June 25, 1876

I admit to being a sucker for all things Little Bighorn. On this day in 1876 Sioux and Cheyenne under the leadership of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse outwitted the U.S. 7th Cavalry and thus successfully resisted for a time their relocation to reservations away from their sacred spaces and on lands deemed unfit for agriculture. These were nomadic people inexorably being hemmed in by US settlement into the Great Plains. With the Civil War over, the nation was able to devote the full strength of its military to suppressing the indigenous people of the country's great midsection. Two very readable books on the Battle of Little Bighorn are Evan S. Connell's 1984 Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn and James Welch and Paul Stekler's 1994 Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians. 

Connell is author of the Mr- and Mrs. Bridge novels dramatising a midwestern family's uneasy movement into mid-twentieth century social change from two points of view: the conservative, outer directed Mr. and the domestic, pollyannaish Mrs. The 1990s Merchant Ivory film combined the two and starred Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in the titular roles. 

James Welch, the great Montana novelist who died far too young, author of Fools Crow, The  Heartsong of Charging Elk, The Indian Lawyer, The Death of Jim Loney and Winter in the Blood, was of mixed Blackfeet, Gros Ventre and Irish heritage and centered his novels on the often tragic intersection of white and Native cultures, usually in small strips of Montana-Wyoming-Idaho where cultures rubbed against each other frequently--though Heartsong (which is probably his best) took that cultural collision to Paris and Marseilles in the wake of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.  Think of Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000) as a late twentieth century reversal of Robinson Crusoe. Three of his novels, including the first two--Death and Winter --which cemented his reputation as a leading figure in the Native American literary renaissance were were spare modernist tragedies but the last two, Fools Crow (a many-paged book) and Heartsong, while still laced with melancholy, were expansive historical fictions in which some measure of individual peace could be found. As far as I know, none of Welch's novels has been filmed, which is a great loss.