"In previous accounts, the U.S. Army's first clashes with the powerful Sioux tribe appear as a set of irrational events with a cast of improbable characters - a Mormon cow, a brash lieutenant, a drunken interpreter, an unfortunate Brule chief, and an incorrigible army commander. R. Eli Paul shows instead that the events that precipitated General William Harney's attack on Chief Little Thunder's Brule village foreshadowed the entire history of conflict between the United States and the Lakota people." "Brevet 2nd Lieutenant John Grattan set the stage when, in August 1854, his small command marched into a Brule camp near Fort Laramie to arrest a Lakota man. Grattan's rash decision to fire on the camp cost him, his interpreter, and twenty-nine soldiers their lives. A year later, sent to Nebraska Territory to avenge this loss, General Harney sighted a village on the banks of Blue Water Creek. His force attacked Little Thunder's village, killing dozens of men, women, and children and taking others captive on a battlefield that stretches across a buffalo ranch now owned by television mogul Ted Turner."--BOOK JACKET.

R. Eli Paul is Museum Director of the Liberty Memorial Museum of World War One in Kansas City, Missouri.