The Cheyenne Wars: Dog Soldiers, Roman Nose, and the Central Plains

How did a people who gathered wild rice from canoes in the lake country of Minnesota become the horsemen who fought the United States Army across the central plains? The Tsitsistas, the Cheyenne, remember it not as one departure but as a slow drift west, a generation at a time: to river villages and cornfields on the Missouri, to horses traded north from the Spanish settlements, to the buffalo, and to winter camps in the timbered bottoms of the Platte, the Republican and the Smoky Hill.

By the 1860s that world stood in the path of gold seekers, railroads and treaty commissioners. The book follows the fighting that came of it: the dawn massacre of Black Kettle's camp at Sand Creek in 1864, the medicine of Roman Nose and his death at Beecher Island, Custer's attack on the Washita, and the Dog Soldiers' long war for the country between the Platte and the Arkansas. From there the story turns north, to the Northern Cheyenne and the Little Bighorn, surrender and betrayal and the reservation years, and closes with the keepers of the Sacred Arrows.

At Sand Creek, Black Kettle had flown an American flag over his lodge. Four years later, on the Washita, Custer's troopers killed him anyway.