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Mochi’s War: The Tragedy of Sand Creek
“Historians Enss and Kazanjian (coauthors, None Wounded, None Missing, All Dead) succeed in personalizing one of America’s most troubling memories, the brutal and unprovoked massacre of a sleeping village of Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples at Sand Creek (present-day Colorado) by troops of the Colorado Volunteers in November 1864. This still controversial military engagement (see Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre) sets the background in which Mochi, a Cheyenne woman, lost her entire family and barely survived herself, by killing a soldier and then fleeing her camp. She reinvented herself as a Dog Soldier and member of the Bowstring Society, one of the few females to claim association in these elite Cheyenne warrior groups.
She remarried, to Medicine Water, himself a military leader, and they in turn brutally raided and avenged themselves on American soldiers and settlers alike for over a decade. The authors have again collaborated to write Western history in an accurate yet accessible manner for mainstream readers. They provide a graphic account of the Plains Indian Wars from 1864 to 1875. VERDICT Highly recommended for adult readers of Western and Native American history, this biographical account provides a counterpoint to the many works that have mythologized such women as Pocahontas and Sacajawea.”
