BOOKSHELF

Natural History, Oct, 1999

Rolling Thunder Speaks: A Message for Turtle Island, by Rolling Thunder, edited by Carmen Sun Rising Pope (Clear Light Publishers, 1999; $14.95; 264 pp.; illus.)

Born into the Cherokee Paint clan, Rolling Thunder mastered the medicine-man traditions of several tribes and ministered to both Indians and non-Indians for more than forty years. This book was assembled after his death in 1997.

Grey Owl: The Many Faces of Archie Belaney, by Jane Billinghurst (Kodansha International, 1999; $22; 150 pp.; illus.)

In the early 1930s, a Native American trapper and conservationist from northern Canada rose to fame as Grey Owl. He was actually Archie Belaney, from an upper-middle-class British family. Striking photographs and extensive excerpts from Belaney's writings add to this portrait of the man who said: "Remember, you belong to Nature, not it to you"

Yellowstone and the Great West: Journals, Letters, and Images From the 1871 Hayden Expedition, edited by Marlene D. Merrill (University of Nebraska Press, 1999; $29.95; 295 pp.; illus.)

Merrill has woven together a selection of writings, photographs, and paintings from geologist Ferdinand Hayden's historic scientific expedition through the Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana Territories to the Yellowstone basin. Hayden's findings and the artists' renderings quickly led Congress to establish Yellowstone as the world's first national park.

The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America, by James Wilson (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999; $27; 496 pp.)

A British historian draws on historical sources, ethnography, archaeology, Indian oral tradition, and his own twenty-five years of research on contemporary Native American communities to chart the fate of indigenous cultures after the European arrival.

The Bonehunters' Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age, by David Rains Wallace (Houghton Mifflin, 1999; $24; 368 pp.; illus.)

In the mid-nineteenth century, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh--rival pioneers in paleontology--kept up a long, vicious battle over the fossils being unearthed in the Wild West.

Holding Stone Hands: On the Trait of the Cheyenne Exodus, by Alan Boye (University of Nebraska Press, 1999; $29.95; 347 pp.; illus.)

In 1995 English professor Boye, joined by descendants of Indian leaders, set out on foot to retrace the 1878 route of 300 Northern Cheyenne seeking to escape the misery of their life on an Oklahoma reservation and return to their homeland in Montana.

Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest, by Charles Wilkinson (Shearwater/Island Press, 1999; $24.95; 384 pp.; illus.)

A law professor who has worked on behalf of Native American groups since the early 1970s documents the history of the arid, high, 80-million-acre Colorado Plateau.

Thunderhead, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Warner Books, 1999; $25.95; 483 pp.)

The disappearance of the sophisticated Anasazi cliff-dwelling culture has long puzzled archaeologists. This book is a page-turner loosely based on the controversial claim that the Anasazi's demise was due to the influx of tenth-century terrorists from Mesoamerica.

Little Bighorn Remembered: The Untold Indian Story of Custer's Last Stand, by Herman J. Viola (Times Books/Random House, 1999; $45; 224 pp.; illus.)

A Smithsonian curator tells the story of the 1876 battle at Little Bighorn with much new material: hundreds of color illustrations, newly discovered letters, archival photographs, and archaeological evidence from the battlefield.

The books mentioned in "Natural Selections" are usually available from the Museum Shop of the American Museum of Natural History, (212) 769-5150.