The feast of Frontier Partisans content continues. Mark Lee Gardner, who has turned in a solid collection of Western frontier history touching on the lives and legends of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Theodore Roosevelt, has a new dual biography coming out on Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. I will inevitably measure any such book against Thomas Powers’ The Killing of Crazy Horse, which is one of my favorite Frontier Partisans books — and it’s a tough bar to clear. But Gardner does good work, and I will be interested to see what he brings to this epic, tragic tale.
True West is giving it big play, so hats of to Bob Boze Bell and his outfit, too. I really like this portrait of Crazy Horse. Gets the wavy hair and the scar from No Water’s pistol shot to the face from a love-triangle that turned violent. Good stuff.
A magisterial dual biography of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, the two most legendary and consequential American Indian leaders, who triumphed at the Battle of Little Bighorn and led Sioux resistance in the fierce final chapter of the “Indian Wars.”
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull: Their names are iconic, their significance in American history undeniable. Together, these two Lakota chiefs, one a fabled warrior and the other a revered holy man, crushed George Armstrong Custer’s vaunted Seventh Cavalry. Yet their legendary victory at the Little Big Horn has overshadowed the rest of their rich and complex lives. Now, based on years of research and drawing on a wealth of previously ignored primary sources, award-winning author Mark Lee Gardner delivers the definitive chronicle, thrillingly told, of these extraordinary Indigenous leaders.
Both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were born and grew to manhood on the High Plains of the American West, in an era when vast herds of buffalo covered the earth, and when their nomadic people could move freely, following the buffalo and lording their fighting prowess over rival Indian nations. But as idyllic as this life seemed to be, neither man had known a time without whites. Fur traders and government explorers were the first to penetrate Sioux lands, but they were soon followed by a flood of white intruders: Oregon-California Trail travelers, gold seekers, railroad men, settlers, town builders—and Bluecoats. The buffalo population plummeted, disease spread by the white man decimated villages, and conflicts with the interlopers increased.
On June 25, 1876, in the valley of the Little Big Horn, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, and the warriors who were inspired to follow them, fought the last stand of the Sioux, a fierce and proud nation that had ruled the Great Plains for decades. It was their greatest victory, but it was also the beginning of the end for their treasured and sacred way of life. And in the years to come, both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, defiant to the end, would meet violent—and eerily similar—fates.
An essential new addition to the canon of Indigenous American history and literature of the West, The Earth Is All That Lasts is a grand saga, both triumphant and tragic, of two fascinating and heroic leaders struggling to maintain the freedom of their people against impossible odds.
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I’ve got Jack Carr’s latest on order at the library. Pretty impressive book trailer here. Tomahawks.
And the official trailer for the new Carr-based thriller series The Terminal List has dropped.
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Somebody said this one gives off “Cormac McCarthy vibes.” I vaguely remember intending to read the novel this was made from a few years back. Never did, but I reckon Lady Marilyn and I will fire this up — we’re both fans of Jessica Chastain and Ralph Fiennes. And of Cormac McCarthy vibes.
John M Roberts says
Mark Lee Gardner just needs a white suit. And I saw some Winkler tomahawks in that Terminal List trailer.
lane batot says
I mean, the original Colonel Sanders, right?
Matthew says
Speaking of Cormac McCarthy, do you think his works are nihilistic? I’ve heard him called that but I don’t think he is, but he is definitely dark.
JimC says
Blood Meridian might be seen that way; maybe No Country For Old Men. The Road certainly is not.
Matthew says
I agree about the Road.
I still wonder about Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men. Couldn’t they be seen as warnings about the human propensity for violence? A lot people seem to label anything that is not bright and cozy nihilistic. But I think you can write dark fiction and not be nihilistic. There is an anime called Sonny Boy where one character says something like, “Nothing matters but cool things happen.” That’s seems to be the theme of the series but it is not exactly a dark series. It is an optimistic nihilism which strikes me as erroneous. (Though it is an enjoyable series.) But I am a pessimistic Christian.
Quixotic Mainer says
All The Pretty Horses definitely has a moral viewpoint, if not much punctuation. I think he tells Blood Meridian from such a neutral point of view to drive home the shock and let the reader’s sensibilities do it for them. That being said, and accounting for the wide variation of human interpretation; the idea of some basement dwelling Glanton fanboy is pretty eerie.
Matthew says
I think that is probably right. It just that it seems a lot of people mistake dark for nihilistic.
There could very well be someone weirdo who admires Glanton. Maybe some of the white supremacists types.
I’ve been reading Horace Bell’s Reminiscences of a Ranger and he has a chapter covering Glanton’s depredations.
Quixotic Mainer says
The Bell book and Samuel Chamberlain’s dragoon tales are on my upcoming nonfiction list. I think both of them crossed paths with him.
Matthew says
The Bell book is a riot. Both because of the things that he recorded but also because of how he writes it.
I’ve heard he might have exaggerated for the sake of a good story, but if he did it was a good story.
JimC says
Reminiscences of a Ranger is probably my favorite frontier memoir.
Quixotic Mainer says
The old “he’s not lying, he’s telling a story”. You’ve both helped me pick which one I’m reading first for sure.
I wonder if Bell and Monstery ever met? He was in San Francisco at about the same time. I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.
Padre says
Back in my undergrad days, I did a fun class on the western as literature with English lit prof who did his doctorate on McCarthy’s work. Needless to say, we read and discussed McCarthy a lot. His conclusion was that McCarthy has (or had) something akin to a traditional Catholic worldview, at least in terms of morality.
This was back when McCarthy was more reclusive, a few years before The Road and the interviews he did around its release, so I’d be interested to talk to that prof again tto find out if he’s had to change his interpretation at all.
JimC says
I don’t have the grounding in the theology to be able to assess that conclusion, but I can say I’ve seen similar commentary. I think it’s certainly possible to read McCarthy not as nihilistic but as recognizing a fallen world in which the devil — probably literally in the case of the Judge — is at play… a world in desperate need of redemption.
lane batot says
Yeah, I’ll havta get this one(“The Earth Is All That Lasts”) for shore! I have in my stack-to-read(up next), just in time for Little Bighorn Day, Stanley Vestal’s classic “Warpath”, the biography of White Bull, Sitting Bull’s nephew, and often the warrior touted to be the one who actually killed Custer himself. I can’t believe I never came across or found a copy of this book in all my rambling reading years, but I have it now, and looking forward to getting into it soon!
Joe says
Looking forward to Mark Lee Gardner’s book. My Grandpa had several books on Crazy Horse and the Lakota, including one by an author named Joseph Marshall I remember really enjoying. It’s a topic we weren’t taught in depth in school.