In 1906 there arrived at Lame Deer, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, a petite, teenage bride named Julia Tuell. With her school-master husband she would live among the Cheyennes, then briefly among the Sac and Fox tribe in Oklahoma and finally (for more than a decade) with the Lakota (Sioux) on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota.

Realizing the fleeting beauty of Plains Indian culture, a beauty fading before her eyes, Julia chose for her constant companion an 8 x 10 Kodak camera and indelibly preserved on its glass plates the treasures in this book.

During the first three decades of the twentieth century, warriors who had fought General Custer still lived. Women who had sheltered and nourished their children among the darkest days of Plains Indian life still survived. The most sacred religious ceremonies of the tribes, the Sun Dance and the Massaum, were still regularly practiced (when reservation officials allowed it).

Julia Tuell understood that all facets of Plains Indian culture were precious and endangered, so she photographed both the mundane and the magnificent, both day-to-day tasks such as food preparation and striking portraits of chiseled faces that exude character.