In this account of America's greatest Indian war, listeners are quickly immersed in the world of Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes and their struggle in the 1870s to retain their lives on the buffalo prairie. Those impassioned Northern Indians faced a succession of white invaders—railroaders, borderland surveyors, prospectors, and ultimately the US Army. In the best of days they turned back George Crook at the Rosebud and wiped out George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn. But many other clashes followed, and in the end these tradition-minded people could not endure the army's hounding. Some fled to Canada to a luring if momentary exile, but in the end one and all faced starvation, submission, and, for some, death.
Personifying this traditional way of life was Sitting Bull, legendary Hunkpapa Lakota spiritualist. He was supported throughout by a host of other kindred traditional chiefs and headmen who, in turn, rallied thousands of like-minded men, women, and children. And yet, but for momentary glory against Crook and Custer, this was a war that could not be won. Award-winning author Paul L. Hedren has spent ten years writing this great American epic. Utilizing an array of Lakota and Cheyenne accounts, pictographic renderings, and original interviews, this is the story of a people intent only on adhering to a traditional life on the buffalo prairie.