LINCOLN — To say that Paul Hedren is a Custer fanatic would be quite an understatement.

Growing up in Minnesota, family vacations consisted of driving west, to the famous forts and battlefields of the great Indian wars.

As soon as he was able to drive, Hedren and his brother continued the tradition, driving to historic sites like Fort Laramie, Fort Robinson and Teddy Roosevelt National Park.

Invariably, they would end up at the Little Bighorn Battlefield on the June anniversary of “Custer’s Last Stand,” where, Hedren said, all Custer buffs can point out where every soldier fell. The trips became known as “Paul’s Custer Trip.”

“This has been a lifelong obsession,” he said.

That infatuation led to a 37-year career with the National Park Service and the writing of 13 books about the famous battles and famous characters of the Indian wars.

And now it has culminated in a book, researched and written over a decade, that ties all those tales together: “Sitting Bull’s War: The Battle of Little Big Horn and the Fight for Buffalo and Freedom on the Plains.”

The 552-page epic, published in November, has brought unprecedented publicity and attention to the 76-year-old author and historian.

Both the Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker have written about the book, which has spawned dozens of requests for speaking engagements.

Sales have soared, eclipsing those of his 13 other books combined, and “Sitting Bull’s War,” is now in its second printing.

“This is all brand new to me,” Hedren said.

He called the book, “a good read.”

“There’s nothing quite like this out there,” Hedren said.

To be sure, there have been plenty of books about Crazy Horse and the end of the Indian Wars and about the inspirational Hunkpapa leader, Sitting Bull, famous for his resistance against whites, fleeing with his band to Canada, and being the last of his people to surrender his rifle to the U.S. Army.

But Hedren said the “big, broad story” of the 18-month war that ended the buffalo herds and the free-roaming way of life of the northern Plains Indians has never been told through “Indian eyes and Indian voices.”

Typically, “Sitting Bull’s War” — so dubbed by Hedren because he led the resistance and united several Indians in a last desperate fight — was a ”Washington-centric story.”

Those, he said, relied on official military accounts of the “hostiles” who refused to accept a torrent of “wasicus” invading their lands and who wouldn’t turn in their guns and ponies and live on reservations.

“It occurred to me, there’s ‘a rest of the story’ here,” Hedren said. “Who were these Indian people, who led them, what were they fighting for, how did they end up at that place at that time? That’s what I took on here.”

Hedren relied on accounts Indians gave when they came into places like the Red Cloud Agency and Spotted Tail Agency in Nebraska to inquire about terms of surrender.

Local agents or officers would interrogate them, and carefully document what these “traditionals” had to say about their encampments, their size, which bands were there and who were their leaders.

Also, he referred to interviews done by authors, including Nebraska’s Mari Sandoz and John Neihardt, who visited reservations years later to speak with old warriors, the survivors, about the war and what led to the 22 battles of what is commonly called “The Great Sioux War.”

“They witnessed this war from the inside,” he wrote of the survivors. “They endured it and suffered it. Their voices are heard on almost every page.”

“This is Sitting Bull’s war, an Indian history of the cataclysmic, decade-long struggle on the northern Plains to preserve and sustain a traditional way of life,” Hedren wrote, ”a story that ended tragically.”

One stop during Hedren’s career with the Park Service was Fort Union, an important trading post on the upper Missouri River, near the confluence with the Yellowstone River. The fort was the site of one of Sitting Bull’s most famous acts of defiance.

In 1866, military outpost Fort Buford was established near the trading post, which enraged Sitting Bull’s people. They began to harass the soldiers, burn their hay stacks, run off their stock and occasionally fire a volley into the fort. Some woodcutters and herders who strayed too far from the stockade were killed.

One day, outside the trading post, a local trapper warned Sitting Bull that eventually, the military fort would have enough soldiers to fight back and he should consider making peace.

“I’d rather have my skin pierced with bullet holes,” he responded.

Later, he told the agent in charge at the trading post that he intended to kill all the soldiers at the military fort. He asked the agent to give him a red shirt “so that the (Fort) Buford defenders would more easily identify him.”

Another famous episode occurred amid a skirmish with soldiers protecting workers laying tracks of the Northern Pacific Railroad through Indian country in 1872. Sitting Bull, as guns blazed, calmly laid down his rifle and walked out into the middle of the battlefield “as if taking a stroll through the camp at evening,” according to one comrade.

Sitting Bull sat down and leisurely loaded and smoked his pipe, imploring others to join him while ignoring the soldiers’ bullets whizzing by.

“Our hearts beat rapidly and we smoked as fast as we could,” said White Bull, one of the Indians that had joined the show of defiance. “But Sitting Bull was not afraid. He just sat there quietly, looking around like he was at home in his tent and smoked peacefully.”

“It was amazing,” White Bull remembered.

Sitting Bull became an inspirational leader of his people who refused offers of food and blankets from the whites. He turned down invitations to come to the agencies and talk peace.

In 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant, pressured by settlers and gold seekers to open the Black Hills, ordered that all remaining “hostiles” lay down their guns and surrender at a government agency. Sitting Bull refused.

Instead, he put out the call for all free bands of Oglalas, Cheyenne, Brules, Arapaho and others to join him to fight for their hunting grounds in northern Wyoming and Montana — and to maintain their traditional ways.

During a Sun Dance days before the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, Sitting Bull had a vision that the “blue coats” would attack his village of an estimated 4,900 Indians as thick as “grasshoppers” falling from the sky but they would end up “falling upside down” or dead.

The premonition of a great Lakota victory electrified and emboldened the warriors and head men camped along the Little Bighorn River. They chose Sitting Bull as the “old man chief” of the assembled bands.

Later, after the Army’s crushing defeat, more and more soldiers streamed into the northern Plains. Sitting Bull led his band across the border into Canada as other Indian bands, facing starvation and the better-equipped U.S. Army, began to surrender.

Sitting Bull’s band survived across the “medicine line,” the U.S.-Canada border, for four years until the buffalo disappeared.

“Hunger became the most powerful persuader,” Hedren wrote.

When he surrendered in 1881, Sitting Bull made a point of emphasizing that he was the last of his people to turn in his gun.

Eventually he was allowed to join Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West Show,” where he was a main attraction and became friends with Annie Oakley. He called her “Little Sure Shot” due to her accuracy with a firearm.

Sitting Bull, 59, was shot and killed on the morning of Dec. 15, 1890, on the Standing Rock Reservation by Lakota tribal police, who sought to arrest and question him about his involvement in the “Ghost Dance” movement.

“The great days were quashed,” Hedren wrote. “But in light of vitality and memory in Sioux Country, then, and even now, how does one define an end to a war when in legacy there is no end?”

---- The New Yorker called Hedren’s book “a fine military history and an affecting study of the intertwined calamities that ended the Lakota way of life.”

--- The Wall Street Journal wrote, “Sitting Bull had not wanted war. Like the other traditionals among the Cheyennes and Lakotas, he had desired simply to follow the old way of life —hunting buffalo, raiding tribal enemies and camping where he wished.”

This story was published by Nebraska Examiner, an editorially independent newsroom providing a hard-hitting, daily flow of news. Read the original article: https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2026/02/23/omaha-historians-book-on-famed-hunkpapa-leader-sitting-bull-drawing-national-plaudits/