Beard was not only a witness to two major battles against the Lakota; he also traveled with William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's Wild West show, worked as a Hollywood Indian, and witnessed the grand transformation of the Black Hills into a tourism mecca. Beard spent most of his later life fighting to reclaim his homeland and acting as "old Dewey Beard," a living relic of the "old West" for the tourists.

This long-overdue biography of Dewey Beard (ca. 1862-1955), a Lakota who witnessed the Battle of Little Bighorn and survived the Wounded Knee Massacre, chronicles a remarkable life that can be traced through major historical events from the late nineteenth into the mid-twentieth century.