Paul Hedren Presents: Sitting Bull’s War

Sitting Bull’s War: The Battle of the Little Big Horn and the Fight for Buffalo and Freedom on the Plains

Thursday, August 6 @ 6 p.m.

Niobrara County Library

In this deeply moving account of America’s greatest Indian war, readers are quickly immersed in the world of Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes and their futile struggle in the 1870s to retain a lifeway on the buffalo prairie.  Those steadfast Northern Indians faced a succession of white invaders:  railroaders, borderland surveyors, prospectors, and ultimately the United States Army.  In the best of days they turned back George Crook at the Rosebud and wiped out George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn.  But a dozen other clashes followed, and in the end these tradition-minded people could not endure the army’s endless hounding.  Some fled to Canada to a luring if momentary exile, but in the end one and all faced starvation, submission, and, for some, death.  Sitting Bull’s War is the story of a people clinging to a traditional life on the buffalo prairie. Copies will be available to purchase.

Paul L. Hedren is a retired National Park Service historian and superintendent whose thirty-seven-year career led him from Minnesota to Wyoming, Montana, Utah, North Dakota, and Nebraska.  He’s also a life-long student of the Great Sioux War, and a prolific writer.  His many books and articles have received numerous honors, including a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, a Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, and multiple Best Book awards from the Little Big Horn Associates.  His life-long labors in history were acknowledged in 2022 by the John G. Neihardt Foundation with a prestigious Word Sender Award.  A firm believer in the notion of landscapes as books, Hedren can commonly be found exploring the trails, battlefields, back corners, and sacred sites of that intriguing 1870s Indian war, and when not in the field resides in Omaha, Nebraska.