"At the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation on January 7, 1891, Lieutenant Edward Casey (the last white soldier to die in the Indian Wars) was assassinated by Lakota warrior Plenty Horses. Four days later peaceful Lakota hunters were ambushed by rancher Pete Culbertson and his brothers. According to frontier justice of the day, Plenty Horses would have been summarily hanged and the Culbertsons never brought to trial, but public opinion, inflamed by the massacre at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890, led to Plenty Horses and the Culbertsons being tried in civilian courts.

In telling the dramatic story of these events and their impact across the nation, In the Shadow of Wounded Knee shows America at the instant it was shifting from a wild frontier country into a modern nation and how the cost of building the country was paid not just in human lives but with the sacrifice of human hopes and dreams and the future of entire native cultures."--Pub. desc.