The Longest Trail Writings on American Indian History, Culture, and Politics

Alvin Josephy Jr.’s groundbreaking, popular books and essays advocated for a fair and true historical assessment of Native Americans, and set the course for modern Native American studies. This collection, which includes magazine articles, speeches, a white paper, and introductions and chapters of books, gives a generous and reasoned view of five hundred years of Indian history in North America from first settlements in the East to the long trek of the Nez Perce Indians in the Northwest. The essays deal with the origins of still unresolved troubles with treaties and territories to fishing and land rights, and who should own archeological finds, as well as the ideologies that underpin our Indian policy. Taken together the pieces give a revelatory introduction to American Indian history, a history that continues both to fascinate and inform.

Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. was born in 1915 in New York. He went to school at Horace Mann and Harvard, worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, a print and radio journalist in New York, and as a World War II Marine Corps combat correspondent in the Pacific; his recording of the amphibious landing at Guam was broadcast nationwide. After the war he became an editor at Time magazine and then American Heritage. On assignment with Time in Idaho in the early 1950s, he discovered the Nez Perce. That meeting changed his life—and that of many others. Fifty years of books and articles on Indian and western history followed. He was also a technical advisor on the film Little Big Man, a noted book and magazine editor, and an advocate for Indians. Josephy worked with Stewart Udall in the Kennedy administration, wrote an influential Indian "white paper" for the Nixon administration, and served as chair of the founding board of the National Museum of the American Indian. Many of his books remain in print. Alvin and his wife, Betty, bought a small ranch in the heart of Nez Perce Country in eastern Oregon in 1963, where the family spent summers for more than forty years. Alvin died in 2005, a year after Betty’s passing.

Foreword by Roberta Conner
Introduction by Marc Jaffe and Rich Wandschneider
Editors’ Note 

Part I. Putting Indians into American History

Listening to Indians: A Commentary by Clifford Trafzer

1. A Continent Awakes
2. Indians of the Sound
3. Tecumseh, the Greatest Indian
4. The Hudson’s Bay Company and the American Indians
5. "A Most Satisfactory Council"
6. Red Morning in Minnesota
7. The Last Stand of Chief Joseph

Part II. Indians and the Natural World

Native Endurance—A Connection to Place: A Commentary by Jaime Pinkham

8. Cornplanter, Can You Swim? The Native Americans’ Fight to Hold On to Their Land Base
9. "Like Giving Heroin to an Addict": The Reassertion of Native American Water Rights
10. The Great Northwest Fishing War
11. The Hopi Way

Part III. The Miracle of Indian Survival

Let’s Make the Deal—Indian Country’s History of Success: A Commentary by Mark Trahant

12. The American Indian and the Bureau of Indian Affairs
13. The Historical and Cultural Context of White-Native American Conflicts
14. "You Are On Indian Land!"

Acknowledgments
Notes on the Editors
Notes on Contributors
Suggestions for Further Reading
Permissions Acknowledgments
Index