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The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull. By Robert M. Utley. (New York: Holt, 1993. xviii, 413 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-8050-1274-5.)
Robert M. Utley has fashioned a marvelous reputation in the business of western history. His books include accounts of the frontier army, biographies of George Armstrong Custer and Billy the Kid, and various studies of nineteenth-century Indian-white conflict. His portrayal of Sitting Bull, the well-known Lakota or Sioux leader, fits well into this corpus of research and writing, placing the man into the context of the swirl of events that led to the Plains wars and ultimately the battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. Yet Sitting Bull offers a new challenge to Utley, since it is his first attempt to write poignantly about Indian culture, a necessity with such a biography.
Utley's Sitting Bull...