Sitting Bull's War

The Battle of Little Big Horn and the Fight for Buffalo and Freedom on the Plains

Paul L. Hedren

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2025
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781639369843
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The dramatic story of America’s greatest Indian war told from perspective of the Lakotas and the Northern Cheyennes, as they fight for their way of life on the buffalo prairie.

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year

In this deeply affecting account of America’s greatest Indian war, readers 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 United States 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 a dozen other clashes followed, and in the end these tradition-minded people could not endure the army’s endless 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.

Rallying the defense of this lifeway of old was Sitting Bull, legendary Hunkpapa Lakota spiritualist. He was supported throughout by Crazy Horse, Spotted Eagle, Big Road, Little Wolf, and 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 was ten years in crafting 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. The narrative is broad and inclusive and a welcome addition to the canon of American Indian wars history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• War Country, 1872–1877 Map
• Dedication
• Sitting Bull’s War Timeline
• Preface
• Chapter 1: A Time in the West
• Chapter 2: Railroaders on the Yellowstone
• Chapter 3: Buffalo and Borders
• Chapter 4: Black Hills Mayhem
• Chapter 5: War Comes to the Cheyennes First
• Chapter 6: The Great Ascendancy
• Chapter 7: Stopping the Gray Fox
• Chapter 8: We Wish to Live!
• Chapter 9: One Day in June
• Chapter 10: A Dangerous Time
• Chapter 11: The Hunted
• Chapter 12: Red Fork and Belly Butte
• Chapter 13: Cruel Fate of the Cheyennes
• Chapter 14: Shock and Despair in the Pine Ridge
• Chapter 15: Defiance
• Chapter 16: The Starving Years
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Image Descriptions
• Copyright