The winter of 1886 would prove a great leveller. His description of finding the place where Sitting Bull’s cabin once stood on the banks of the Great River immediately transports the reader to its place, remote, unassuming, surrounded by long grass and a grove of bur oaks.Īs fast as the new, rich European landowners arrived to stake their claim on the lands they would be gone.

The tragedy of the American Indian is well written, that they were so far behind the white settlers in education, wealth and enterprise makes their demise all the more sobering: ‘ When a band of Indians plundered a Missouri River keel boat carrying $25,000 worth of gold dust in buckskin sacks, they poured the gold dust into the sand and kept the buckskin sacks’ Frazier is clearly struck by the plight of the Indian tribes, the book is littered with references both historical and personal to give a human perspective to a race which deserved far better than it ever got.

Like the fields themselves, this is a fine patchwork of historical facts and personal memories which make both book and place so fascinating. The result is a memorable mix of the disconcerting to the quirky, to the tragic and the shameful. Having moved to Montana from New York in 1982, Frazier parked his intention of writing a novel and set about exploring his new landscape over several summers whilst spending the winter months researching the historical notes he had made along the way. In Ian Frazier’s remarkable book, the American Indian is at the forefront of his account of the Great Plains story. Sitting west of the great Mississippi River and to the east of the Rocky Mountains in the US and Canada this was home to the earliest American Indians and the subsequent tribes whose names of Sioux, Comanche, Cheyenne and Apache would see their incredible history reduced to the part of the common enemy in every chest-thumping Western movie ever made. Some 2,500 miles long and 600 miles across at its widest point, great swathes of prairie and grassland lay home to cattle faming, crops and latter day wind farms. For most non-Americans the scale and diversity of the American landscape is near impossible to comprehend and perhaps non more so than the Mid-West and the stunning Great Plains with its rich history and eye-watering size.

Great plains frazier