Sitting Bull's War

The Battle of Little Big Horn and the Fight for Buffalo and Freedom on the Plains

By: Paul L. Hedren

Narrated by: David Colacci

In this account of America's greatest Indian war, listeners are quickly immersed in the world of Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes and their struggle in the 1870s to retain their lives on the buffalo prairie. Those impassioned Northern Indians faced a succession of white invaders—railroaders, borderland surveyors, prospectors, and ultimately the US Army. In the best of days they turned back George Crook at the Rosebud and wiped out George Armstrong Custer at the Little Big Horn. But many other clashes followed, and in the end these tradition-minded people could not endure the army's hounding. Some fled to Canada to a luring if momentary exile, but in the end one and all faced starvation, submission, and, for some, death.

Personifying this traditional way of life was Sitting Bull, legendary Hunkpapa Lakota spiritualist. He was supported throughout by a host of other kindred traditional chiefs and headmen who, in turn, rallied thousands of like-minded men, women, and children. And yet, but for momentary glory against Crook and Custer, this was a war that could not be won.

Award-winning author Paul L. Hedren has spent ten years writing this great American epic. Utilizing an array of Lakota and Cheyenne accounts, pictographic renderings, and original interviews, this is the story of a people intent only on adhering to a traditional life on the buffalo prairie.

©2025 Paul L. Hedren (P)2025 Tantor Media

Great documentation

Great storytelling of sitting Bulls people, describing locations and stories of days gone by. Highly recommend reading. I even purchased a hard copy of the book for my personal library.

Sitting Bull Biography

This was a terrific book, complimenting other biographies. I believe I learned more about Sitting Bull than I did from Robert M. Utley’s biography, although I highly recommend both. The other striking feature of this book is the exhaustive effort to add the perspective and recollections of Lakota and Cheyenne peoples to the history. This is as much or more their story than anyone else’s.