Cougar Face

   William Brandon c e up with another book on Indians that I read in a short time."The Rise And Fall Of North American Indians" covers full history of the peoples from prehistory migrations I to the North American continent until the eventual loss of. Dependence and forced settlement in small reservations. The author does a good i depth Analysis of the Toltecs,Aztecs, and Mayan societies Nd the importance of trade I These cultures and their eventual fall from power. This book covers the first battles with Spanish and Indians in the Caribbean to the defeat of empires by small Soansih armies with their Native allies. Great detail is discussed what enabled this conquest to take p,ace but it is irrevocably repeated that the Spanish thrust North was halted and retreated several times despite the technological inferiority of Indians. The author Mr Brandon also makes sense of the complexity of European alliances with various tribes and the confusing Iroquois confederacy and beaver wars with other Native groups. The second phase covers the Tench era and the settlement and trade patterns that affected North American Indians. The Mohawk and Seneca willingness to wage total war o. Some of their neighbors had to do with religious,national,and emotional factors in addition to the depleting fur resources that is so often repeated in history class. The New England and Virginian separate Indian wars is explored up by this book and the similarities And differences explained. These two losses by Native American lead more than anything else to their fall and aft King Phillips war the Indians lost pretty much the conflict. As France's position weakened in North America and the English continued to grow more pressure was put on Natives and eventual loss of the Tennessee valley and Ohio country would be further blows destroying Indian base and land entitlements in North America. William Brandon does. Good job putting all of this immense information in one long reading on a lengthy topic. It is not easy to pretty much put three centuries of warfare no e volume and he does his best to put the whole Native American-white conflict in one comprehensive volume. He correctly points out that the changing images of Native Americans through the decades gave rise to more later oppression and actions from an expanding manifest destiny evolving country that whose unwarranted demand for more land would eventually spill out of North America a d spill blood in other distant lands. In essence history would come full circle as White American Europeans would go out and invade new lands much like their Spanish,French, and English counterparts that landed on North America in the fifteenth century.