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Summary
Summary
"Fast-paced and highly absorbing." --Wall Street Journal
A magisterial new history of the fierce final chapter of the "Indian Wars," told through the lives of the two most legendary and consequential American Indian leaders, who led Sioux resistance and triumphed at the Battle of Little Bighorn
True West magazine's "Best Nonfiction Book of the Year"
Winner of the Colorado Book Award
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull: Their names are iconic, their significance in American history undeniable. Together, these two Lakota chiefs, one a fabled warrior and the other a revered holy man, crushed George Armstrong Custer's vaunted Seventh Cavalry. Yet their legendary victory at the Little Big Horn has overshadowed the rest of their rich and complex lives. Now, based on years of research and drawing on a wealth of previously ignored primary sources, award-winning author Mark Lee Gardner delivers the definitive chronicle, thrillingly told, of these extraordinary Indigenous leaders.
Both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were born and grew to manhood on the High Plains of the American West, in an era when vast herds of buffalo covered the earth, and when their nomadic people could move freely, following the buffalo and lording their fighting prowess over rival Indian nations. But as idyllic as this life seemed to be, neither man had known a time without whites. Fur traders and government explorers were the first to penetrate Sioux lands, but they were soon followed by a flood of white intruders: Oregon-California Trail travelers, gold seekers, railroad men, settlers, town builders--and Bluecoats. The buffalo population plummeted, disease spread by the white man decimated villages, and conflicts with the interlopers increased.
On June 25, 1876, in the valley of the Little Big Horn, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, and the warriors who were inspired to follow them, fought the last stand of the Sioux, a fierce and proud nation that had ruled the Great Plains for decades. It was their greatest victory, but it was also the beginning of the end for their treasured and sacred way of life. And in the years to come, both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, defiant to the end, would meet violent--and eerily similar--fates.
An essential new addition to the canon of Indigenous American history and literature of the West, The Earth Is All That Lasts is a grand saga, both triumphant and tragic, of two fascinating and heroic leaders struggling to maintain the freedom of their people against impossible odds.
A Denver Post Bestseller
A Spur Award Finalist, Best Western Historical Nonfiction
Winner of the John M. Carroll Literary Award
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Spur Award winner Gardner (Rough Riders) delivers a stirring account of the resistance campaign led by Lakota holy man Sitting Bull and war chief Crazy Horse in the 1870s. "Unwavering in their resolve to live separate from the white men steadily encroaching upon their lands," the Lakota chiefs and their followers "recognized no treaties and no reservations." The centerpiece of the narrative is the pair's victory at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, a clash that Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer instigated and horribly mismanaged, even though he was warned by his own Crow scout, Half Yellow Face, not to divide his troops against the overwhelming force of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. As Gardner makes clear, however, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse's greatest victory set the stage for their eventual defeat. After Little Big Horn, they had the permanent attention of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who vowed to force the anti-treaty bands onto reservations, or "exterminate them." Sharp characterizations and evocative imagery--"The warrior's head was promptly cut off and taken to Deadwood, where it was paraded around town, earning its keeper enough whiskey to get him falling-down drunk"--make this a standout portrait of the Old West. (June)
Kirkus Review
Spirited history of the great Sioux war leaders of the late 19th century and their valiant stand against White encroachment. Is it possible to say anything more about George Armstrong Custer? Perhaps not, and Gardner, a practiced historian of the West, doesn't really try. Instead, he places Custer's demise in the context of a complex Native political and military milieu, with two leaders of widely different dispositions in the forefront. One was Sitting Bull, who, as a holy man endowed with a gift of vision, not only launched a concerted war against the Whites, but also foresaw Custer's defeat in specific detail. Another was Crazy Horse, the "mysterious Oglala war chief," whose bravery in the Battle of Little Bighorn verged on the suicidal. Gardner broadens the narrative to embrace related episodes such as the so-called Red Cloud War and the Starvation March, the latter of which made Sitting Bull's name a household word--so famous that once he surrendered, he joined Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. (See Deanne Stillman's excellent Blood Brothers for more.) Gardner does a good job of showing how events large and small conditioned the last 20-odd years of the Sioux Wars. For example, as he writes of the Yellowstone region, sacred ground to many Native groups, "the Panic of 1873 put a temporary stop to the Northern Pacific [Railroad], but it didn't put a stop to the white man's incursions." Deals cut behind closed doors in Washington, D.C., were as significant as closer-to-home developments such as the Ghost Dance--and, as Gardner shows, unbending federal policies and their enforcers proved fatal to both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, who "would not suffer the ignominy of being imprisoned." A grim highlight of the book is the denouement, which recounts what happened to Sitting Bull's body in the years after his murder in 1890. A strong work of Western history that strives to bring the Native American view to center stage. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| 1 Hóka Hé! | p. 1 |
| 2 Becoming Warriors | p. 19 |
| 3 Native Ground | p. 41 |
| 4 Visions of the Future | p. 63 |
| 5 The Invasion of Good Horse Grass Country | p. 81 |
| 6 The Hundred in the Hand | p. 107 |
| 7 Too Many Tongues | p. 137 |
| 8 Land of Uncertainty | p. 165 |
| 9 The Act of Thieves | p. 189 |
| 10 Soldiers Coming with Heads Down | p. 221 |
| 11 A Winter War | p. 259 |
| 12 Father, I Want to See You | p. 277 |
| 13 The End of Freedom | p. 311 |
| 14 Ghosts | p. 339 |
| Epilogue | p. 377 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 395 |
| American Indian Informants | p. 401 |
| Notes | p. 405 |
| Resources | p. 501 |
| Index | p. 529 |
