Volume 30, Number 6 · April 14, 1983
Reds
By Page Stegner
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse
by Peter Matthiessen
Viking, 628 pp., $20.95
On a sultry morning in June 1975 two FBI agents assigned to the Pine Ridge Reservation near Rapid City, South Dakota, followed a station wagon onto Indian land somewhere between the little towns of Oglala and Pine Ridge, two traditional Lakota Sioux communities thought to be harboring American Indian Movement (AIM) agitators and generally hostile to outside law enforcement agencies. Why the agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, were following the station wagon is not shown in the transcripts of their brief radio transmissions that morning, nor do they give any detail concerning the events that befell them when they suddenly found themselves parked in a woodlined field and fired upon from a nearby hill by an unspecified number of angry Indians. The only detail that mattered to Coler and Williams was how quickly backup forces of FBI and Bureau of Indian Affairs police could reach them.
Review, 3505 words
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