Drawing on government records and first-person accounts, Brown exposed how the U.S. government sought systematically to destroy the American Indian in the late 19th century. Beginning with the forced relocation of the Navajo in 1864 and ending with the massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890, Brown revealed the broken treaties, condescending diplomacy and discriminatory policies that helped extend America’s border to the Pacific. Published in 1970, Bury My Heart at Wounded Kneeattracted some criticism from scholars, who called it one-sided, but Brown didn’t care. To lay out how the West was really won, he wrote, it was necessary to approach history from a new direction: “Americans who have always looked westward when reading about this period should read this book facing eastward.”