In 1840 Benjamin Armstrong accompanied Ke-Che-Waish-Ke, or Great Buffalo (1759-1855) and other Ojibwe chiefs to Washington, D.C., to plead against the proposed forced relocation of the tribes west of the Mississippi. The mission was successful: a meeting with President Millard Fillmore brought a reversal of the removal order of 1849.

Alice C. Fletcher (1838–1923), one of the few women who became anthropologists in the United States during the nineteenth century, was a pioneer in the practice of participant-observation ethnography. She focused her studies over many years among the Native tribes in Nebraska and South Dakota. Life among the Indians, Fletcher’s popularized autobiographical memoir written in 1886–87 about her first fieldwork among the Sioux and the Omahas during 1881–82, remained unpublished in Fletcher’s archives at the Smithsonian Institution for more than one hundred years. In it Fletcher depicts the humor and hardships of her field experiences as a middle-aged woman undertaking anthropological fieldwork alone, while showing genuine respect and compassion for Native ways and beliefs that was far ahead of her time. What emerges is a complex and fascinating picture of a woman questioning the cultural and gender expectations of nineteenth-century America while insightfully portraying rapidly changing reservation life. Fletcher’s account of her early fieldwork is available here for the first time, accompanied by an essay by the editors that sheds light on Fletcher’s place in the development of anthropology and the role of women in the discipline.

Surprised by an early and devastating winter, 145 of 376 Mormon handcart pioneers perished. A rescue of the survivors took place from a stone refuge near Devil's Gate, Wyoming. Jones accompanied the Mexican War volunteers who marched from St. Louis in 1847, and went to Utah in 1850, where he played an active part in Mormon affairs. He spent many further years as a guide, hunter, Indian fighter, and explorer.

David Zeisberger: A life among the Indians offers the unique perspective of a Moravian missionary who lived and worked for sixty-three years among the Iroquois and Delaware nations in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Upper Canada. Earl P. Olmstead's narrative draws on thousands of pages of Zeisberger's own diaries, some of which are translated here for the first time. The diaries offer insights into the role of wampum in tribal government, problems resulting from the mass Euro-American western migration, and incidents of duplicity on the parts of both the American government and Native American nations. Of particular interest are Zeisberger's descriptions of Native American life in the years surrounding the French and Indian War and the American Revolution and the effects of these conflicts on the nations that lived in Ohio Country.

For fifty-four years in the 19th century, Benjamin Armstrong spent his life with Native American tribes, learning their customs and languages, and becoming the adopted son of a Chippewa chief. Armstrong sat before Presidents Filmore and Lincoln on separate occasions as interpreter and advocate for Native American visitors to Washington.In this remarkable book, Armstrong relates his many years in the west with a depth and sympathy for his Native American friends that found few parallels among his contemporaries. He discusses their religion, marriage customs, camp life, and many anecdotes of individuals with whom he formed close bonds.Armstrong did more to humanize Native Americans than nearly any white person of his day. In the end, he writes:"...the unbiased judgment of the future will be that the Indians were found good and were made bad by white people, and that the condition of things has not been one whit improved by white associates, but, on the contrary, has been degraded....[the Indians] saw that the example of the white people was far from the teachings of the missionaries, far from the truth and the pretensions of the traders, and far from justice and right."

The portrayal of native Americans and the role they played in American history has been riddled with stereotypes and falsehoods. Moulton attempts to correct decades of misinformation with insightful scholarship on the real story. Includes maps, illustrations, chronologies and reference sources.

These eight reports by white settlers held captive by Indians gripped the imagination not only of early settlers but also of American writers through our history. Puritans among the Indians presents, in modern spelling, the best of the New England narratives. These both delineate the social and ideological struggle between the captors and the settlers, and constitute a dramatic rendition of the Puritans' spiritual struggle for redemption.

Treuer, an Ojibwe scholar and cultural preservationist, answers the most commonly asked questions about American Indians, both historical and modern. He gives a frank, funny, and personal tour of what's up with Indians, anyway.