Wounded Knee Where a Nation’s Hoop Was Broken

An etching from a photograph--The frozen dead at Wounded Knee three days after the massacre by 7th Cavalry troopers.

127 years ago one of the final chapters of the conquest of the Native Peoples in the United States was carried out.  It was on this day in 1890 in the frigid snow that troopers of the 7th Cavalry surrounded a starving band of Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota and opened up with deadly carbine and Hotchkiss gun fire.  By the end of the day by the banks of Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, as many as 300 tribal members lay dead or dying, most of them women, children, and the infirm.  Twenty-five troopers also died, 56 were injured and six of those later died—almost all from “friendly” cross fire during the chaotic “battle.”

The legendary Lakota medicine man Black Elk, who survived the massacre as a child, later wrote:

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream ... the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

Trouble had been brewing for years after the back of Indian resistance on the high plains was finally broken following the massacre of Col. George Armstrong Custer and members of the 7th Cavalry in 1876. 

The Lakota and their allies the Northern Cheyenne and Arapahoe were forced to sign treaties ceding most of their remaining lands and were moved onto desolate reservations.  They were promised generous annual payments and provision of food, blankets, and clothing to make up for their lost buffalo hunting economy.  A parsimonious Congress and a corrupt system of Indian Agents failed continuously to make good on those promises.  Attempts to convert the Lakota to farmers on the poor arid reservation land largely failed, especially after an extended drought in the last half of the 1880’s.  Starvation and disease swept the reservations and annually hundreds died.

As a result of the increasing privation the Lakota nation welcomed and adopted the Ghost Dance preached by the Piute prophet, Wovoka also known as Jack Wilson.  As originally conceived it was a ritual of spiritual cleansing and actually emphasized a common brotherhood among all people, including the Whites and pacifism.  But the rapid spread of the movement frightened local settlers across the west.  This alarm grew greater when a tribe in Utah introduced the Ghost Shirt to the movement, apparently inspired by the Mormon temple garments that protected wearers from harm.

The Lakota variation of the Ghost Dance was more militant than that practiced on the Southern plains and the Ghost Shirts were interpreted as having the power to stop bullets thus possibly making warriors invincible. 

Winter Ghost Dancing on the High Plains frightened settlers on lands taken from the former Great Sioux Reservation.

At the same time in the summer of 1890 the Great Sioux Reservation that had once encompassed most of western South Dakota including the sacred Black Hills and parts of adjacent Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana, was broken up into five much smaller reservations with land being squatted on by White settlers given to them.  Many Lakota living outside the new reservations were told to relocate or be labeled Hostiles and hunted down by the army. Ghost dancing only intensified as a result.

Alarmed settlers petitioned the War Department for protection. Against the advice of the senior Army officer on the Northern Plains, General Nelson A. Miles, the 7th Cavalry and other units including companies of Black Buffalo Soldiers were dispatched to the reservations to squelch the Ghost Dance and retrieve bands of renegades.  Miles was particularly worried about the assignment of the 7th which harbored deep resentments for the Custer massacre.

A contemporary Lakota pictograph shows the December 15 murder of Sitting Bull and his son who was in his bed at the hands of Indian Police.  The killing frightened his Hunkpapa band many of whom jumped the Standing Rock Reservation to seek shelter with the Miniconjou at the Cheyenne River Reservation.

Indian Agents and Army officers on the scene believed that Sitting Bull, the medicine man who had been the spiritual leader of the Lakota at the time of the fight on the Little Big Horn, was the mastermind behind the Dance. Although he approved, he seems to have had no leadership role in it.  Indian Police were dispatched to Sitting Bull’s cabin on the Standing Rock Reservation on December 15, 1890 and in the chaotic struggle that followed the old man was killed along with several others on both sides.

News of Sitting Bull’s murder inflamed the Lakota.  General Miles assessed the situation and wired Washington on December 19:

The difficult Indian problem cannot be solved permanently at this end of the line. It requires the fulfillment of Congress of the treaty obligations that the Indians were entreated and coerced into signing. They signed away a valuable portion of their reservation, and it is now occupied by white people, for which they have received nothing.

They understood that ample provision would be made for their support; instead, their supplies have been reduced, and much of the time they have been living on half and two-thirds rations. Their crops, as well as the crops of the white people, for two years have been almost total failures.

The dissatisfaction is wide spread, especially among the Sioux, while the Cheyennes have been on the verge of starvation, and were forced to commit depredations to sustain life. These facts are beyond question, and the evidence is positive and sustained by thousands of witnesses.

His appeal for calm and for adequate rations to relieve starvation on the reservation fell on deaf ears.  Some of Sitting Bulls Hunkpapa from the Standing Rock Reservation, fearing further reprisals from the Army or Indian Police, bolted to seek refuge with Spotted Elk—often called Big Foot by Whites—and his Miniconjou on the Cheyenne River Reservation.  They were immediately declared Hostiles. 

When they arrived at Cheyenne River they found a band in even more desperate condition than themselves.  Rations had not been issued in weeks.  The Miniconjou were starving and had nothing to share with the new arrivals.  Spotted Elk himself, like many of his band, was desperately sick with pneumonia.  And by harboring their cousins, they had become de facto hostiles themselves.

Spotted Elk, called by Whites Big Foot, was desperately ill as were many of his starving people, when the Hunkpapa arrived.  Their presence made them all hostiles in the eyes of the Army.  He decided to seep protection from peace chief Red Cloud at the Pine Ridge Agency.

On December 23 with three hundred of his own band and about 64 Hunkpapa, Spotted Elk made the desperate decision to jump his reservation and make a run to find refuge with the largest of the Lakota Bands—Red Cloud’s Oglala on the Pine Ridge.  As a peace chief Red Cloud got marginally better payment of rations and it was hoped his influence with the whites would protect the runaways.

The Indian Agents at Standing Rock and Cheyenne River called on the Army to intercept the band.  On December 28 elements of the 7th Cavalry under the command of Major Samuel Whitside intercepted Spotted Elk near Porcupine Butte.  They surrendered without resistance but were not immediately disarmed.  Instead they were force marched five miles through the snow to the banks of the Wounded Knee Creek where they were allowed to go into camp. That evening Col. James W. Forsyth and the rest of the 7th Cavalry arrived, bring the total troops on hand to over 500.  Forsyth was a known Indian hater who had publicly advocated their extermination as the only solution to the “Indian Problem.”

Forsyth ordered the camp surrounded on all sides.  He set up his four Hotchkiss guns, one to each side of the camp.  At dawn he ordered troops into the camp to seize weapons and to prepare the Hostile for transportation by train to a place “outside the zone of military operations.”  None of the old men were armed and 38 rifles were voluntarily surrendered before troopers began searching younger men for weapons.

When they came to Black Coyote, who was deaf and could not understand the commands of the soldiers, a struggle ensued for his rifle, which discharged in the struggle.  A young warrior named Yellow Bird and five of his friends may have pulled rifles from under their blankets and opened fire on the troopers.  Likely they did not, at least until after troopers began their indiscriminate fire into the exposed Indians.  A brief melee including some close fighting lasted no more than five minutes.

Famed artist Fredrick Remington, who deeply admired the Cavalry, made this inaccurate depiction of the opening of the "Battle of Wounded Knee for Harper's Weekly.  There were no fearsome chief in war bonnets. nor was there organized fire by the surrounded band.  All of the Army casualties were the result of wild friendly fire.  It is a small thing that the troopers are depicted in simple blouses instead of in the great coats most wore.

But the panicked troops on the perimeter of the camp let loose indiscriminate fire from all sides, many rounds tearing into their own ranks.  When resistance stopped, enraged troopers swarmed the “battlefield” executing wounded men where they lay. Hotchkiss gun fire raked the teepees where the women, children, sick and infirm were still hiding.  Many tried to flee down a ravine.  Those who stayed behind were burned alive in the tepees.  Troopers pursued the fleeing women, as well as the few men who escaped chasing them for miles and executing them as they found them.

In a couple of hours it was all over.  That evening a three day blizzard moved in freezing the corpses where they fell, including that of old, sick Spotted Elk contorted in pain. Three days later when the storm lifted General Miles arrived on the scene along with civilian workers hired to bury the dead.  He was outraged by what he found and immediately relieved Col. Forsyth of command.  As the contract workers scoured the prairie for the dead, they dug a long trench into which the corpses were unceremoniously dumped.  

In early January General Nelson A. Miles, Center, arrived on the scene and was outraged by the carnage and Colonel Forsyth's leadership of the 7th Cavalry. A day or two later William F. Cody--yup Buffalo Bill himself--points out an encampment of other "hostiles" on the Pine Ridge reservation.  They were taken without bloodshed.  Cody had been called away from his Wild West Show to treat with his old employee, Sitting Bull.  After the medicine man's murder he remained with Miles and an unofficial scout despite not having been active on the Plaines for years.  How much real help he was is best left to the imagination.

The Cavalry dead were placed in caskets and prepared for an honorable military funeral. Miles urged that Forsyth be court-martialed for dereliction of duty and for “completely losing control over his troops.”  He freely shared his criticism with the press.  None the less, most of the country, particularly in the West, approved of the action and regarded the Cavalry as heroes.  A Court of Inquiry did find fault with Forsyth, but he was never charged.  His command was restored, and he continued to advance in the army, retiring with full honors as a Major General in 1897.

Twenty soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor for the engagement, one of the highest percentages per troops engaged in any action in history. General Miles’s career was temporarily damaged by his dogged criticism of Forsyth and of the Army’s performance that day.  But he soldiered on. 

In 1893 he was placed in command of the troops that were called in to crush the Pullman Strike in Chicago.  In 1895 he became Commanding General of the Army.  Despite this staff command position, he elected to take to the field and command the operation which seized Puerto Rico in the Spanish American War, which he accomplished without the bloody battles in Cuba and the Philippines.  Then he did double duty as the post-war military governor of the new possession.  In 1900 he was made a three-star Lt. General, the army’s highest possible peace time rank.  When he retired from the Army still Commanding General in 1903, the post was abolished and replaced with the Army Chief of Staff—a star spangled military bureaucrat who would never, ever take to the field again.  In 1925 he keeled over and died of a heart attack while watching a circus performance with his grandchildren.

As for the Lakota, well, so many of them were permanently good Indians at last—dead ones.  The nation was crushed physically as well as spiritually.  Survivors lived under virtual military occupation in shabby open-air concentration camps for a couple of decades.  Then they were allowed simply to rot, hopefully into oblivion.

In 1973 there was another nasty flare up and a new siege at Wounded Knee.  The American Indian Movement (AIM) briefly captured the nation’s attention.  But it soon wandered.

This monument was erected to mark the slit trench where the Wounded Knee dead were thrown still frozen.  It is inscribed with the names of some of the identified dead, including Spotted Elk, but most were never identified.

Today the Pine Ridge Reservation is officially the poorest county in the United States.  Unemployment hovers around 80%.  Alcoholism, sexually transmitted disease, chronic depression, and violence are epidemic.  Life expectancy is decades shorter than the national norm.  Allegedly benign neglect seems to be the official policy of administration after administration regardless of the party in the White House.

But I hear drums are beating there again.  Can the ghost shirts be far behind?

Aces and Eights—Wild Bill’s Luck Runs Out

James Butler Hickok had been made semi-legendary as Wild Bill in the penny press and dime novels.  As a genuine celebrity his death was breathlessly covered by the popular press.

On August 2, 1876 James Butler Hickok a.k.a. Wild Bill, was shot in the back of the head by a drifter, Jack McCall while playing poker in a Deadwood saloon.  At the time of his death he was losing for the day, but held a promising hand with two pairs—black aces, black eights.  The fifth card was a Diamond but its value has never been agreed on.  After Hickok’s death aces and eights became commonalty referred to as the Dead Man’s Hand, although that designation had previously been given to other poker hands involved in fatal altercations.  

Hickok was born in Homer, Illinois in 1837.  His father was an abolitionist and ran a station of the Underground Railroad out of the family’s barn.  Young James was given his first pistols by his father to defend the station in case of raids by slave catchers.  Although the raids never came, the boy became an expert marksman and something of a local celebrity for his shooting skills.  

He high tailed it to Bloody Kansas in 1855 after he mistakenly thought he had killed a companion in a fist fight in which both boys ended up in a canal.  Likely he was drawn to Kansas in support of his father’s views.  He quickly enlisted in a Jayhawker militia fighting pro-slavery Bushwhackers.  He met young William Fredrick Cody, then 12 years old and serving as a scout/spy for the Jayhawkers.  

A young James Butler Hickok in his early Kansas and Missouri days is  flanked by his parents.  He idolized his abolitionist father who gave him his first pistol as a boy to guard the family barn, an Underground Railroad station.

By 1859 both he and Cody had signed on with the Russell, Waddell & Majors freight company, a contractor for the Pony Express.  After being injured by a bear, he was recuperating on light duty as a stable man at Rock Creek Station in Nebraska when he was involved in a gunfight with the former owner of the property David McCanles and members of his family who demanded a due payment on the land.  In a wild exchange of fire McCanles was killed.  Hickok, the station manager, his wife, and another employee were all charged with murder but acquitted on the ground of “defending company property.”  Whether Hickok himself made the fatal shot is still a matter of dispute.  

At the outset of the Civil War Hickok enlisted as an Army Teamster and within six months was promoted to wagon master.  He served in the bloody civil war with in a Civil War in Missouri. He was discharged in September 1862 and disappears from history until late the following year when he was appointed a detective for the Provost Marshal of South-West Missouri working out of Springfield.  There is indirect evidence, and much speculation that Hickok was serving as a spy during those missing months.  He mustered out of the service at war’s end but stayed in Springfield as a gambler.  

Hickok's 1865 gunfight with Davis Tutt in Sprngfield, Missouri is considered the first recorded quick draw, stand up gun fight in Western history.  His amazing kill shot at 75 feet made him instantly famous.

On July 21, 1865 he was involved in a shoot out in the Springfield streets that is usually considered first recorded “quick draw” duel in history—the kind of gunfight that though extremely rare in actuality became a staple of Western movies.  He shot and killed Davis Tutt, a drinking and gambling companion, over an alleged poker debt and Davis’s wearing of the watch he took from Hickok as collateral.  Several witnesses attest that both men drew and fired at a distance of 75 yards—ordinarily far out of range for accurate pistol fire. Tutt, at least, may have believed that both men could fire, preserve their honor, and survive the confrontation. Tutt’s shot was wild and wide.  Hickok sent a ball completely through Tutt’s torso, although he was standing in a sideways dueling posture to reduce his exposure.   The shot impressed everyone and cemented Hickok’s later reputation.  Again, he was acquitted on a murder charge because the judge instructed the jury to consider the incident a “fair fight.”  

Shortly after the trial Hickok, who had acquired the nickname Wild Bill during the war, was interviewed by Colonel George Ward Nichols for an article that appeared with a woodcut of a ferocious looking Wild Bill in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.  Either Hickok hornswoggled the writer, or more likely given his personal reputation for not being a braggart, Nichols simply spun a wild but entertaining yarn, but the article portrayed Hickok as a dead shot who had killed dozens of men. 

 In reality Wild Bill is known to have killed five men in gunfights over his entire life or six if credited with McCanles.  He was involved in other, non-fatal scrapes and fights, but his fearsome reputation discouraged many would-be assailants.  In addition in his Civil War service and later service as an Army Scout he undoubtedly killed others.  

After losing an election for city marshal of Springfield that November, Hickok accepted appointment as a Deputy U. S. Marshal at Fort Riley, Kansas.  During his tenure there he also served as a scout for Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry.  Custer burnished Hickok’s reputation by extolling his “sure shot” ability with a pistol, bravery, and honor in press interviews.  Hickok was involved a number of skirmishes and led small parties seeking out Indian raiders during Red Cloud’s War.  

In 1867 Hickok went east for the first time to cash in on his reputation by performing in a western melodrama in Buffalo, New York.  He was a terrible actor and returned west within a month with a bitter taste in his mouth.  

He ran for election as sheriff in Ellsworth County, Kansas but was defeated.  Resuming duties as a Federal Marshal he arrived at wild and woolly Hays City where he arrested a gang of Army deserters and was re-united with Cody who served as scout for an army detachment sent to help escort the 11 men to trial in Topeka.  

Hickok in his days as a Cavalry Scout around 1869.

After an 1869 stint as a scout with the Buffalo Soldier 10th Cavalry during which time he was wounded in the foot while rescuing a party of ranchers near Bijou Creek in Colorado who had been surrounded by hostiles.  

Back in Hays City in July 1869 Hickok finally won an election—two in fact—to serve as both city marshal and Ellis County sheriff.  Hays City was then a rail head destination for the great Texas cattle drives and the town and county were beset by wild cowboys fueled on lots of liquor at the end of a long trek.  It’s clear the Hickok was expected by the town’s “better elements” to clean things up.  

In his first month on the job he was involved in two fatal gunfights.  Legal questions about his first election and his defeat at the hands of his deputy for Sheriff in November was overturned on account of election fraud, Hickok remained in “effective control” of law enforcement in the area through most of 1870.

In July of that year he got into a fracas with two drunk and disorderly 7th Cavalry troopers who somehow got the best of him. The two held him on the floor of a saloon while one trooper, John Kile, tried to shoot him in through the ear.  When Kile’s pistol misfired, Hickok wrestled the gun from his companion, Jeremiah Lonergan, shot him in the knee and put two balls in Kile, who died the next day. Hickok held up in the town’s Boot Hill for a few days where the commanding view and clear field of fire would give him a chance in case fellow Troopers rode after him in revenge.  

That fall, after the town father’s decided to get out of the business of running a trail head for the cattle drives, Hickok was defeated for re-election and replaced by a much less expensive officer.  

Hickok in buckskins.  He liked to wear his bone-handled Navy Colt pistols butt forward and tucked into his belt rather than holstered.  Despite the cumbersome arrangement he could get them out with speed and fire with acuracy...until perhaps his eyesight began to fail.

In 1870 he became town marshal at Abilene, Kansas which had picked up most of Hays City’s former business as a cow town.  On October 5, 1871 Hickok was involved in his last known fatal gun fight, the outcome of which would haunt him the rest of his life. 

After an earlier run-in with a drunken saloon keeper—Phil Coe who was also a business rival to Hickok’s second profession as a gambler—he tried to arrest the man for discharging a gun on the street.  Coe pretended to hand over the gun, but spun it and took aim at the marshal who fired, killing him. Another man rushing to the scene caught Hickok’s attention and thinking that he was under attack by Coe’s friend, killed the second man.  That man turned out to be his own friend and deputy, Mike Williams.  Hickok was inconsolable.  He is known to have written an anguished letter to Williams’ widow and raised money for the support of her and her children.  Some historians believe that the incident happened because Hickok was beginning to lose his fabled eye-sight, probably from trachoma.  He now occasionally wore spectacles, but did not have them on the night of the shooting.  

Hickok’s career as a lawman and a gunfighter was over within two months.  He turned to full time gambling and heavy drinking.  In 1873 Cody convinced him to join with another showman, Texas Jack Omohundro in a new western stage play.  Although this was better received than his first theatrical attempt, he left the show after a few months with a substantial purse from the show’s success and two new Smith and Weston revolvers from his old friend. Those revolvers soon disappeared, probably pawned, as Hickok fell on hard times back out West. 

A publicity photo for the show Buffalo Bill Cody put together  in 1873.  After a few months on stage, Hickok came back west temporarily flush.  Flanked by two other well known scouts are Hickok, Cody and Texas Jack Omohundro, stars of the the play.

He returned to his old favorite twin bone handled Colt 1851 .36 Navy Model pistols—by then obsolete cap-and-ball revolvers.  He carried them, usually without  holsters, stuck in his belt butt forward in the fashion of the cavalry and drew them with equal skill with either a reverse spin or a cross draw.  

Frequently a loser at cards, Hickok was arrested for vagrancy several times before winding up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, another wide open town.  He had better luck there. In March of 1876 he married Agnes Thatcher Lake, the operator of a small time circus who was 14 years his senior.  Her money may have been a factor, although surviving letters indicate an admiring and loving relationship.  

Hickok with his long locks shorn for once with his new Cheyenne family.  Circus proprietor Agnes Thatcher Lake, right, was better looking than the formal photographer's frown of the period would indicate despite being Wild Bill's senior by 15 years.  Her daughter Emma, on whom Hickok reportedly doted, is center.

Despite his new wife, however, Hickok signed on as a teamster and guard for a wagon train taking supplies to the Black Hills gold rush town of Deadwood, a lawless, illegal settlement on Indian land in what is now South Dakota.  His aim was to re-make his fortune in the gold fields, not as a miner, but by separating miners from their gold—and possibly even from their claims.  He may also have had the notion that the new wild town might use his somewhat rusty services as a law man.  

Mary Jane Canary, better known as Calamity Jane, joined the wagon train near Ft. Laramie.  This was likely the first time the two met, although she would later claim to have previously had a child with Hickok and graciously given him up to Agnes Lake.  Calamity was an alcoholic sometime prostitute, teamster, and a fairly shrewd business woman who was better looking than the most frequently seen picture of her in her teamster’s buckskins.  They were both in Deadwood for some weeks, although they were not known to have a relationship.  

Hickok was drinking heavily and gambling, mostly unsuccessfully.  On August 1, he had a minor run in with Jack McCall that ended with Hickok buying the younger man a drink.  Perhaps because he had been humiliated, perhaps looking for revenge for a brother he said he believed Hickok had killed as marshal in Abilene, perhaps to just to gain a reputation as the man who killed Wild Bill, and perhaps at the urging of local interests that may have been worried about Hickok resuming his lawman career, McCall entered Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon No. 10 where Hickok was sitting uncharacteristically with his back to the door and shot him once in the back of the head crying out “Take this!”  

Hickok's assassin Jack McCall miraculously was acquitted by an illegal Deadwood jury.  He would not be so lucky when real law got a hold of him.

After boasting around town of the killing, he was captured and put on trial for murder but somehow acquitted.  The trial, however, in unorganized Deadwood, had no effect in law.  The next year Federal Marshals re-arrested McCall and he was tried in Dakota Territory capital Yankton.  This time he was convicted and hanged.  

Hickok’s friends arranged for a Deadwood funeral and burial.  The grave was later relocated to the new Mount Moriah Cemetery high on a hill overlooking the town. Various monuments were destroyed by souvenir hunters as the grave became a tourist attraction until the current bronze bust and marker were erected.  When Calamity Jane died in 1903, old timers buried her next to Hickok, some said as a joke because “Bill couldn’t stand to be around her” but probably to further interest tourists.  

Calamity Jane at Wild Bill's grave after it was moved to Mt. Moriah Cemetery.  She peddled picture post cards of this to tourists for drinking money.  Later she would be buried  next to Hickok "as a joke"--and as an added tourist attraction.

Hickok was one of the western figures who almost lived up to his reputation—if you discount the wild exaggerations of the dime novels and barbershop rags like the Police Gazette.  But in death he became iconic.  He has been portrayed in dozen of films, the best known of which include Wild Bill Hickok staring William S. Hart in 1923; The Plainsman, C.B. DeMille’s fanciful 1936 epic staring Gary Cooper; the musical Calamity Jane with Howard Keel opposite Doris Day in the title role in 1953; Little Big Man with Jeff Corey as Dustin Hoffman’s mentor in 1970; and the gritty Wild Bill starring Jeff Bridges in 1995.  Wild Bill Elliot and Roy Rogers both played him in B movie oaters. 

Baby Boomers undoubtedly best remember the long running TV show (1951-’58) The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok starring heart throb Guy Madison with Andy Divine as his comic sidekick Jingles.  Other than the name the TV character had nothing in common with the historical figure. 
 

Older Baby Boomers like me will remember the long running TV show Wild Bill Hickok staring heart throb Guy Madison and Andy Divine as comic sidekick Jingles.  Absolutely nothing in the series was remotely like the life of the real teamster/spy/scout/lawman/actor/gambler/drunk.  But we can all imitate Divine gargling out "Wait for me, Wild Bill!"

Much better was David Milch’s riveting cable mini-series Deadwood which ran from 2004-2006 with Keith Carradine as Wild Bill.

Hickok has also frequently appeared in print in innumerable cheap popular paperback novels, and in comic books, but also in serious fiction, most significantly in Thomas Burger’s Little Big Man, Buffalo Gals by Larry McMurtry, and Darlin’ Bill: A Love Story of the Wild West by Jerome Charyn.