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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Politics & government

THE RED AND THE WHITE

Andrew R. Graybill

A Family Saga of the American West

One of the American West‘s bloodiest—and least-known—massacres is searingly created in this generation-spanning history of native-white intermarriage.

National Book Award—winning histories such as The Hemingses ofMonticetto and Siaves 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 overlooked interracial Native-white relationships critical in the development the Mississippi West in this multigenerational saga. Beginning in 1844 with the marriage of Montana fur trader Malcolm Ciarke and bis Piegan Blackfeet bnde, Coth-co-eo-na, Graybill traces the family from the mid-nineteenth century, when such mixed marriages proliferated, to the first half of the twentieth, when Ciarke children and grandchildren often encountered virnient prejudice. At the center of Graybill‘s history is the virtually unexamined 1870 Marias Massacre, on a par wiffi the more infamous slaughters at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, an episode in motion by the murder of Malcolm Ciarke and in which Clarke two sons rode with the Second U.S. Cavalry to kill their own blood relatives. Andrew R. Graybill is an associate professor of history and direetor of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.

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Book Published 2013-10-01 by Liveright / Norton

Comments

[The Clarke family’s] experiences provide fascinating insights into race relations on the evolving frontier…. Graybill’s book is highly recommended for all readers interested in the 19-century West.

With meticulous research and a keen eye for the grand sweep of time and space in the West, Andrew Graybill tells the story of a forgotten massacre that blows apart stereotypes of the nineteenth-century frontier. He brings to life a remarkable family that lived at the intersection of worlds, where the fur trade and intermarriage blurred the distinction between American Indians and white Americans. In this clan's corner of Montana, personal conflicts met national policy and mass migration in an explosion of violence and political recriminations.

A touching portrait of race relations on the frontier… Graybill uncovers a forgotten history culminating in the Marias Massacre, an epochal event for the Blackfeet but so obscure today that no marker commemorates its location. Evocative details and a close attention to the arc of its subjects’ lives lend Graybill’s narrative emotional heft… An entertaining and insightful exposition of an unjustly ignored facet of the American social fabric.