TO DIE GAME The Story of the Lowry Band, Indian Guerrillas of Reconstruction [SOLD]

TO DIE GAME The Story of the Lowry Band, Indian Guerrillas of Reconstruction 

by W. McKee Evans

Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge

Hardback with slipcover, first edition, 1971.  282 pages

During the Civil War, the Confederate government forced the Indians of the isolated Lumber River valley in North Carolina to work alongside black slaves in constructing a system of forts around a key port.  Outraged, a number of the conscripted Indians fled into the swaps, formed a guerrilla band, and emerged to exact their vengeance in blood.  With the Confederate defeat, the Indians hoped to realize Republican promises of an equitable place in the changing social order.  Instead, they were harassed, hunted down, and lynched by Klansmen and civilian authorities, and branded outlaws by the state legislature.

To survive, the guerrillas—including a number of blacks and whites—raided the big houses of North Carolina planters and found refuge from the militia in the homes of the poor, with whom they shared their loot.  In a climactic showdown, Henry Berry Lowry single-handedly engaged eighteen militiamen, killed several, and routed the others.  (This fearless tradition has persisted into modern times.  In 1958 a small band of armed Lumbees descended upon a Ku Klux Klan rally in Robeson County, North Carolina, and put to flight nearly a hundred Klansmen.)

A case study of guerrilla violence in the United States, To Die Game is a book for the general reader as well as a student of Reconstruction and Indian history.