Volume 46, Number 5 · March 18, 1999
Passion Play
By Thomas Powers
Crazy Horse
by Larry McMurtry
Lipper/Viking, 148 pp., $19.95
Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas
by Mari Sandoz, Introduction by Stephen B. Oates
University of Nebraska Press, 428 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Red Cloud: Warrior-Statesman of the Lakota Sioux
by Robert W. Larson
University of Oklahoma Press, 316 pp., $24.95
The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull
by Robert M. Utley
Ballantine, 413 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Plains Indian Drawings, 1865-1935: Pages from a Visual History
edited by Janet Catherine Berlo
Abrams, 240 pp., $65.00
It was 'howling adventures among the Injuns' that Huckleberry Finn vowed to light out for when Aunt Sally threatened to adopt and civilize him, and it's a bet he wasn't thinking about the root-digging Indians of the Utah desert, or the sheep-herding Indians of the Southwest, or the rice-harvesting Indians of the Great Lakes, but about the gorgeous, horse-riding, buffalo-killing, war-whooping Indians in feathers of the Great Plains who lived as they liked and rode where they pleased. Finn was chafing for freedom in the 1840s, stuck in western Missouri on a hemp farm ('There's liver places than a hemp farm,' writes Twain), at a time when the three men who became the great Sioux chiefs of the nineteenth century—Red Cloud in his twenties, Sitting Bull in his teens, and Crazy Horse not yet ten—had rarely if ever seen a white man, and could not imagine the restless ocean of white faces to the east already beginning to dream about bettering their condition across the wide Missouri.
Review, 6744 words
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