Coyote Warrior

"A major work of American history. . . . It is our country's story and it is our responsibility to know it." —Award-winning author Rick Bass

When Congress seized the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara homelands at the end of World War II, tribal chairman Martin Cross, the great-grandson of chiefs who fed and sheltered Lewis and Clark through the winter of 1804, waged an epic but losing battle against the federal government. As floodwaters rose behind the massive shoulders of Garrison Dam, Raymond, the youngest of Martin's ten children, was growing up in a shack with dirt floors and no plumbing or electricity, wearing clothes made from flour sacks. By the time he was six, his people were scattered to slums in a dozen different cities. Far from the homeland of their ancestors, Raymond and his siblings would hear that their father had died alone and broken on the windswept prairie of North Dakota.

After Stanford and Yale Law, Raymond returned home to resurrect his father's fight against the federal government. His mission would lead him back to the Congress his father battled forty years before and into the hallowed chambers of the Supreme Court. There, the great-great grandson of Chief Cherry Necklace would lay the case for the sanctity of the U. S. Constitution, treaty rights, and the legal survival of Indian Country at the feet of the nine black robes of the nation's highest court.

Coyote Warrior tells the epic story of the three tribes that saved the Corps of Discovery from starvation, their century-long battle to forge a new nation, and the extraordinary journey of one man to redeem a father's dream—and the dignity of his people.