Hoping to complete its transcontinental route, the Northern Pacific Railroad set out in 1872 to survey the Yellowstone Valley. An emissary from the Lakota chief Sitting Bull had warned the two surveying expeditions (eastern and western) not to enter the valley. But no one - certainly not any Northern Pacific investor - was worried about taking the Indian threat seriously. As it turned out, the Indians were deadly serious - and successful. The firsthand accounts compiled here by M. John Lubetkin document the survey's three-month struggle with the Lakotas and other Plains Indian peoples. It tells the story of a military and public relations disaster. Much to the surprised dismay of U.S. Army strategists and railroad executives, the Indians repeatedly harrassed army forces of nearly a thousand men. Lubetkin has assembled all the parts of this complicated story, from business corruption to northern plains battle strategies, as told with vivid detail in lively eyewitness accounts. They reveal the failures of alcoholic army commanders and show personal encounters between soldiers and Indians, among them the formidable Lakota warrior known as Gall. This is a little-known but crucial episode in the history of westward expansion and Native peoples' efforts to halt that expansion.

Part I. To the Yellowstone, May-August 1872 -- Part II. Fighting on the Yellowstone, August-September 1872 -- Part III. Bitter Returns, August-November 1872 -- Part IV. Last Reports.