Book Description
Howard Terpning, often referred to as the "Storyteller of the Native American People," has concentrated his award-filled career on painting the major Great Plains tribes: Blackfeet, Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow, Commanche, and Apache. Terpning's images are powerful and sweeping, yet profoundly intimate in the way they include the viewer in the emotion of each scene, like the sweetness in a young girl's passage into womanhood or the youthful pride of a new warrior. His paintings chronicle the Plains Indians' "glory days" in the early nineteenth century until their displacement as a result of the westward expansion of the white man.
Western historian Don Hedgpeth interweaves a stirring narrative about the tribes' final, desperate years and the spiritual basis to all aspects of their lives.
Back Cover copy
Relations between the Blackfoot and the white man got off to a bad beginning when members of the Lewis and Clark expedition killed two Piegan warriors in the summer of 1806. The Piegans were one of three bands that made up the Blackfoot nations. From that day forward, for the next sixty years, the Blackfoot would prove to be a fierce and formidable foe; an implacable enemy of white men forever. Blackfoot chiefs and the leaders of the various warrior societies met in council to develop strategy and make plans for their continuing crusade against the intruder. Young men listened to the wisdom of the elders, and no one spoke at all of appeasement, or surrender.
