The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West

Description

National Book Award winning histories such as The Hemingses of Monticello and Slaves in the Family have raised our awareness about America s intimately mixed black and white past. Award-winning western historian Andrew R. Graybill now sheds light on the overlooked interracial Native-white relationships critical in the development of the trans-Mississippi West in this multigenerational saga. Beginning in 1844 with the marriage of Montana fur trader Malcolm Clarke and his Piegan Blackfeet bride, Coth-co-co-na, Graybill traces the family from the mid-nineteenth century, when such mixed marriages proliferated, to the first half of the twentieth, when Clarke s children and grandchildren often encountered virulent prejudice. At the center of Graybill s history is the virtually unexamined 1870 Marias Massacre, on a par with the more infamous slaughters at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, an episode set in motion by the murder of Malcolm Clarke and in which Clarke s two sons rode with the Second U.S. Cavalry to kill their own blood relatives.”