Similar to FranksWildYear's experience, I read it as a teenager while driving in a car with my parents to California. Seeing the depressingly straitened, poverty-stricken conditions that Indians lived under on modern-day reservations served as a dramatic emphasis to the events that I was reading about that had transpired less than a hundred years previously. I remember the book as being my first indication that American history as I had been taught it in a nearly all-White, middle-class grammar school left a lot to be desired in terms of reliability and objectivity. I can understand why small-minded, nervous types, confronted with the spectre of minorities finally rising up against their oppression, wanted to ban it.

I never heard that it was called into question, banned or otherwise challenged but it is a grim and disturbing account of the history of the continent. It's an admittedly one sided view of the events, by the author's own account, but it goes some distance toward addressing a century's worth of history that told the other side of the story. Since it's publication it has largely altered our view of history.

I read it 20 years ago on a driving trip though Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and South Dakota and recall passing through some of the locales of the history recounted. You couldn't help but be haunted by the stories as you came to landmarks and familiar place names.

Well written, moving, and comprehensive chronicle of the often bloody conflict between European settler and Native American for the full four hundred years between Columbus and Wounded Knee. It was used for several classes in my high school.