Theodore Roosevelt was
president, Jack Johnson was heavy-weight boxing champion, Henry Ford
introduced his $850.50 Model T, General Motors and Champion Spark
Plugs were launched in the year he was born and Mark Twain had died
just two years before. Dee Brown grew up in a world in which Libbie
Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody, the Wright brothers, Kaiser Wilhelm and
Thomas Edison shared newspaper space, an era, he says, "of steam
locomotives, Civil War veterans' reunions, Victorian attitudes,
genuine patriotism, baseball players who loved the game as well as
money, gadgets that were easily repaired and were usable for years,
frequent and sudden fatal diseases, depressing funerals held in family
parlors, religious revivals under big tents and politicians who
apparently believed in honor and country."
"The world I was born
into bore little resemblance to the world we live in today," Brown
reflects. "It was so close to the nineteenth century that I have
always felt a kinship with that era."
His books, all 30 of
them, show that kinship: Fighting Indians of the West, The
Settlers' West, Trail Driving Days, The Gentle Tamers:
The Women of the West, The Year of the Century: 1876,
Fort Phil Kearny, Showdown at Little Big Horn, The
Galvanized Yankees, Grierson's Raid, The Bold Cavaliers,
Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, The Westerners, his
most celebrated book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and, among
his novels, Creek Mary's Blood, Kildeer Mountain and
A Conspiracy of Knaves.
Dee Alexander Brown was
born in Alberta, Bienville Parish, Louisiana, in 1908, and had a
story-book beginning as a writer. At age five he remembers sitting on
his grandmother's lap in a room beside a window with an apple tree
blooming outside. He and his grandmother were looking at a school
primer and one page showed a dog running and had some black marks
beneath the picture. His grandmother pointed to the marks and read
them: "The dog ran." Brown recalls, "I must have thought, 'What magic
is this? What wonder is this?' To me, the event was the discovery of a
hidden secret that for some reason had been kept from me by conspiring
adults. It was the startling event of my childhood ....From that
moment on I was an addict of the printed word."
He worked on the
Daily Times in the Ozark town of Harrison, in Boone County,
Arkansas, set type for the Log Cabin Democrat in Conway, Ark.
while in college there ("Nothing has ever matched the fragrance of
printing ink in my nostrils," he says), saw his first published
composition in the Stephens, Ark. News in 1918 and sold his
first story to Blue Book at the age of 17, receiving the
fortune (for a teenager in 1925) of $100 for it.
His devotion to Western
history came from his early reading of accounts of the Lewis and Clark
expedition and in seeing, at age 21, the Bozeman Trail and the site of
the 1866-67 Fetterman massacre and Wagon Box fight near Fort Phil
Kearny, Wyoming, and the then-still-mystical town of Santa Fe, New
Mexico.
Brown's love for the
printed work led to his career as a professional librarian, trained at
George Washington University and practiced in the army in World War
Two, at the U.S. Depart-ment of Agriculture and War Department and at
the University of Illinois College of Agriculture.
His first book, Wave
High the Banner, a novel based on the life of Davy Crockett, was
published in 1942, his first non-fiction book, Fighting Indians of
the West (with Martin Schmitt) in 1948. His novels were an
outgrowth of his research: "In most cases," he says, "I found it
necessary to construct certain narratives in fiction form because
there was not enough research material for documented non-fiction,
which I prefer."
A distinguishing
feature of Brown's novels are their solid historical bases and of his
non-fiction works their novel-like dramatic flair.
Brown's most successful
novel, Creek Mary's Blood (1980) is a complex work which traces
five generations of an Indian family from Georgia to the Minneconjou
Sioux reservation in South Dakota, with Creek Mary the matriarch.
His best-known book,
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971) was, he says, "the product of
25 years of researching and writing other books. For a long while I
collected Indian speeches without knowing exactly how I would use
them. When I came to writing a history of the American West from the
Indian point of view, the words of the Indians themselves gave the
book much of its authority." He admits he was skeptical at first,
wondering about the authenticity of speeches so beautifully phrased,
at least in their translations. "I spent hours tracking down
identities of the official interpreters," he says, "and eventually
reached the conclusion that in most cases it mattered little who the
interpreters were. The words came through into English with the same
eloquence, seasoned with inspired metaphors and similes of the natural
world."
Brown credits
television personality Dick Cavett with helping put Bury My Heart
at Wounded Knee on best-seller lists by quoting passages from the
book on his ABC program. (Eventually Brown made two guest appearances
on the Cavett show.)
In 1985 a panel of 100
members of Western Writers of America, Inc. selected the book as the
best non-fiction Western book ever written. Of it, Western novelist
and historian Win Blevins says: "In 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,'
Dee Brown managed to be a revolutionary without being a radical. He
changed America's views of the Indian and did it without being
confron-tational. In that book and in his others, he changed the way
we look at the West and did it without a political or ideological
agenda, did it by simply looking at the Old West and setting down what
he saw--which was the truth."
(Despite its enormous
popularity of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, it is not the
author's favorite among his own works. That honor goes to The Year
of the Century: 1876 (1966), a book about the Centennial of
American Independence and a year Brown considers the watershed of the
19th century.)
The 86-year-old author
continues to work: his memoir, When the Century Was Young: A
Writer's Notebook was published in 1993 and in late 1994 his
The American West, an anecdotal, illustrated portrait of the
Western experience, will be released by Simon & Schuster.
In his introduction to
The American West Brown sums up his convictions about the West
and his philosophy in writing of it: "We must accept the fact that the
Old West was simply a place of magic and wonders. Myths and folktales
form the basis of almost every enduring saga in the literature of the
American West. They are the comfort and joy of screen and television
writers. But let us be wise enough to learn the true history so that
we can recognize a myth when we see one."
Dee Brown answered
these questions from his home in Little Rock, Arkansas.
DLW: Having lived in
all ten decades of this century, can you identify some of the things
you miss from the early decades and some things you like and dislike
about the later ones?
BROWN: Looking at
both ends of the 20th century: When I came into it, the United States
had only about one-third the number of people it now has. Some call
that progress, but as much as Daniel Boone disliked the "crowding" of
his largely uninhabited world, I am discomfited by the rapid
destruction of the land's loveliest places to make room for more
people. Call it selfish if you like, it was my world and I liked it
better the way it was. I grew up in small towns and small cities. In
small groups of people each individual was important. In mass, the
individual becomes an ant. That's why individuals were important in
the thinly populated Old West.
DLW: But there was a
downside to the early days?
BROWN: Yes, the
early years of this century had their bad side as well. Life
expectancy was too short for the average person to get much done.
Diseases baffled the medical profession and killed many promising
young people. Many were poor. It was possible to rise out of poverty,
but nutritional deficiencies and psychological effects sometimes
shortened the lives and careers of those who managed to succeed.
DLW: Medical
advances, then; what else in contemporary America pleases you?
BROWN: What I have
liked about the last years of this century are the advances in medical
sciences, the rapid and reasonably priced means of travel and
communication, and the creature comforts. Whether the latter are good
for the human race, however, is doubtful. Air conditioning is
over-populating the South and Southwest with over-large and
unmanageable cities.
DLW: What of the
communication revolution?
BROWN: The
information super-highway will be of no use to me; I can't digest the
information that comes in now. The kind of research I did for most of
my books would be impossible today. The archives are being locked up
to protect them from the public, and the libraries are destroying
their catalogs. One can always write a novel, but who reads novels?
DLW: In reading your
'When the Century Was Young,' I was struck by what you said about
feeling a kinship with the 19th century. Are those who love history
destined to want to live in another time?
BROWN: One reason
why 20th century Westerners feel a kinship with the 19th century is
the drama of its unfolding, particularly across the West: the
exploration of so much territory unseen by any beings of European
origin, the importance of the individual everywhere and the many
opportunities the century afforded for success and failure. It was an
era of romance, adventure and courage, the era of steamboats, the
first railroads, the madness and glory of the Civil War and the Indian
wars, of cattle drives, the cowboy, the settlers on the plains, the
miners in the mountains, the first American ballads and ragtime, of
religious fervors and the first truly American pieces of literature.
With all its dangers and evils and the brevity of lives, it was a
special time. No other century in any other part of the world appeals
to me as does the 19th century in America.
DLW: Your maternal
grandmother lived with your family when you moved to Arkansas in 1913.
Her father hunted with Davy Crockett and she came to Arkansas in a
covered wagon in 1849. As a youngster listening to her stories, were
you aware of the historical importance of her experiences?
BROWN: One of the
ironies of American life is that so few youngsters listen to what
their elders, especially their grand-parents, have to tell. One of my
grandmothers lived through two-thirds of the 19th century and told me
stories of wagon trains, hunting, the Civil War and Reconstruction,
primitive foods and clothing, the coming of the railroad to her
county, and much more. But I was too young to know its value, too
ignorant to write it down.
DLW: I know you fell
in love with Sherwood Anderson's books, and those of John Dos Passos,
at a young age. What other books and authors do you remember as an
adolescent?
BROWN: In addition
to Anderson and Dos Passos, of course I read Edgar Rice Burroughs and
Zane Grey. Then there was Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London's sea
tales, the "Saturday Evening Post" and the pulp magazines--especially
the Western variety.
DLW: What was the
first historical work you can remember that made an impression on you?
BROWN: The account
of the Lewis and Clark expedition made a deep impression on me. That
book was put in my hands by a high school teacher whose name I should
honor, but alas, can't recall.
DLW: Who are some of
your favorite historical writers and fiction writers?
BROWN: My favorite
historical writers are J. Frank Dobie and Shelby Foote. There are
several others who have published one good book, but none are writing
as Dobie or William H. Prescott wrote. My favorite fiction writers are
Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, and my friend Charles
Portis [Arkansas author of True Grit, Norwood and other
books]. Add a poet, Stephen Vincent Benet and add several others who
have published one great book.
DLW: I think you
were 21 when you made your first trip into the far West and saw the
old Bozeman Trail and the sites of the Fetterman and Wagon Box fights
in Wyoming. Had you read about these places and events before you saw
where they took place?
BROWN: Before seeing
Fort Phil Kearny I heard something about the Fetterman fight from the
splendid history teacher I was accompanying. And I had read John
Neihardt's epic poem about it, "Twilight of the Sioux." In that period
there was very little available about Fort Phil Kearny or many other
incidents of the Old West.
DLW: Why do you
suppose these places made a bigger impression on you than the Custer
battlefield?
BROWN: Probably
because of the absence of markers, unlike at the Custer battleground.
Marble monuments and paved roads do not a realistic historical
site make.
DLW: You have had an
uncommon writer's career in that your books include successful and
highly-regarded novels as well as historical works. Looking back,
which gave you the most pleasure as a writer, the fiction or the
histories?
BROWN: Working on
and completing a historical or documented non-fiction work is more
satisfying to me than writing a novel. In writing history, incidents
or "bridges" to connect a narrative flow cannot be invented; they must
be searched out and proven. This is like solving a mystery or puzzle,
and can be very rewarding. In a novel, the author simply invents
incidents and "bridges" to tell a story.
DLW: College
"creative writing" courses seem to belittle non-fiction writing as a
craft and raise fiction and poetry to a pedestal as art. Do you
consider your non-fiction work "creative"?
BROWN: Yes. Of
course non-fiction is creative. It is also harder to write than
fiction.
DLW: Your historical
books have staying power: they are always in print, always being read
and used. What do you think you did in writing these books that made
them so appealing?
BROWN: I wish I
knew.
DLW: I think I know,
but I'm supposed to be asking the questions, not answering them. I
think it would be fair to say that your most celebrated non-fiction
book is Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and your most famous
novel Creek Mary's Blood. Both clearly required a lot of hard
research. Which took the longest to research and write?
BROWN: The writing
and research of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee turned out to be
the research for Creek Mary's Blood. The work of fiction was
the logical outcome of the non-fiction research.
DLW: What was the
inspiration behind Creek Mary's Blood?
BROWN: I started to
write a biography of the real Creek Mary but I didn't have access to
enough material so I used the facts I had as a basis for fiction. The
real Creek Mary never got out of Georgia. She was all Creek. Her
children were Creek and Cherokee.
DLW: Nearly a
quarter-century after its publication, and knowing what you know since
writing it, is there anything you'd add or delete from Bury My
Heart at Wounded Knee if you had to write it over?
BROWN: I've often
regretted that I didn't include more about the Wounded Knee massacre.
By the time I wrote that part I was so tired that I didn't want to
write anymore.
DLW: Geoffrey Wolfe,
in reviewing Bury My Heart in Newsweek used the phrase "revisionary
history." Were you aware in writing the book that it was "revisionary"?
BROWN: I don't know
what it means.
DLW: I think it has
the same approximate meaning as the kind of spin the "new" historians
are putting on the era of 19th century Western expansion--framing it
in terms of conquest, racism, genocide and environmental ruin. What is
your reaction to these "revisionists"?
BROWN: I think they
are young academics trying to be noticed.
DLW: Well said. You
became a newspaperman at a young age and I notice that there are
reporters in your fiction--the narrators of Creek Mary's Blood
and Kildeer Mountain for example. Was you newspaper background
of value to you later as a historian and writer?
BROWN: Yes, I would
say so. I became a newspaperman at the Harrison, Arkansas Times.
I went to Conway later, to go to college, and I operated a Linotype
machine at The Log Cabin Democrat for part-time income.
DLW: In 1947 or
therabouts, when you were working on Fighting Indians of the West
and visiting the Scribner's office in New York, you had a meeting with
the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins. What is your recollection of
him?
BROWN: He wanted to
get things done and didn't waste time with idle talk. He was ordinary
looking and combed his hair straight back. He was slightly deaf.
DLW: Have you had
trouble separating myth from reality in writing about the Old West?
Can one, in fact, be separated from the other?
BROWN: No, never.
They both belong together. Myth comes out of reality and vice-versa.
DLW: What is there
about our Western saga that so captivated you and made it your life's
work?
BROWN: I got into it
before science fiction was in vogue and before the period of space
exploration. The West was the exciting time in my time.
DLW: Are there book
you still want to write?
BROWN: There is
always something else you want to write. It takes time and
energy...but I have an unfinished novel I plan to complete.
