Books by Valerie Sherer Mathes

No other book so effectively captures the day-to-day and exhausting work of a single individual on the front lines of reform. Like most of his fellow advocates, Charles Cornelius Coffin Painter was an unapologetic assimilationist, a man of his times whose story is a key chapter in the history of the Indian reform movement.

Examines how the national publicity surrounding the trial of Chief Standing Bear, as well as a speaking tour by the chief and others, brought the plight of his tribe, and of tribespeople across America, to the attention of the general public, serving as a catalyst for the nineteenth-century Indian reform movement.