Dee Brown, whose Homeric vision of the American West, meticulous research and masterly storytelling produced the 1970 bestseller "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West," died at his home in Little Rock, Ark., on Thursday. He was 94.
Brown was a librarian who was writing books after his children had gone to bed when "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" was published. The book, which sold more than 5 million copies, told a grim, revisionist tale of the ruthless mistreatment and eventual displacement of the Indians by white conquerors from 1860 to 1890.
Some historians have since taken a more moderate view, but before Brown's portrayal of white beastliness and Indian saintliness entered the public consciousness, the history of Western conquest was usually told from a much more Eurocentric point of view, a perspective echoed by countless Hollywood movies.
Peter Farb, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1971, summed up Brown's new interpretation: "The Indian wars were shown to be the dirty murders they were."
The racism and wanton carelessness of whites and the betrayals and killings they perpetrated were relentless themes for Brown, who was white himself. His vivid terms are the ones used by Indians at the time: they called Gen. Custer "Hard Backsides" and white soldiers "maggots."
"What surprised me most was how much the Indians believed the white man over and over again," Brown said in an interview with The New York Post in 1971. "Their trust in authority was amazing. They just never seemed to believe that anyone could lie."