The 34″x22″ mounted game board is a stylized map of the area (i.e. Minor factions have cubes but no cards, and only the Enemies faction has custom dice. Every major faction has a deck of 15 cards (larger in size than those found in a Birth of America game), custom faction dice, and color-coded cubes. The three “minor factions”-all controlled by the US player(s), are the Enemies of the NPT/SPT, Wagon Trains, and the Transcontinental Railroad. The Major US Factions are the Cavalry and Settlers. In Plains Indian Wars there are seven “factions.” The Major Indian Factions are the Northern Plains Tribes (NPT) and the Southern Plains Tribes (SPT). Admittedly, the combat part of the history in many Birth of America games is glossed over because casualties don’t really matter-the only judge of victory is who controls a particular area. Victory is usually based on area control. In every game, you have asymmetric factions working together to deliver victory. Part of what makes the Birth of America-series of games so appealing to me is game balance. was originally designed for Academy – they turned it down.” That’s…sad for Academy Games.]

Peter Cozzens book The Earth is Weeping does not ignore injustices done to the Indians, but he insists we not ignore the white perspective, either. Cozzen contends Brown’s book made no attempt at historical balance. But in the 1970s that view changed as people began seeing whites as villainous conquerors, and the Indians as victims-thanks in no small part to Dee Brown’s influential book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Following the tragedy/massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, most Americas for the next 80 years viewed brave Indian fighters (cavalry) and courageous settlers as heroic.

The Earth is Weeping is a book that tries to bring balance to the historical record of the American Indian Wars. For 125 years, much of both popular and academic history, film, and fiction has depicted the period as an absolute struggle between good and evil, reversing the roles of heroes and villains as necessary to accommodate the changing national conscious. No epoch in American history, in fact, is more deeply steeped in myth than the era of the Indian Wars of the American West. In his 2016 book The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, author Peter Cozzens delivers a narrative history of the American Indian Wars that tries to reset the record.

The earth is weeping