Whirlwind belonged to the Oglala Sioux, the people of Crazy Horse. Born in 1820 near the Black Hills, she knew prosperity-her father could afford an expensive Buffalo Maiden ceremony-and eventually tragedy. The Indian woman feels profoundly the chill of change: the decimation of the buffalo, the coming of white settlers to the Great Plains, the wars that reduce her people to raggedness. After the Battle of the Little Big Horn and an attack that leaves her band homeless, Grandmother Whirlwind faces her final challenge in joining the band's journey through snow toward refuge in Canada. With...

The title story, The Hanging Tree, is based on a true episode in Montana s gold-mining past. Three amazing characters meet: the cynical Doc Frail; the boy robber named Rune, whom Doc saves and enslaves; and Elizabeth, the young easterner who survives an Indian assault and comes under the care of Doc and Rune. In the gold-mining camp of Skull Creek Elizabeth becomes the mysterious Lucky Lady. A vigorous, psychological western, The Hanging Tree was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper.The stories in this book consolidate Dorothy M. Johnson s reputation for authenticity and...

This sequel to Dorothy M. Johnson s prize-winning Buffalo Woman continues the story of Grandmother Whirlwind s family of Hunkpapa and Oglala Sioux who flee to Canada with Sitting Bull after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. All the Buffalo Returning is a haunting novel about the fate of the Lakotas who find no surcease in Canada but are driven back onto their dwindling reservation by starvation. They face the enormous problem of surviving in the world of the white conquerors. Stormy, the grandson of Whirlwind, travels with his family to Pine Ridge for Wovoka s Ghost Dance. There, true...

Dorothy Johnson, author of The Hanging Tree and Indian Country, describes the great western experience of a number of nineteenth-century women of widely different situations and fates. Some were captured by Indians. Cynthia Ann Parker, assimilated to the Comanche tribe after being captured as a child, was later recaptured by U.S. soldiers who killed her Comanche husband and separated her forever from her sons. Pioneer Fanny Kelly spent five months as a captive of the Sioux; she went on to write a clearheaded book about her experiences. Some, like missionary Mary Richardson...

The Bozeman Trail led to the goldfields of Montana for six years in the 1860s before the army abandoned its three forts along the way, yielding to Red Cloud and his warriors. Hailed by A. B. Guthrie Jr. as "among the very best in the American Trail series, " The Bloody Bozeman weaves an "almost seamless" pattern of destiny and adventure.