Trickster and transformer, powerful and vulnerable, Coyote is a complex figure in Indian legend. He was often the ultimate example of how not to be: foolish, proud, self-important. The tales in Old Man Coyote were told by the Crow Indians of present-day southeastern Montana. During long winter evenings by the lodge fire, they enjoyed hearing about the only warrior ever to visit the Bird Country, the Little-people who adopted a lost boy, the two-faced tribe that gambled for keeps, the marriage of Worm-face, and the origin of the buffalo. Wandering through these well-spun tales is the...

Frank B. Linderman knew the frontier types who appear in these robust stories and sketches. A trapper in Montana during his youth, he stayed on as a publisher, politician, and businessman, beginning to write in middle age. The Montana Stories of Frank B. Linderman, originally published in 1920, still crackles with the freshness of arctic wind, the pungency of aged whiskey, the impact of a whip. "In the Name of Friendship" sets up a deadly bluff with ironic results. "Was Chet Smalley Honest?" shows a good deed in danger of punishment. "Jake Hoover's Pig" describes a hungry man's sentimental...

While trapping in Montana during the 1880s, young Frank B. Linderman befriended the Kootenai Indians. At their campfires he heard about Skinkoots the coyote, Co-pee the owl, Frog Chief, and the other animal people. The telling impressed him, and in 1926 he was able, from long familiarity, to translate the tales for Kootenai Why Stories. Old-Man appears as the flawed undergod known by different names to other tribes, a figure provoking more hilarity than reverence. The frog is another prominent character in this northwestern Indian lore. Also recognizable for their distinctive attributes are...

Sheriff and outlaw Henry Plummer needed no introduction to the citizens of Montana Territory in the mid-nineteenth century. And well into the twentieth century, Frank Bird Linderman sought out the stories of the people who knew Plummer-and ultimately hanged him. In 1920 Linderman completed a novel about Plummer's life, but it was rejected by publisher after publisher. They felt that it showed too much fidelity to historical truth for a public increasingly enamored of western dime novels. Eighty years later, Linderman's lively interpretation of one of Montana's most enduring legends is being...

In his old age, Plenty-coups (1848 1932), the last hereditary chief of the Crow Indians, told the moving story of his life to Frank B. Linderman, the well-known western writer whohad befriended him. Plenty-coups is a classic account of the nomadic, spiritual, and warring life of Plains Indians before they were forced onto reservations. Plenty-coups tells of the great triumphs and struggles of his own life: his powerful medicine dreams, marriage, raiding and counting coups against the Lakotas, fighting alongside the U.S. Army, and the death of General Custer.

This new edition allows readers...

In 1822 Elijah Mounts, barely eighteen, shoulders his rifle and walks from his uncle's Missouri farm to Saint Louis to seek his fortune in the fur trade. Frank B. Linderman's 1922 novel is a first-person account, based on a true story and his own trapping experience, of a young man's coming of age among the trappers and Indians in remote Montana, on the upper reaches of the wild Missouri River. Befriended by Wash Lamkin, "Dad" to all who know him, "Lige" learns to live on the trail, trap the beaver, hunt the buffalo, speak the Cree language, and observe the customs of the country and its...

"Bears are commonly misquoted." That s what Frank B. Linderman concluded after spending most of his life in the wild. In Big Jinny Linderman lets a little grizzly cub speak for herself, and Jinny has plenty to say.This is Jinny s story about growing up in the Montana wilderness, where every day promises adventure, mischief and danger. She and her brother cub, Jim, learn from their mother about eating, playing, avoiding certain animals and, most important of all, minding their own business. But when Jinny wakes up from her first hibernation, curiosity tempts her to ignore this most...