George A Custer and/or Crazy Horse

The New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers
...a narrative of striking richness and power; it is simultaneously intimate and strange, like something overheard in someone else's tongue and mind, and it conveys the feel of a life relentlessly driven, and in the end extinguished, by unknown forces for reasons only dimly understood.

It will be 3 years ago this February that I first read this book. I then bought the hard cover version so I could keep it in my library and read it over and over again.
Prior to this, my interest in Western history was confined to pioneers and cowboys. The Indians were just some folks who happened to get a tough break. This book though, opened my mind to a culture that I had never known or thought much about. Now I read every book I can get on the subject, and spend my summers touring forts and battlefields.

Since my first reading of Crazy Horse I have read a biography of Sandoz. I know that her research was maticulous and that she had a good rapport with the Indians who knew Crazy Horse and were still living at the time she was writing. Of course, since this is mostly an oral history it is hard to know what is actual truth and what is the myth which grew around the subject, but it doesn't really matter. No one can read this book without coming away with a new understanding of what it was like to live the free life on the Plains, and how devestating it must have been for those who lost it.

her literary works, and encouraging interest in the High Plains region of Nebraska and the Great Plains.
The Buffalo Hunters: Stories of the Hide Men,
Old Jules
Crazy Horse
Cheyenne Autumn
The Cattlemen
and The Beaver Men.