Let no one regard "Cheyenne Autumn" as one of those customary attempts by historians to rescue an episode or a figure from oblivion. The episode did not change history, any more than the march of 10,000 Greeks under Xenophon out of Persia changed history, but it has all the elements of that drama. Miss Sandoz has made it into a Lear-like tragedy of displaced persons.

The story begins in the fall of 1878 and ends in the following winter. The place is along 2,000 harsh miles between a guarded reservation camp in Oklahoma and the mouth of Powder River on the Yellowstone. The main actors are Dull Knife and Little Wolf, who fulfilled the conception of a great chief: "Forget himself and remember only the people."

A few of the people in the cast with those great chiefs are warriors, from 13 years old up, more with bows and arrows than with rifles, some as hostile to discipline as to "the spiders" (white men). The impersonators of love, jealousy and murder act their parts. The presence of a boy, seldom seen and always silent, has the power of the Voice of Kurtz in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." (pp. 1, 14)

Superstition, hunger, lack of horses, and not understanding the minds of their conquerors pressed as hard against the hiding homeseekers as the soldiers. And the mind of Mari Sandoz is inside these Cheyennes as sensitively as it is inside her outlooking self. She seldom comments. She pictures constantly with economy. Without one word of analysis concerning the deep spiritual content of Plains Indians, she stands on Bear Butte with Little Wolf "to fast and meditate," seeking wisdom for the guidance of his people. She is there by a campfire with Spotted Deer feeding broth to his old grandmother, "who has been so homesick for the North that his Southern parents sent him to take her there." In cold so deep that it froze grouse stone dead, she is with a lone little girl that soldiers found in a rocky crevice fingering some cards—and refusing to tell where other Indians hid.

Nobody can read this moving book, along with George Bird Grinnell's noble volumes on "The Fighting Cheyennes" and Captain John G. Bourke's noble "On the Border with Crook" without considering again the tragic failure of the United States to incorporate into its Melting Pot the great tribes of the West…. (p. 14)