Brown, Dee Alexander 1908–2002

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Brown, Dee Alexander 1908–2002

PERSONAL: Born February 28, 1908, in Alberta, LA; died December 12, 2002, in Little Rock, AR; son of Daniel Alexander and Lulu (Cranford) Brown; married Sara Baird Stroud, August 1, 1934; children: James Mitchell, Linda. Education: Attended Arkansas State Teachers College (now University of Central Arkansas); George Washington University, B.L.S., 1937; University of Illinois, M.S., 1952.

CAREER: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, DC, library assistant, 1934–39; Beltsville Research Center, Beltsville, MD, librarian, 1940–42; U.S. War Department, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Aberdeen, MD, technical librarian, 1945–48; University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign, librarian of agriculture, 1948–72, professor of library science, 1962–75. Military service: U.S. Army, 1942–45.

MEMBER: Authors Guild, Western Writers of America, Society of American Historians, Beta Phi Mu.

AWARDS, HONORS: Clarence Day Award, American Library Association, 1971, for The Year of the Century; Christopher Award, 1971; Buffalo Award, New York Westerners, 1971, for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee; named Illinoisan of the Year, Illinois News Broadcasters Association, 1972; Best Western for young people award, Western Writers of America, 1981, for Hear that Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West; Saddleman Award, Western Writers of America, 1984.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Wave High the Banner (based on the life of Davy Crockett), Macrae Smith, 1942, reprinted, University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Yellowhorse, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1956.

Calvary Scout, Permabooks, 1958.

They Went Thataway (satire), Putnam (New York, NY), 1960, reprinted as Pardon My Pandemonium, August House (Little Rock, AR), 1984.

The Girl from Fort Wicked, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1964.

Creek Mary's Blood, Holt (New York, NY), 1980.

Killdeer Mountain, Holt (New York, NY), 1983.

Conspiracy of Knaves, Holt (New York, NY), 1986.

The Way to Bright Star, Forge (New York, NY), 1998.

NONFICTION

Grierson's Raid, University of Illinois Press (Champaign, IL), 1954.

The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West, Putnam (New York, NY), 1958.

The Bold Cavaliers: Morgan's Second Kentucky Cavalry Riders, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1959.

(Editor) George B. Grinnell, Pawnee, Blackfoot, and Cheyenne, Scribner (New York, NY), 1961.

Fort Phil Kearny: An American Saga, Putnam (New York, NY), 1962, published in England as The Fetterman Massacre, Barrie & Jenkins, 1972, published as The Fetterman Massacre, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1984.

The Galvanized Yankees, University of Illinois Press (Champaign, IL), 1963.

The Year of the Century: 1876, Scribner (New York, NY), 1966.

Action at Beecher Island, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1967.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, Holt (New York, NY), 1970, thirtieth-anniversary edition, 2001.

Andrew Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans, Putnam (New York, NY), 1972.

Tales of the Warrior Ants, Putnam (New York, NY), 1973.

The Westerners, Holt (New York, NY), 1974.

Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West (also see below), Holt (New York, NY), 1977, reprinted, University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, NM), 2001.

American Spa: Hot Springs, Arkansas, Rose Publishing (Little Rock, AR), 1982.

Wondrous Times on the Frontier, August House, 1993.

When the Century Was Young: A Writer's Notebook (autobiographical), August House, 1993.

Images of the Old West, with paintings by Mort Kunstler, Park Lane Press, 1996.

(Editor) Stan Banash, Best of Dee Brown's West: An Anthology, Clear Light Publishers (Santa Fe, NM), 1997.

Dee Brown's Civil War Anthology, edited by Stan Ban-ash, Clear Light Publishers (Santa Fe, NM), 1998.

Contributor to Growing Up Western: Recollections, Knopf (New York, NY), 1990.

WITH MARTIN F. SCHMITT

Fighting Indians of the West (also see below), Scribner (New York, NY), 1948.

Trail Driving Days (also see below), Scribner (New York, NY), 1952.

The Settlers' West (also see below), Scribner (New York, NY), 1952.

The American West (contains Fighting Indians of the West, Trail Driving Days, and The Settlers' West), Scribner (New York, NY), 1994.

FOR CHILDREN

Showdown at Little Big Horn, Putnam (New York, NY), 1964, reprinted, University of Nebraska Press, 2004 (Lincoln, NE).

Teepee Tales of the American Indians, Holt (New York, NY), 1979, published as Dee Brown's Folktales of the Native American, Retold for Our Times, illustrated by Louis Mofsie, Owl Books, 1993.

(With Linda Proctor) Lonesome Whistle: The Story of the First Transcontinental Railroad (abridged edition of Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West), Holt (New York, NY), 1980.

OTHER

Editor of "Rural America" series, Scholarly Resources, 1973. Contributor of articles to periodicals, including American History Illustrated, Civil War Times, and Southern Magazine. Editor of Agricultural History, 1956–58.

Brown's books have been published in more than twenty languages, including Latvian, Russian, and Icelandic.

SIDELIGHTS: The American West of the nineteenth century figures prominently in the writings of historian and novelist Dee Alexander Brown. His bestseller, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, chronicled the settling of the West during the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of the Native Americans. In his novels Creek Mary's Blood and Killdeer Mountain, Brown dramatized events and characters from Western history, while his many nonfiction works concerned such subjects as the building of the railroads, the massacre at Little Big Horn, and women settlers of the Old West. Throughout his career, Brown showed a consistent compassion for the Native Americans and moral outrage at the injustices they suffered. In the Los Angeles Times, Bob Sipchen credited Brown's fictional and nonfictional accounts of Native Americans as pivotal in bringing about a widespread change in attitude toward the legends of the West.

Brown's interest in Native Americans stemmed from his childhood in Arkansas where, as he once told an interviewer for Publishers Weekly, "there were quite a few Indians around, people with mixed blood, and at the beginning, I swallowed the old myths. When I began to travel and meet more Indian I began wondering, Why do people think of them as such villains?" The question spurred Brown to investigate Native Americans on his own, reading everything he could about their history and culture. In time this interest led to his writing about the American West. Three of his early books, Fighting Indians of the West, Trail Driving Days, and The Settlers' West, were written with Martin F. Schmitt and were based on historic photographs that the two men discovered in the National Archives. Writing their text around these previously unpublished photographs, Brown and Schmitt succeeded in presenting pictorial histories of three great Western subjects that had never before been seen.

After writing a score of books about the Old West, Brown embarked upon his most ambitious and successful historical work, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a book that chronicles the settling of the West based on eyewitness reports from the Native Americans who lived there. Brown's reason for writing the book, explained Peter Farb of the New York Review of Books, is reflected in his belief that "whites have for long had the exclusive use of history and that it is now time to present, with sympathy rather than critically, the red side of the story."

"The Indians," wrote Helen McNeil in her New Statesman review of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, "knew exactly what was being done to them." Brown used quotes from the Native Americans themselves to present their history of the period. The book, according to J.W. Stevenson in Library Journal, is based "largely upon primary source material such as treaty council records, pictographic and translated autobiographical accounts of Indian participants in the events, and contemporary newspaper and magazine interviews, [and it is an] extensively researched history." N. Scott Momaday, in his review of the book for the New York Times Book Review, offered a similar assessment. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, he stated, is "a compelling history of the American West, distinguished not because it is an Indian history … but because it is so carefully documented and designed." As Brown told an interviewer for Publishers Weekly, "I had a document for everything in the book."

The uniquely Native-American viewpoint of the book was acheived not only through the extensive use of the Native American's own words, but also by the use of the Native-American names for the white historical figures of the period. General Custer, for example, was called "Hard Backsides" by the Native Americans, and is so referred in the book. When the names are "consistently used," wrote R.A. Mohl in Best Sellers, "these become creative and effective literary devices which force the reader, almost without his knowing it, into the position of the defeated, retreating Indian."

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee took Brown over two years to write, and he maintained a consistently Native-American perspective throughout the book. Speaking to Anne Courtmanche-Ellis in the Wilson Library Bulletin, Brown once explained how he did it: "I would tell myself every night, 'I'm a very, very old Indian, and I'm remembering the past. And I'm looking toward the Atlantic Ocean.' And I always kept that viewpoint every night. That's all I did."

The importance of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to the field of Western history was noted by several reviewers. "Brown," Farb related, "dispels any illusions that may still exist that the Indian wars were civilization's mission or manifest destiny; the Indian wars are shown to be the dirty murders they were…. Bury My Heart is an extremely ambitious and readable attempt to write a different kind of history of white conquest of the West: from the point of view of the victims, using their words whenever possible." McNeil judged the book to be "a deliberately revisionist history [that tells] the story of the Plains Indians from an amalgamated Indian viewpoint, so that the westward march of the civilized men, 'like maggots,' according to a Sioux commentator, appears as a barbaric rout of established Indian culture." Bury My Heart, Cecil Eby wrote in Book World, "will undoubtedly chart the course of other 'revisionist' historical books dealing with the Old West."

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee became a nation-wide top-seller, gaining the number-one spot on the country's bestselling books list and selling well over one million copies. But Brown claimed the most satisfying compliment he ever received for the book came from an old Native-American friend who told him: "You didn't write that book. Only an Indian could have written that book! Every time I read a page, I think: That's the way I feel."

In Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West, Brown approached the ruthless setting of the West from a different perspective—the history of the building of the Western railroads, although the author did not intend to write an exposé. Union Pacific was so upset with Brown's manuscript that the company denied him access to its corporate library for further research.

"Brown does a good job with the drama and with the scalawaggery of the great railroad promoters," Tony Hiss commented in the New York Times Book Review. Philip French of New Statesman also commended Brown's absorbing narrative, but added that "the constant emphasis on shoddy deals serves not merely to qualify almost out of existence the epic nature of the undertaking, but to deny a true complexity to the events and a full humanity to the participants." But Winifred Farrant Bevilacqua, in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980, described the book as "an engaging reconstruction of the drama surrounding the advent of the iron horse and a case against railroads."

In his fiction, Brown dramatized many of the historical themes he presented in his nonfiction, creating stories from the actual historical conditions of the nineteenth century. Creek Mary's Blood, for instance, is based on a Native-American woman in Georgia who organized an attack on British-held Savannah during the American Revolutionary War. The novel tells her story and that of her descendants as they are pushed farther and farther west by the expanding frontier. Brown told Judy Klemesrud of the New York Times: "I tried to make the historical events as accurate as possible, but I did make some changes for dramatic effect. That's something you never do in nonfiction, and I felt guilty about it."

Despite its fictional liberties, Creek Mary's Blood is considered to accurately describe Native-American life of the nineteenth century while chronicling the lives of one Native-American family on their westward trek. Interspersed with the family's story are chapters about events of the time that affected all Native Americans. "In this absorbing historical romance," Bevilacqua stated, "Brown skillfully blends fact with fiction but falters in his attempt to confer on his characters an authentic Indian perspective." But Joseph McClellan commented otherwise in the Washington Post Book World: "Using fictional characters against a carefully researched historical background, [Brown] combines the attractions of both genres. The major incidents of his story are true, but by inventing fictional participants he is able to give the events a human dimension lacking in the historic record."

"The dominant themes of Creek Mary's Blood," explained Mary Anne Norman of the Lone Star Book Review, "are the displacement of the Indians and the treachery of the U.S. government in its dealings with the Indians." Through the misfortunes of Creek Mary's family, Brown outlines the fate of all Native Americans during the course of the nineteenth century. Creek Mary's two husbands, McClellan pointed out, symbolize the two ways that Native Americans sought to deal with the white settlers. Her first husband was an English colonist, "who is related thematically to the effort at accommodation and assimilation," McClellan wrote. Her second husband was a Cherokee warrior, "a leader of the resistance to white encroachment." "Both ways of coping," McClellan concluded, "ultimately proved futile, and in his novel's epic length Dee Brown has leisure to examine the modes of futility in assimilation and in resistance."

Although concerned with the same themes as his earlier works, Brown's novel Killdeer Mountain was a stylistic departure from his previous writings. Its disjointed narrative structure presents a number of conflicting versions of the same basic story. Reviewing Killdeer Mountain for the Chicago Tribune Book World, Robert Gish described it as "perhaps [Brown's] most intriguing book to date." Told by a newspaper reporter who is unraveling the true story of Major Charles Rawley, a Native-American fighter and military hero, the novel contains the differing accounts of people who knew and worked with him. The reporter's attempts to make sense of the ambiguities and contradictions in the stories, and his efforts to discover the truth concerning the major's heroism and supposed death, turn the novel into a kind of mystery story. "The world we view," Brown stated in the novel, "is a complex mirror that tricks us with false images so that what we believe to have happened … may or may not have taken place." "We gradually acquire," wrote Michael A. Schwartz of the Detroit News, "a complex tangled web of evidence resting upon a shadow. Brown makes the various guises that Major Rawley assumes seem quite real, and in Rawley's manifestations we discover the ambiguous nature of this country's westward expansion."

The strongest aspect of Killdeer Mountain, according to several critics, was Brown's narrative ability, which makes adventurous scenes come alive, while the weakest aspect is his use of dialogue. "Brown's gift for strong narrative," Jonathan Coleman of the New York Times Book Review believed, "far outweighs his skill at writing dialogue, which, at times, hurts his novel by trivializing it." Using similar terms, C.C. Loomis wrote in the Washington Post Book World: "Brown is at his best narrating adventurous episodes within the novel…. But most readers want vivid characters in novels as well as vivid narration, and here … Brown has only limited success…. [His] dialogue is artificial; it flattens his characters." Brown's narrative strength was best used, Schwartz related, in a scene involving the massacre of Sioux Indians, which "shows Brown's mastery as a storyteller and his thorough understanding of these times…. It is rendered with such intensity that it becomes a brutally realistic portrait of the Indian wars."

With Wondrous Times on the Frontier, Brown returned to nonfiction with a look at the social and cultural history of the nineteenth-century West. Reviewing this collection of anecdotes for the Washington Post Book World, Paula Mitchell Marks noted that Brown takes a more benign approach to characterizing life on the frontier than do other recent Western historians: "Brown's key word is 'merriment'—there are 'merry' frontier courtrooms and military expeditions, merry cowboys and gold stampeders and gamblers." James R. Kincaid, writing in the New York Times Book Review, pointed out that many of the light-hearted stories that Brown terms "jollity" are, in fact, dismal. Kincaid drew attention to Brown's "odd insensitivity to a running nastiness in these stories and their willingness to find what the author regards as 'merriment' in such things as women's helplessness ('I done left Edna May locked up in a room for twenty-four hours an' I ain't neither fed nor watered her'), the susceptibility of Native Americans to practical jokes, and the fun of spreading lies about 'Injuns on the warpath.'" It is incongruous, continued Kincaid, that the author of "the powerful Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee … who alerted us to how catastrophic such lies were, should now offer them for fun." Although Marks also faulted the book for glossing "over the complexities of frontier experience in favor of joviality," she acknowledged that may readers will enjoy enjoy the "engaging and well-presented" anecdotes in the book.

The American West, published in 1994, combines the three photography-based histories that Brown produced with Martin F. Schmitt into a single narrative. The result is a detailed chronicle of the mythic West, from the legendary gunfighters and heroic Native-American leaders to the insect plagues and ferocious blizzards that elevated the place and time into America's collective consciousness. Several reviewers praised the volume as a powerful and compelling account that both reinforces the myths of the West and reveals the underlying truth behind those stories.

Brown "reminds us that myths are based on actual events, people, places and concepts, and encourages us to learn the 'true' history of the West 'so we can recognize a myth when we see one,'" commented Donna Seaman in a Booklist review of The American West. Calling the work "wondrous," Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Larry Watson noted Brown's achievement in documenting the "astonishing swiftness" with which Native-American customs and cultures were transformed. Watson averred, "Brown documents these losses, until, finally, the American West feels more like an elegy than history." Writing in the Washington Post Book World, Elliot West criticized Brown for leaving out many important aspects of the frontier experience. "Mountain men and traders, the Mexican War, the Mormons, Lewis and Clark, missionaries and buffalo hunters are only the merest flickerings in the narrative," commented West. However, West praised Brown's storytelling prowess and his "vivid, straightforward prose," noting that Brown excels at bringing famous events to life by including the perspectives of ordinary men and women who participated in the events.

In book after book, Brown examined the history of the settling of the West and presented the hardships and triumphs of this vast undertaking. In particular, he drew attention to "the destruction of ancient Indian cultures," Bevilacqua stated, "and investigated other aspects of the toll exacted by the nation's western expansion. He has always been recognized as a tireless researcher and a gifted raconteur who narrates his stories in an informative and entertaining matter."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Brown, Dee Alexander, Killdeer Mountain, Holt (New York, NY), 1983.

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 6, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 18, 1981, Volume 47, 1988.

Contemporary Southern Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, April, 1955.

American West, March, 1975.

Arkansas Business, September 23, 2002, p. 30.

Atlantic Monthly, February, 1971.

Best Sellers, March 1, 1971.

Booklist, September 1, 1993, p. 27; October 15, 1994, p. 397; May 1, 1998, p. 1477; May 15, 1998, p. 1563.

Book World, February 28, 1971.

Catholic World, August, 1971.

Chicago Tribune Book World, March 2, 1980; March 13, 1983.

Christian Century, February 3, 1971.

Christian Science Monitor, June 21, 1977.

Detroit News, July 13, 1983.

Economist, October 2, 1971; September 10, 1977; December 21, 2002.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), February 14, 1987.

Guardian, September 21, 1974.

Journal of American History, November, 1966.

Library Journal, December 15, 1970; October 15, 1994, p. 73; March 15, 1997, p. 73; November 1, 1998, Randall Miller, review of Dee Brown's Civil War Anthology, p. 108; April 15, 2001, Michael Rogers, review of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, p. 138.

Life, April 2, 1971.

Lone Star Book Review, April, 1980.

Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1987.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 3, 1983; January 25, 1987; August 9, 1987; October 2, 1988; December 18, 1994, p. 2.

National Review, March 9, 1971.

New Republic, December 14, 1974.

New Statesman, October 1, 1971; September 30, 1977.

Newsweek, February 1, 1971; May 23, 1977; March 28, 1983.

New York, April 7, 1980.

New Yorker, February 13, 1971.

New York Post, April 22, 1971.

New York Review of Books, December 16, 1971.

New York Times, December 3, 1976; April 13, 1980.

New York Times Book Review, May 3, 1942; March 7, 1971; May 15, 1977, p. 15; April 13, 1980; April 27, 1980; May 25, 1980; April 26, 1981; June 5, 1983; June 17, 1984, p. 20; January 11, 1987; April 21, 1991; February 2, 1992, p. 11.

Pacific Historical Review, November, 1972.

Publishers Weekly, April 19, 1971; March 21, 1980; October 4, 1991; July 26, 1993, p. 54; October 24, 1994, p. 47; April 20, 1998, p. 46.

Time, February 1, 1971.

Times Literary Supplement, December 16, 1977.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), January 25, 1987.

Village Voice, August 5, 1971; June 27, 1977.

Voice Literary Supplement, November, 1991.

Washington Post Book World, March 16, 1980; March 14, 1983; January 18, 1987; March 3, 1991; January 5, 1992, pp. 6-7; December 27, 1992; January 8, 1995, p. 9.

Wild West, April, 1997, p. 64; December, 1998, review of Best of Dee Brown's West: An Anthology, p. 80.

Wilson Library Bulletin, March, 1978.