Frank Carlson Library

The timid rabbit who outwits the tyrannical bear, the wonderful turtle who marries the Indian chief's daughter, the pet crane who saves a family--these and many other legendary figures appear in Myths and Legends of the Sioux. Marie L. McLaughlin, born to a white father and a mixed-blood Sioux mother, heard these stories while growing up among the eastern Sioux of Minnesota. When she recorded them for posterity in 1916 she had long been the wife of...

"38 Nooses" details the events surrounding the 1862 uprising of the Dakota Indians led by Little Crow within the larger context of the Civil War, the history of the Dakota people, and the subsequent United States-Indian wars.

The U.S. Army's goal: wipe out the remnants of scattered, starving people on the frontier's Northern Plain. But before Colonel Nelson A. Miles, the Bear Coat, launched his Spring campaign into the heart of Indian country, the commander took one last stab at negotiations and called on a Cheyenne woman and the famous half-breed pony scout named Johnny Bruguier. Together, they traveled to the valley of the upper Rosebud River to urge the Sioux to surrender....

Fanny Kelly's memoir, first published in 1872, is an intelligent and thoughtful narrative. Kelly spent five months as a prisoner of Ogalalla Sioux in 1864 when she was nineteen years old. A woman of her time, there was no reason she should feel sympathy toward her captors, but the introduction points out examples of expressed favor toward the Sioux, however unconscious. This narrative is a valuable part of literature not only for its historical importance...

"In the tradition of Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals comes Gustav Niebuhr's compelling history of Abraham Lincoln's decision in 1862 to spare the lives of 265 condemned Sioux men, and the Episcopal bishop who was his moral compass, helping guide the president's conscience. More than a century ago, during the formative years of the American nation, Protestant churches carried powerful moral authority, giving voice to values such as mercy and...

"August 18, 1862. On the Sioux reservation in southwestern Minnesota, Indians desperate for food and freedom rise up against whites in the region. Sarah Wakefield, the wife of a physician, is taken captive with her two babies. Their fate falls into the hands of the warrior Caske, with whom she has slim acquaintance. As war rages, little does she know how entwined their lives will become. Beneath the Same Stars is the gripping story of two people,...

The author of Dances With Wolves turns his creativity and imagination toward America's doomed romantic hero, George Armstrong Custer—the youngest general of the Civil War, trailblazer, Indian hunter, passionate lover, obsessive husband, and tormented, guilt-ridden soul. A wonderful merger of fact and fiction, Marching to Valhalla is soon to be a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt.

On June 25, 1876, 611 men of the United States 7th Cavalry rode towards the banks of the Little Bighorn where three thousand Indians stood waiting for battle. The lives of two great war leaders would soon become forever linked: Crazy Horse, leader of the Oglala Sioux, and General George Armstrong Custer. This masterly dual biography tells the epic story of the lives of these two men: both were fighters of legendary daring, both became honoured leaders...