Dee Brown: If one book demolished for ever the heroic myth of America's conquest of the West, it was Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History Of The American West. Published in 1970, it has sold more than five million copies, and been translated into 15 languages. But its author, Dee Brown, who has died aged 94, was a white southerner, who had to make himself think like "a very old Indian" in order to complete his classic.
Meticulously researched and vividly written, Wounded Knee opened the way for the modern school of revisionist historians, who have largely confirmed Brown's perception that, rather than a triumph of pioneers, the West was subdued by a bloody, military conquest of native Americans that amounted to genocide.
Much of the material in the book's 446 pages derived from accounts by native American interpreters who had attended treaty sessions, tribal councils, meetings with US army officers and other proceedings, including eye-witness accounts of battles. It concludes with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, in South Dakota, the confrontation that brought the so-called Indian wars to a bloody close after the 7th US Cavalry disarmed and slaughtered 300 Sioux, including women and children.
Trouble among the Sioux had been brewing for months. Confined to reservations, they had increasingly turned to the teachings of a self-proclaimed messiah, who advocated the mystic powers of the ghost dance. Leaders were arrested, and Chief Sitting Bull was killed during an attempt to apprehend him.
Leading his people to seek protection at the Pine Ridge reservation, Sitting Bull's successor, Chief Big Foot, set up camp along the banks of Wounded Knee creek. The following morning, the US cavalry raked the Sioux teepees with grapeshot. "This is not a cheerful book," Brown noted laconically in his introduction.
Altogether, Brown wrote 30 books, 11 of them novels, completing many while working as a librarian in the agriculture department at the University of Illinois, from which he retired in 1972. He was frequently consulted by filmmakers and writers as an expert on Native American history. The West remained his favourite subject, and his last book was published when he was 90. His other works included The Gentle Tamers: Women Of The Old Wild West, and Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, in which he argued that the transcontinental railroads were "built mainly for the purpose of financial exploitation". To critics who argued that he sacrificed facts for effect, he retorted: "I have documents for everything."
Born in Louisiana, Brown moved with his family to Arkansas after his father died, when he was five. His interest in the West was prompted by cinema visits, at one of which a native American friend told him the screen Indians he watched bore no relation to reality.
After graduating from teacher training college, he took up to 50 different jobs during the depression, before joining the US Department of Agriculture library, in Washington, in 1934. Joining the US army in 1942, he spent most of the war in military libraries, before moving to the University of Illinois. Since the 1930s, he had written magazine articles in his spare time, and his first book, a novel based on the life of Davy Crockett, came out in 1942.
Brown had written more than a dozen books, including several for children, before he tackled Wounded Knee, which took two years to complete. An important source was the Indian chief Black Elk, who was reported by Brown to be still haunted in old age by memories of the massacre. He recalled "the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch, as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. A people's dream died there."
In 1971, Brown said that what pained him the most while researching the book was "how much the Indians believed the white man over and over again. Their trust in authority was amazing. They just never seemed to believe anyone could lie."
Brown's wife Sara, whom he married in 1934, died last year. He is survived by their son and daughter.
Dorris Alexander "Dee"Brown: born February 29th, 1908; died December 12th, 2002.