A War of Freedom, A War Never Won

Paul Hedren's new biography of Sitting Bull, plus three new biographies on the Earps and Doc Holliday, Jim Bridger, and the legendary boomtown of Deadwood

- STUART ROSEBROOK

In the annals of the American West, few names are as iconic and internationally recognized as Lakota Sioux leader and holy man Sitting Bull. Mythmakers, historians, boosters and filmmakers have all been drawn to his legendary life. Since June of 1876 and his overwhelming defeat of the U.S. Army and George Armstrong Custer along the banks of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull has captured and recaptured our imaginations. For many decades, historians have sought to provide us with a greater understanding, a more detailed and empathetic biography of the mythic man of the Sioux people, and one of those chroniclers is the award-winning scholar, Paul L. Hedren.

For the past two decades, the Omaha, Nebraska, historian has been thoroughly researching the history of the Great Sioux War. Sitting Bull's War: The Battle of Little Big Horn and the Fight for Buffalo and Freedom on the Plains (Pegasus Books, $35) is Hedren's 14th book. Many will consider it the greatest chronicle of Sitting Bull, the Lakota people, the war with the United States, and the significance of how the war changed the direction of American history forever. As the retired superintendent of national parks states in his Preface, "I've spent most of my adult life writing about of the great sagas occurring the plains, the Great Sioux War, or, as some call it, the Custer War, and others, the Black Hills War. ... I consciously intend that the work in hand defy the standard tradition. This is a unique history of the Great Sioux War, carefully and deliberately told through the eyes of its victims, the Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes of the northern plains, the tradition-embracing people of the buffalo prairie."