The Earth Is All That Lasts: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the Last Stand of the Great Sioux Nation

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)