"A Civil Action" meets Indian country, as one man takes on the federal government and the largest boondoggle in U.S. history--and wins.

From White Shield to Washington DC, new Indian wars are being fought by Ivy League-trained lawyers called "Coyote Warriors"--among them a Mandan/Hidatsa named Raymond Cross. "Coyote Warrior" tells the epic story of the three tribes that saved Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery from starvation, their century-long battle to forge a new nation, and the extraordinary journey of one man to redeem a father's dream--and the dignity of his people. Cross graduated from law school and, following his father's death, returned home to resurrect his father's fight against the federal government. His mission would lead him to Congress, which his father had battled forty years before, and into the hallowed chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court. There the great-great-grandson of Chief Cherry Necklace would lay at the feet of the nation's highest court the case for the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution, treaty rights, and the legal survival of Indian Country.

VanDevelder demolishes long-held myths about America's westward expansion and uncovers the unacknowledged federal Indian policy that shaped the republic What really happened in the early days of our nation? How was it possible for white settlers to march across the entire continent, inexorably claiming Native American lands for themselves? Who made it happen, and why? This gripping book tells America's story from a new perspective, chronicling the adventures of our forefathers and showing how a legacy of repeated betrayals became the bedrock on which the republic was built. Paul VanDevelder takes as his focal point the epic federal treaty ratified in 1851 at Horse Creek, formally recognizing perpetual ownership by a dozen Native American tribes of 1.1 million square miles of the American West. The astonishing and shameful story of this broken treaty-one of 371 Indian treaties signed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-reveals a pattern of fraudulent government behavior that again and again displaced Native Americans from their lands. VanDevelder describes the path that led to the genocide of the American Indian; those who participated in it, from cowboys and common folk to aristocrats and presidents; and how the history of the immoral treatment of Indians through the twentieth century has profound social, economic, and political implications for America even today.