A magisterial dual biography of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, the two most legendary and consequential American Indian leaders, who triumphed at the Battle of Little Bighorn and led Sioux resistance in the fierce final chapter of the "Indian Wars."
The Earth Is All That Lasts is a fast-paced and highly absorbing read, but the attempt to squeeze Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse into the same frame breaks little new ground in our understanding of the epic fight for the nation’s midsection...Instead, after a rousing opening chapter on the Battle at Little Bighorn, Mr. Gardner settles into a straightforward recapitulation of the Plains Indian Wars featuring its best-known episodes—from the Grattan Fight (1854) to the Fetterman Fight (1866)—as well as some other violent encounters that will be less familiar to many in his audience...Only rarely does the author raise his eyes to take in events happening elsewhere in the United States—most notably the Civil War, which conditioned U.S. military policy toward Native Americans during the conflict and especially afterward, in the era of Reconstruction...But if Mr. Gardner is unsuccessful in the effort to tell a new story, he enhances our appreciation of the brutality of this grinding conflict by documenting in graphic detail the horrors committed by both sides.
Spur Award winner Gardner delivers a stirring account of the resistance campaign led by Lakota holy man Sitting Bull and war chief Crazy Horse in the 1870s...As Gardner makes clear, however, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse’s greatest victory set the stage for their eventual defeat...After Little Big Horn, they had the permanent attention of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who vowed to force the anti-treaty bands onto reservations, or 'exterminate them'...Sharp characterizations and evocative imagery—'The warrior’s head was promptly cut off and taken to Deadwood, where it was paraded around town, earning its keeper enough whiskey to get him falling-down drunk'—make this a standout portrait of the Old West.
[Gardner] places Custer’s demise in the context of a complex Native political and military milieu, with two leaders of widely different dispositions in the forefront...One was Sitting Bull, who, as a holy man endowed with a gift of vision, not only launched a concerted war against the Whites, but also foresaw Custer’s defeat in specific detail...Another was Crazy Horse, the 'mysterious Oglala war chief,' whose bravery in the Battle of Little Bighorn verged on the suicidal...Gardner broadens the narrative to embrace related episodes such as the so-called Red Cloud War and the Starvation March, the latter of which made Sitting Bull’s name a household word—so famous that once he surrendered, he joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show...A grim highlight of the book is the denouement, which recounts what happened to Sitting Bull’s body in the years after his murder in 1890...A strong work of Western history that strives to bring the Native American view to center stage.
