Guns, Indians and the West

In his scholarly study, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, $29.95), author David J. Silverman shows how firearms played a major role in the lives of North American indigenous people from the time they were first introduced to the end of the Indian Wars of the 19th century—and again during the 1973 South Dakota uprising of AIM (American Indian Movement). Reflecting the might firearms offered and associating gu