The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash Between White and Native America Hardcover by Richard Kluger [S71] |

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Product Types: Books | Hardcover Books
Genres: Drama | Suspense
Studios: Knopf

The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek: A Tragic Clash Between White and Native America Hardcover by Richard Kluger.

The nearly 400-year confrontation between the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere andthe white settlers from Europe was marked from first to last by the newcomers’ conviction that they were entitled – by cultural superiority, moral enlightenment, and God’s grace – to displace the primitive inhabitants and make the land their own.

Among the last places in North Americawhere this stark racial collision played itself out was the bountifulPuget Sound region in what was then known as the Washington Territory in the northwestern corner of the United States. There, thanks to moderate climate, sheltering mountain ranges, lush forests, crystal-purewaterways teeming with wildlife, and the absence of predatory neighbors, the local tribes had prospered in their remote paradise for some 10,000 years.

All that suddenly ended in the middleof the nineteenth century when a proud, retired young U.S. Army major,an engineer with high political ambitions, was appointed the firstgovernor of newly acquired, 100,000-square-mile Washington Territory.Isaac Ingalls Stevens’s primary task was to persuade the natives thattheir only hope for survival was to sign treaties handing over theirancestral lands to the American government in exchange for protectionfrom oncoming whites eager to turn the wilderness into crop-land. But one tribal chief at Puget Sound, Leschi of the Nisqually nation,insisted that his people be dealt with fairly and not coerced intosurrendering virtually their entire sacred homeland without justcompensation. The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek is the emblematic story of this confrontation between the headstrongAmerican governor and the defiant leader of the Nisquallies and theirbrethren who resisted him and, in doing so, stirred up the gross abuseof power and the licensing of injustice on our last frontier.