Philippe Régis de Trobriand was a French aristocrat, lawyer, poet, and novelist who served in the American Civil War and later in the Indian Wars. In this fascinating look into the rumbling post-Civil-War volcano that was brewing between whites and Indians in Dakota Territory, this educated observer saw and recorded the events that were heading toward a boil. Witty, perceptive, and a proven soldier, de Trobriand knew all of the famous generals from the Civil War and worked with some of them on the frontier. Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Gall, Crazy Horse, and other soon-to-be-famous chiefs and warriors were already on de Trobriand's radar. During the general's time at Fort Stevenson, the 1868 Peace Commission negotiated a treaty that gave the Black Hills to the Lakota and barred whites from entering the Powder River country. The abrogation of that treaty, due to George Armstrong Custer's discovery of gold in the Black Hills, was to bring the clash of civilizations to the point of explosion.