A History

If you imagine South Dakota as a dry and dusty plains state, you are partly right, says author John Milton in this gracefully written history. But the image of flat, barren prairies fails to convey other qualities that have lured people there—the cool fragrance of the pine-covered Black Hills, the grand sweep of sky and earth on the prairie.

Strong indivisuals marked the land's early history, from frontiersman Hugh Glass, who barely outwrestled a grizzly bear, to sharpshooting Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok. Though the tradition of individualism remains, more recently some have dound in South Dakota a new sense of community—as did poet Kathleen Norris, who writes of being on a "thin line" in the farmland, where other Americans fail to appreciate the need for food-growing territory and where massive national indifference threatens everyone in states like South Dakota with the fate of the Indians: loss of the land to outside forces.

Gold sparked the major migration of white settlers to the Dakota Territory a century ago, but for South Dakota, grass proved to be the real bonanza. Today more and more Americans are coming to understand the almost mystical appeal of the horizon and the primitive pull of the earth that make South Dakota one of the few remaining places where the individual can enjoy real isolation and a sense of standing apart from the crowd.

Hunter, trapper, resourceful fighter, and scout, Hugh Glass was just a rugged man among other rugged American frontiersmen until he was mauled by a grizzly bear and left for dead by his best friends. Hugh's rage drove him to crawl two hundred miles across dangerous territory to seek revenge until he was no longer Hugh Glass but had become Lord Grizzly. "Lord Grizzly" is the second volume of Frederick Manfred's acclaimed five-volume series, The Buckskin Man Tales. For this Bison Books edition, poet Freya Manfred provides a new introduction.