Selling Your Father's Bones: Manifest Destiny And The American West

Selling Your Father's Bones: Manifest Destiny And The American West

Synopsis

In 1877, the US Army forced the Nez Perce tribe to a smaller unfamiliar reservation thereby destroying forever a life of bucolic calm. In this process, the pastoral chief, Joseph, was forced to break a promise he′d made at his dying father′s bedside: "Never sell the bones of your father or your mother." As his punishment, years later, Joseph died of a broken heart. The Nez Perce tribe thus travelled 1700 miles across America′s most dramatic, inhospitable wilderness and fought six battles and countless skirmishes against a chasing US Army to recover peace and freedom. Using this legendary part of American history as a starting point, Brian Schofield′s Selling Your Father′s Bones is a stunning account of the author′s travels through this wilderness encompassing the Rocky Mountain States of the USA through to Wyoming and the Great Plains. Yet, not only will it be a Bill Bryson-esque reflection on the people of this land and the wild and beautiful terrain that he encounters (there will be inevitable stops-off in Idaho where membership of a Baptist church, a gun club, a combat-ready survivalist militia are all de rigueur) but a serious and probing look at what the author calls ′the victory of Manifest Destiny over native, natural stewardship′, environmental degradation on such a massive scale, it is a wonder the government will ever be able to recover. Schofield follows the route originally taken by the Nez Perce tribe uncovering huge areas denied environmental protection, the building of a 51,000-well gas mine in the Powder River Basin and the fact that America had already destroyed 80% of its indigenous animals by 1950. By doing so, he demonstrates an innate faith and a resolute belief (that has cursed the Western world as a whole for generations) that nature exists to serve man. Selling Your Father′s Bones is a fascinating journey of self -discovery set against a thrilling historical drama that results in a contemporary polemic work of vim and impact.

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