The Last Frontier
Here is one of the rousing and inspiriting stories of the old West that is not a Western, a story of flight and pursuit, battle on the Great Plains, and the triumph of an ideal.
Less than a life span ago, a remnant of the proud Cheyennes, herded onto the Indian Territory in Oklahoma, broke away in apparently hopeless flight back to their home in the Black Hills of Wyoming. The country they had to cross was laced -- for this was in the 1870's -- by railroads and telegraph lines, was filled with towns and homesteads. The Cheyennes numbered no more than three hundred, men and women and children. Ten thousand soldiers, the pick of trained Indian fighters under General Crook, were sent out against them. And yet, by ruse, by their lore of the wilds, by sheer refusal to be beaten in the face of overwhelming odds and hardship, a tiny band won through, over that vast checkerboard, to their goal.
"In all American history," wrote Struthers Burt in 'Powder River' "there is nothing finer than the loping march of the Cheyennes up from the Indian Territory and their subsequent incredible frozen flight. The march of Xenophon and his ten thousand was as nothing compared with it."
Treated as Howard Fast has treated it, with superb command of action, but with compassion and indignation, this tale of men who are willing to sacrifice their lives for freedom and for human dignity is no lost "incident" of history. It is a pertinent as well as an absorbingly readable story for the world of today. from the dust jacket of the Duell, Sloan & Pearce edition The tale of three hundred Cheyennes who, herded onto the Indian Territory in Oklahoma, broke away in apparent hopeless flight back to their home in the Black Hills of Wyoming. Ten thousand trained Indian fighters under General Crook were sent out in pursuit across a country networked with railroads and telegraph lines, filled with towns and homesteads. But this tiny band of men and women and children who refused to be beaten in the face of overwhelming odds and hardships, who were willing to sacrifice even their lives for freedom and human dignity, won through at last to their goal.
from the 1945 Pocket Book edition cover
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