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Joseph Hamilton

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Joseph is Currently Reading

Joseph Hamilton is currently reading

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI's War on the American Indian Movement

by Peter Matthiessen

bookshelves: currently-reading, listened-to, mysteries-and-controversies, true-crime

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Joseph Hamilton said: " This book was first published in 1983 and in its current edition in 1992. At an even 600 pages of text the book covers considerably more than the subtitle's The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on the American Indian Movement, however, the This book was first published in 1983 and in its current edition in 1992. At an even 600 pages of text the book covers considerably more than the subtitle's The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on the American Indian Movement, however, the raison d’être of the book is the June 26, 1975 shooting deaths of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation.

Matthiessen, who died in 2014, was an extremely verbose writer. For example, he subsequently wrote another true crime book, Killing Mr. Watson and then three more books about this largely unknown and scantily reported 1910 crime. What I find interesting in Matthiessen’s choice of subject is the lynch mob character of all three killings. The paucity of eyewitness accounts gives free rein to the author’s febrile imagination and in both instances his sentiments lie with the mob which is probably unique in American literature. The shamanistic American Indian belief system receives a sympathetic reception in both cases and aligns with the pantheism of his nature writings, his primary career interest.

Nowhere in the book as far as I recall did Matthiessen say he had attended Peltier’s trial in which he received a life sentence on June 11, 1977 in Fargo, North Dakota. This sentence is typical of the book’s tone:

...these very conservative rural jurors - mostly Lutherans of Scandinavian ancestry, with long faces and a long ruminative memory of the nineteenth-century massacres in Minnesota. [an apt description of Matthiessen at least] In general, the jury seemed ignorant about Indians, or prejudiced, or both; in any case, it was openly suspicious of “East Coast Jewish radical lawyers” and their “East Coast sarcasm,” [no attribution provided] which the harsh-spoken, sharp-tongued Taikeff - cool and quick as a snake with witnesses - seemed to personify.

Initially two other Indians as well as Peltier were to be tried for the killings but Peltier fled to Canada and the other two were tried in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. They were represented by another East Coast Jewish radical lawyer, William Kunstler, and were acquitted.

Matthiessen has a persistent and profound distrust of the official or non-Indian version of events. This is especially evident as well as tiresome and ridiculous in his recounting of Peltier’s short-lived escape from Lompoc Prison in 1978. In the all points bulletins that followed his escape he was described as “armed and dangerous” which doesn’t strike me as especially remarkable when you consider what he was convicted of and that he was last seen fleeing the prison with Mini-14 in hand. Matthiessen believes he was so described to increase the likelihood that he would be shot and killed rather than taken alive. He was recaptured unharmed. Matthiessen then quotes several after action reports by Peltier’s captors as well as a newspaper interview with one of them. They are consistent in acknowledging Peltier’s quiet acceptance and stoic humor upon his return to captivity. Peltier, on the other hand, must have told Matthiessen well after the fact that he was mistreated.

Peltier was released from prison on February 18, 2025 and reunited with his nine children in the U.S. and Canada; the agents were twenty-seven and twenty-eight years of age in 1975.

I’m not sure this should be any longer the definitive account or the final word on the killing of the FBI agents if it ever was. Outside magazine published an alternative viewpoint in its July 1995 issue; Matthiessen responded angrily in the October issue. He did acknowledge that his explanation of a government motive for persecuting the Indians, uranium deposits on the Pine Ridge reservation, was wrong. That motive was the starting point of the book and everything else followed from that.

One will find more concise and, I believe, evenhanded accounts in Wikipedia articles.

My preferred Matthiessen novel is At Play in the Fields of the Lord and African Silences for nonfiction. ...more "

Jan 13, 2026 11:13AM · see review

Joseph Hamilton is currently reading

Lincoln's Road to War: A Day-by-Day Account of the First 60 Days of Abraham Lincoln's Presidency

by David Alan Johnson

bookshelves: currently-reading, biography, war

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Joseph Hamilton said: " I find it interesting that Lincoln consistently is rated as the first or second best President by American historians, and his immediate predecessor, James Buchanan, as one of the worst if not the worst. Sometimes when a catastrophic error is made it ...more "

Jan 08, 2026 09:00AM · see review

Joseph Hamilton is currently reading

The War Magician: Based on an Extraordinary True Story

by David Fisher

bookshelves: currently-reading, war

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Jan 01, 2026 11:23AM

See all 25 books that Joseph is reading…

Joseph’s Quotes

“To put the last point another way, writers such as Graves, Sassoon, and Owen saw the Great War as the disease, but Tolkien saw it as merely the symptom.”
― John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth

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“Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

tags: goodbye

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“As she looked back, the trail behind her faded away and she was way up in the air, with no man behind her and only the smooth trail leading into the sky.”
― Ada Blackjack

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“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

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