Part historical narrative, part travelogue through the wilds of the West and part environmental polemic, 'Selling Your Father's Bones' is a thrilling journey through the history and wilderness of the stunning area of landscape that is Continental USA. In the summer of 1877, around seven hundred members of the Nez Perce Native American tribe set out on a 1,700-mile exodus through the mountains, forests, badlands and prairies of modern-day Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. They had been forced from their homes by the great wave of settlement that crashed over the West as the American nation was born. The Nez Perce used their knowledge of the landscapes they passed through to survive six battles and many more skirmishes with the pursuing United States Army, as they raced, with women, children and village elders in their care, towards the safety of the Canadian border. But all Chief Joseph wanted was to return to his beloved Wallowa valley, which his dying father had ordered him never to abandon: 'Never sell the bones of your father and your mother.' Now, Brian Schofield retraces the steps of that epic exodus, to tell the full dramatic story of the Nez Perce's fight for survival - and to examine the forces that drove them to take flight. The white settlement of the West had been largely motivated by patriotic fervour and religious zeal, a faith that the American continent had been laid out by God to fuel the creation of a mighty empire. But as he travels through the lands that the Nez Perce knew so well, Schofield reveals that the great project of the Western Empire has gone badly awry, as the mythology of the settlers opened the door to ecological vandalism, unthinking corporations and negligent leadership, which have left scarred landscapes, battered communities and toxic environments. Uncovering the history of the plunder of these lands, and talking to the living descendants of both the Nez Perce warriors and the European settlers, Schofield encounters communities grasping towards a fresh realisation that the values of the Native American West, of love for your homeland, ancestry and Mother Nature, might be the only route to salvation for the settlers who now occupy their sacred lands.
An award-winning travel writer follows the 1,700-mile path of the Nez Perce tribe's1877 flight from the U.S. Army, Western lands that today bear the scars ...
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