And nobody can accuse Cozzens of candy-coating Native American culture. Rivalries between tribes, outlying examples of weird mysticism and secret collaborations with the Army are all explored. After explaining how Plains Indians saw warring as a “cultural imperative,” a way to prove manhood, Cozzens offers a graphic description of the art of scalping. “Indian men wore their hair long, which made taking the scalp of an enemy warrior relatively swift and simple,” he writes. “Grasping a tuft or braid in one hand, with the other a warrior made a two- or three-inch-wide cut around the base of the skull, usually with a butcher knife. A quick jerk tore away the skin and hair with a ‘report like a popgun.’ ” According to Cozzens, many Native American warriors mutilated corpses because disfigurement was thought to safeguard the killer from the dead person’s revengeful spirit in the afterworld.

Indian victories are few and far between in “The Earth Is Weeping.” There is, however, one impressive exception. Red Cloud, the war chief of the Oglala Lakotas, conducted successful attacks against the Army in the northern Rocky Mountain region from 1866 to 1868. He then shrewdly negotiated the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), which not only created the Great Sioux Reservation but also set aside a vast land called Unceded Territory. Red Cloud’s new reservation included the Black Hills of South Dakota. With the discovery of gold, the reservation would soon shrink, but Red Cloud had prevailed against the government and its Army, as had few other Indians of his time. “Red Cloud’s war had revealed a regular Army woefully unprepared for its Indian-fighting mission,” Cozzens explains. “The Army’s problems, however, were of no interest to westerners, who expected General Sherman to punish the Indians whenever and wherever they caused trouble.”

Toward the end of “The Earth Is Weeping,” Cozzens recounts how Geronimo — who surrendered in the Arizona Territory to Gen. Nelson A. Miles in 1886 — became a dancing-bear figure for white audiences, appearing as a circuslike attraction and signing photographs of himself for children enthralled by the Wild West. The Apache warrior once hungry for scalps and revenge in the desert-seared arroyos along the Mexican border had become a gentleman farmer at Fort Sill, Okla. (site of the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation). He drank whiskey, raised cattle, played shaman and sold bow-and-arrows. “Since my life as a prisoner has begun I have heard the teachings of the white man’s religion,” Geronimo said of his conversion to Christianity, “and in many respects believe it to be better than the religion of my fathers.”

The pacification of Geronimo serves as a closing metaphor for the crushing Native American defeat retold in “The Earth Is Weeping.” For every Indian triumph like Little Big Horn (1876), there was a drubbing like Wounded Knee (1890), for every surprise Indian victory there were huge retaliations by the Army. As if to add insult to injury, one evening in February 1909, Geronimo got drunk in the town of Lawton, Okla., fell off his horse and was discovered the next morning half-submerged in icy water. “Four days later,” Cozzens writes, “at age 79, the man whom no bullet could ever kill died in bed of pneumonia.” A bloody era of American history was at last over. Still, I have a feeling the academic fight for the true legacy of the Indian Wars — Brown versus Cozzens — has just begun.