Charles C. Painter: The Life of an Indian Reform Advocate

by Valerie Sherer Mathes

Overview

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, Painter was an unapologetic assimilationist, a man of his times whose story is a key chapter in the history of the Indian reform movement.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806166322
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	09/17/2020
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Valerie Sherer Mathes, Professor Emerita of City College of San Francisco. Among the books she has authored or edited are Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy and The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson.

Editorial Reviews

"In Charles C. Painter, Mathes sets out to restore Painter's prominence within the Indian reform movement, and encourage further scholarship on the sources he left behind. Her detailed work successfully establishes Painter's importance in terms of his skills, compromises, contradictions, and personal sacrifices. Along with Painter's career, Mathes captures the complexities, achievements, and shortcomings of the larger Indian reform movement."--New Mexico Historical Review


"Few who study early twentieth-century federal Indian policy will immediately recognize the name Charles C. Painter. But, as Valerie Sherer Mathes demonstrates in this first book-length study of the Indian reform advocate, Charles Cornelius Coffin Painter (1833-1895) was one of the most prominent, active, and influential promoters of American Indian rights in the late nineteenth century. Drawing from Painter's extensive archive of public letters, articles, speeches, investigative reports, and papers, Mathes reconstructs the working life of an overlooked, yet significant, Indian reformer.... Mathes offers a thoroughly researched and detailed account of the work of this important Indian rights supporter which furthers our understanding of nineteenth-century Indian reform history."--South Dakota History


"Mathes does not fall into a classic trap of biography and romanticize Painter. To the contrary, she explains that he was an unapologetic assimilationist as well as "a reformer who devoted his life work to doing what he thought was best for America's Indian population and doing it with élan" (x). There is no question that Painter was both productive and consequential. This fine-grained study of the work of reform in the 1880s and 1890s makes an important contribution to the scholarly literature and anyone interested in the subject matter should read this book carefully."---Nebraska History


"Valerie Sherer Mathes's Charles C. Painter offers a fine-grained and meticulously chronicled biography of one of the most important Indian reformers of the post-Civil War period. Mathes's detailed and readable study succeeds in acknowledging the work and legacy of an important and often overlooked advocate for Native American rights."-- Montana the Magazine of Western History

From the Publisher