Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost

This unique anthology chronicles the Plains Indians' struggle to maintain their traditional way of life in the changing world of the nineteenth century. Its rich variety of 34 primary sources - including narratives, myths, speeches, and transcribed oral histories - gives students the rare opportunity to view the transformation of the West from Native American perspective. Calloway's comprehensive introduction offers crucial information on western expansion, territorial struggles among Indian tribes, the slaughter of the buffalo, and forced assimilation through the reservation system. More than 30 pieces of Plains Indian art are included, along with maps, headnotes, questions for consideration, a bibliography, a chronology, and an index.

Colin G. Calloway is professor of history and Native American studies at Dartmouth College. Formerly he taught at the University of Wyoming and served as assistant director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library in Chicago. He is author of The American Revolution in Indian Country (1995), The Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600-1800 (1990), and Crown and Calumet: British-Indian Relations, 1783-1815 (1987). Calloway has also written articles on the Plains Indian history and edited several collections of documents, including The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America (Bedford, 1994).