We remember Dewey Beard, of the famed Miniconjou Lakota Horn Cloud family, much as this book’s subtitle suggests, as the last survivor of the Little Bighorn. Dewey Beard was there, and took a soldier’s life.
He was with Sitting Bull in Canada, too, and with Big Foot at Wounded Knee, where he lost his father, mother, two brothers, and his wife and son. Add a stint with Cody’s Wild West show; many ceaselessly fascinating years on the Pine Ridge Reservation; and, acclaim, finally, in the 1950s for all of this, and we have a remarkable American life. Philip Burnham, professor at George Mason University and storyteller in the rich vein of Ian Frazier and Tom Powers, serves up a highly recommended tale in Song of Dewey Beard: Last Survivor of the Little Bighorn.
—Paul L. Hedren, author of After Custer: Loss and Transformation in Sioux Country
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