Description
Sitting Bull - few figures in American history have so charged the imagination or been so little understood.
A generation before Sitting Bull's birth in 1831, the Lakota Sioux had changed from semisedentary pedestrians east of the Missouri River into the legendary horse-and-buffalo Indians of the Northern Plains.
None of the ironies Robert Utley reveals in this fresh and authoritative account of Indian-white relations is more striking than the fact that Sitting Bull's resistance was made possible by white invaders who provided the horse and the gun on which it depended. The absorbing text closely examines Sioux ethnology, focusing on Sitting Bull's tribe, the Hunkpapas (campers at the opening of a circle), who, along with the 6 other Lakota tribes, occupied the grassy, buffalo-rich high plains between the Missouri River and the Bighorn Mountains from the Platte River north to the Canadian prairies.
The Hunkpapa world centered on the buffalo: migration of the herds governed the movements of its people and fixed the yearly cycle of life. Where the range over-lapped with land claimed by others, enemies such as the Crows and Assiniboines, Sitting Bull's people fought for control of the hunting grounds.
War and the hunt shaped the tribe's social organization and political institutions, preparing the warriors for the soldiers' invasion of the Lakota territory. After the battle at Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull believed victory had earned his people the peace to pursue their usual activities, but he failed to understand that by routing Custer and the 7th Cavalry, he had hastened the downfall of his own people.
At the center of this dramatic, well paced narrative is the flesh-and-blood Sitting Bull - a leader of his people and a man of rare complexity. Yet to the US government he was merely an obstacle: one of the last troublesome remnants of resistance to the white man's inexorable westward expansion.