used to be sent across the continent to command forces in the Pacific Northwest. Shattered by Reconstruction’s collapse, he assumed a new mission: forcing Native Americans to turn out to be Christian farmers on government reservations.

Howard’s plans for redemption in the West ran headlong into the resistance of Chief Joseph, a young Nez Perce leader in northeastern Oregon who refused to leave his ancestral land. Claiming equal rights for Native Americans, Joseph used to be made up our minds to find his way to the center of American power and convince the government to acknowledge his people’s humanity and capacity for citizenship. Despite the fact that his words echoed the very ideas about liberty and equality that Howard had championed throughout Reconstruction, in the summertime of 1877 the general and his troops ruthlessly pursued hundreds of Nez Perce families through the stark and unforgiving Northern Rockies. An odyssey and a tragedy, their devastating war transfixed the nation and immortalized Chief Joseph as a hero to generations of Americans.

Recreating the Nez Perce War through the voices of its survivors, Daniel J. Sharfstein’s visionary history of the West casts Howard’s turn away from civil rights alongside the nation’s rejection of racial equality and embrace of empire. The conflict becomes a pivotal struggle over who gets to claim the American dream: a battle of ideas about the meaning of freedom and equality, the mechanics of American power, and the limits of what the government can and will have to do for its people. The war that Howard and Joseph fought is one that Americans continue to fight as of late.

8 pages of illustrations

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » Civil War » Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War

Recent Products