the contested plains book review

“The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado” Written by Elliott West. I chose to write about this book because of the large range of events and transitions that occurred throughout the American West that the author includes in the text. Elliot West highlights the struggles that many endured while trying to create better circumstances for not only themselves but also their families by moving to the west. He chronicles the adaptations that many white settlers arriving in the west faced in order to be able to make a living for themselves. But another reason why I found the book interesting was because of the way Elliot West provided perspective for each side of the struggle over the American West. He gives us the Native American view of what was happening at the time, which I found valuable because a lot of the time the Native American perspective is not heard. The conflicts between White settlers and Native Americans is a huge theme throughout the book, the book actually opens with Elliott West illustrating a violent conflict between the Cheyenne Indians and White soldiers when two Cheyenne Indians hail a mail coach and non-intentionally spook the driver resulting in him shooting at the two men and fleeing. This resulted in the Cheyenne tribe that the two men were from to be attacked, and many of the members of that tribe to be killed or captured. I found this to be interesting because it seemed like a lot of the violence that each group perpetrated against each other was the result of fear, and this fear was a result of the misconceptions that both the White settlers and the Native Americans had towards each other. Although there were many other reasons that these conflicts happened, I feel that the main underlying issue was misunderstanding. Another aspect about the book that I found to be interesting and yielded a lot of information was on the discovery of gold and the effect that gold had on both groups. But something that I learned