Beauty for Ashes (1878)

In the thirty-year span between 1860 and 1890, an incredible era of violence, greed and fraud, the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed. Seldom was the voice of an Indian heard, and even then, it was by the pen of a white man. Were the reports written with sympathetic authenticity or perhaps bias and bigotry? Had the Americans in the East been accurately informed that the United States government was methodically exterminating Native Americans, forcing the survivors to confinement on worthless reservations, simply because we wanted back the land we promised them in perpetuity and they refused to give it up? Courage by Trial is a story of a twelve-year-old Lakota Sioux Indian boy who survived outrageous adversity to fulfill his purpose of being. That is, to tell the truth of what was happening to his people. His voice ripples eastward across the plains, all the way to Washington.