James Morrow Walsh can rightfully be called the original Mountie. In late 1873 he led the first troop of scarlet-coated policemen toward the great Canadian prairie. In the summer of 1875 he was assigned to construct Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills above the Canada-U.S. border. Below the border, or medicine line as the Sioux Nation knew it, 15,000 Native Americans were drawn a year later to the camp of Sitting Bull on the Little Bighorn River. By 1877, newspaper headlines from Chicago to New York tweaked the curiosity of millions by referring to Walsh as "Sitting Bull's Boss." The years leading up to those headlines and the times that followed were the most dramatic era in the history of the west.

“Gripping. . . . transforms Sitting Bull, the abstract, romanticized icon and symbol, into a flesh-and-blood person with a down-to-earth story.” —The New York Times Book Review Winner, Spur Award for Best Western Nonfiction Historical Book A New York Times Notable Book Reviled by the United States government as a troublemaker and a coward, revered by his people as a great warrior chief, Sitting Bull has long been one of the most fascinating and misunderstood figures in American history. Distinguished historian Robert M. Utley has forged a compelling portrait of Sitting Bull, presenting the Lakota perspective for the first time and rendering the most unbiased, historically accurate, and vivid portrait of the man to date. The Sitting Bull who emerges in this fast-paced narrative is a complex, towering figure: a great warrior whose skill and bravery in battle were unparalleled; the spiritual leader of his people; a dignified but ultimately tragically stubborn defender of the traditional ways against the steadfast and unwelcome encroachment of the white man. “A definitive biography of this Native American warrior and tribe leader.” —Publishers Weekly “Compelling reading.” —The Washington Post Book World Originally published as The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull

While the Battle of the Little Bighorn is a legendary episode in American history, what happened to Sitting Bull and his followers afterward is less well known. Ruthlessly harried by US troops, roughly twenty-five hundred Sioux Indians sought refuge in Canada. They crossed at the Cypress Hills near Fort Walsh, a North-West Mounted Police post that was under the command of Major James Walsh. Faced with the possibility of a full-scale war uniting all the tribes in the area, Walsh laid down the law to Sitting Bull, promising to help the Sioux with food and ammunition strictly for hunting. Walsh was in command of the situationbut only because Sitting Bull recognized him as a true friend who would do everything possible to help the Sioux. Although the Americans wanted the Sioux back and the Canadians wanted them to go back, the Canadian government was bound by its promise to grant refuge to the Indians as long as they obeyed the law. Narrating actual events and depicting Sitting Bull and his followers, this historical novel describes the war against the Sioux and other tribes in the late nineteenth century.

One week after the infamous June 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn, when news of the defeat of General George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry troops reached the American public, Sitting Bull became the most wanted hostile Indian in America. He had resisted the United States’ intrusions into Lakota prairie land for years, refused to sign treaties, and called for a gathering of tribes at Little Big Horn. He epitomized resistance. Sitting Bull’s role at Little Big Horn has been the subject of hundreds of historical works, but while Sitting Bull was in fact present, he did not engage in the battle. The conflict with Custer was a benchmark to the subsequent events. There are other battles than those of war, and the conflict between Sitting Bull and Indian Agent James McLaughlin was one of those battles. Theirs was a fight over the hearts and minds of the Lakota. U.S. Government policy toward Native Americans after Little Big Horn was to give them a makeover as Americans after finally and firmly displacing them from their lands. They were to be reconstituted as Christian, civilized and made farmers. Sitting Bull, when forced to accept reservation life, understood who was in control, but his view of reservation life was very different from that of the Indian Bureau and its agents. His people’s birth right was their native heritage and culture. Although redrawn by the Government, he believed that the prairie land still held a special meaning of place for the Lakota. Those in power dictated a contrary view – with the closing of the frontier, the Indian was challenged to accept the white road or vanish, in the case of the Lakota, that position was given personification in the form of Agent James McLaughlin. This book explores the story within their conflict and offers new perspectives and insights.

Born in South Dakota in 1831, Sitting Bull was given his father's name after killing his first buffalo as a teenager. Sitting Bull witnessed the downfall of his people's way of life after the California gold rush of 1849 and the opening up of the West by the railroad. After he was wounded in battle, his views hardened about the presence of whites in Sioux land. He began to assume an uncompromising militancy that would characterize the rest of his life. Developing into one of the most important of chiefs, Sitting Bull was able to unite a multitude of Sioux bands and other tribes at his camp, which continually expanded as the tribes sought safety in numbers. It was this camp that General George Armstrong Custer found on June 25, 1876, when he led the 7th Cavalry advance party to the Little Big Horn River. Sitting Bull, who had seen a vision of this attack during a tribal dance, and his people were able to defeat Custer and his men, but their victory was short-lived as thousands more outraged soldiers pursued the Sioux, forcing their surrender. This brave warrior was finally brought down in 1890 by tribal police who had been sent to arrest him. In Sitting Bull, read about a man who refused to back down from his convictions, even when they brought him face to face with the United States Calvary.

2021 Spur Award Winner for Best Historical Nonfiction from the Western Writers of America True West Magazine's 2020 Best Author and Historical Nonfiction Book of the Year The Last Sovereigns is the story of how Sioux chief Sitting Bull resisted the white man's ways as a last best hope for the survival of an indigenous way of life on the Great Plains--a nomadic life based on buffalo and indigenous plants scattered across the Sioux's historical territories that were sacred to him and his people. Robert M. Utley explores the final four years of Sitting Bull's life of freedom, from 1877 to 1881. To escape American vengeance for his assumed role in the annihilation of Gen. George Armstrong Custer's command at the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull led his Hunkpapa following into Canada. There he and his people interacted with the North-West Mounted Police, in particular Maj. James M. Walsh. The Mounties welcomed the Lakota and permitted them to remain if they promised to abide by the laws and rules of Queen Victoria, the White Mother. But the Canadian government wanted the Indians to return to their homeland and the police made every effort to persuade them to leave. They were aided by the diminishing herds of buffalo on which the Indians relied for sustenance and by the aggressions of Canadian Native groups that also relied on the buffalo. Sitting Bull and his people endured hostility, tragedy, heartache, indecision, uncertainty, and starvation and responded with stubborn resistance to the loss of their freedom and way of life. In the end, starvation doomed their sovereignty. This is their story.

Since the shocking news first broke in 1876 of the Seventh Cavalry’s disastrous defeat at the Little Big Horn, fascination with the battle—and with Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer—has never ceased. Widespread interest in the subject has spawned a vast outpouring of literature, which only increases with time. This two-volume bibliography of Custer literature is the first to be published in some twenty-five years and the most complete ever assembled. Drawing on years of research, Michael O’Keefe has compiled entries for roughly 3,000 books and 7,000 articles and pamphlets. Covering both nonfiction and fiction (but not juvenile literature), the bibliography focuses on events beginning with Custer’s tenure at West Point during the 1850s and ending with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Included within this span are Custer’s experiences in the Civil War and in Texas, the 1873 Yellowstone and 1874 Black Hills expeditions, the Great Sioux War of 1876–77, and the Seventh Cavalry’s pursuit of the Nez Perces in 1877. The literature on Custer, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and the Seventh Cavalry touches the entire American saga of exploration, conflict, and settlement in the West, including virtually all Plains Indian tribes, the frontier army, railroading, mining, and trading. Hence this bibliography will be a valuable resource for a broad audience of historians, librarians, collectors, and Custer enthusiasts.

When Candace Savage and her partner buy a house in the romantic little town of Eastend, she has no idea what awaits her. At first she enjoys exploring the area around their new home, including the boyhood haunts of the celebrated American writer Wallace Stegner, the backroads of the Cypress Hills, the dinosaur skeletons at the T. Rex Discovery Centre, the fossils to be found in the dust-dry hills. She also revels in her encounters with the wild inhabitants of this mysterious land -- two coyotes in a ditch at night, their eyes glinting in the dark; a deer at the window; a cougar pussy-footing it through a gully a few minutes' walk from town. But as Savage explores further, she uncovers a darker reality -- a story of cruelty and survival set in the still-recent past -- and finds that she must reassess the story she grew up with as the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of prairie homesteaders.

A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year: “Part Western, part historical epic, part romantic melodrama and part crime novel” (Montreal Gazette). Son of a Canadian lumber baron, Wesley Case is a former soldier who sets out into the untamed borderlands between Canada and the United States to escape a dark secret from his past. He settles in Montana, where he hopes to buy a cattle ranch, and where he begins work as a liaison between the American and Canadian militaries in an effort to contain the Native Americans’ unresolved anger in the wake of the Civil War. Amidst the brutal violence that erupts between the Sioux warriors and US forces, Case’s plan for a quiet ranch life is further compromised by an unexpected dilemma: he falls in love with the beautiful, outspoken, and recently widowed Ada Tarr. It’s a budding romance that soon inflames the jealousy of Ada’s quiet and deeply disturbed admirer—a tension that will explode just as the American government unleashes its final assault on the Indians. Following The Englishman’s Boy and The Last Crossing, this is part of the acclaimed trilogy by an author who “is often compared to Larry McMurtry, and rightfully so” (Booklist). “A love story, a thriller, a Conradian meditation on courage and manhood, and a thoughtful examination of the origins of Canada’s tangled relationship with its big southern neighbor . . . An epic that matches its grand ambitions.” —Winnipeg Free Press “One of North America’s best writers.” —Annie Proulx, New York Times–bestselling author of Barkskins

"The first comprehensive history of the Aboriginal First World War experience on the battlefield and the home front. When the call to arms was heard at the outbreak of the First World War, Canada's First Nations pledged their men and money to the Crown to honour their long-standing tradition of forming military alliances with Europeans during times of war, and as a means of resisting cultural assimilation and attaining equality through shared service and sacrifice. Initially, the Canadian government rejected these offers based on the belief that status Indians were unsuited to modern, civilized warfare. But in 1915, Britain intervened and demanded Canada actively recruit Indian soldiers to meet the incessant need for manpower. Thus began the complicated relationships between the Imperial Colonial and War Offices, the Department of Indian Affairs, and the Ministry of Militia that would affect every aspect of the war experience for Canada's Aboriginal soldiers. In his groundbreaking new book, For King and Kanata, Timothy C. Winegard reveals how national and international forces directly influenced the more than 4,000 status Indians who voluntarily served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force between 1914 and 1919--a per capita percentage equal to that of Euro-Canadians--and how subsequent administrative policies profoundly affected their experiences at home, on the battlefield, and as returning veterans."--Publisher's website.