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| The Lance and the Shield | 
| Author: Robert Utley
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 27259
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0345389387
Dewey Decimal Number: 978.0049752
EAN: 9780345389381
ASIN: 0345389387
Publication Date: July 19, 1994
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Product Description
"His narrative is griping....Mr. Utley transforms Sitting Bull, the abstract, romanticized icon and symbol, into a flesh-and-blood person with a down-to-earth story....THE LANCE AND THE SHIELD clears the screen of the exaggerations and fantasies long directed at the name of Sitting Bull."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Reviled by the United States government as a troublemaker and a coward, revered by his people as a great warrior chief, Sitting Bull has long been one of the most fascinating and misunderstood figures in American history. Now, distinguished historian Robert M. Utley has forged a compelling new portrait of Sitting Bull, viewing the man from the Lakota perspective for the very first time to render the most unbiased and historically accurate biography of Sitting Buil to date.
WINNER OF THE SPUR AWARD FOR BEST WESTERN NONFICTION
HISTORICAL BOOK OF 1993
A MAIN SELECTIN OF THE HISTORY BOOK CLUB
A FEATURED ALTERNATE SELECTION OF THE QUALITY PAPERBACK BOOK
CLUB
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| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 The Lance and the Shield January 22, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Well researched and well rounded text. The story of Sitting Bull is
told with respect for the man and his people without adulation. Sitting Bull's story is one of strength,integrity,and courage with enduring inspiration.
 Tatanka Yatanka, Chief of Chiefs September 15, 2006
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Robert Utley does a fine job of describing the world and worldview of the nineteenth century Plains Indians in this engaging biography of the greatest of the chiefs of the Sioux Nation, Sitting Bull.
Sitting Bull was a traditionalist. Simply put, he lived the way Wakantanka, the Great Spirit, decreed. His life's task was to maintain the culture and lifestyle of his people. Mr. Utley paints us a surprisingly complex and sympathetic portrait of Sitting Bull. In Tatanka Yatanka, the man and the times had met.
Sitting Bull came into a Sioux world which had only recently seen the tribe's transformation from a woodland people to the quintessential quasi-nomadic buffalo hunters of legend. The Sioux largely defined themselves by war, the hunt, and their relationship with both the natural world and the spirit world, between which they made no distinction.
Sitting Bull's lifespan coincided with the slow destruction of the buffalo culture at the hands of Euro-Americans. Dedicated as they were to settling the wilderness country, the Whites finally denuded the Sioux of virtually everything imaginable. As the grand "refusenik" of the Indian nations, Sitting Bull rose to become a remarkably eclectic war chief, tribal leader, wise man and holy man of the Hunkpapa Sioux. He encapsulated in himself all of the greatest virtues of the Sioux, becoming the only High Chief the Sioux tribes were ever to have.
But Sitting Bull, also encapsulated all the weaknesses of his people. Understanding and valuing only those things that were time-honored, he was (unlike his contemporary Chief Red Cloud) constitutionally incapable of grasping the import of the vast changes that were undermining his world even as the sun rose every day. Temperamentally unable to appreciate any mode of thought that was not Sioux, he was reactionarily set against any accommodation with the Whites, long resisted formalized alliances with peoples other than his own, and maintained intact the historical friendships and enmities that marked Sioux relations with other tribes. As a result, the Whites branded him as the leader of "hostiles" and "renegades." Yet, it is clear that Sitting Bull did not hate Whites so much as he would have much preferred of the White Man and the Indian that the twain should never have met.
Unfortunately, this was not to be the case, and Sitting Bull fought a valiant rearguard action against White encroachment in a desperate and ultimately vain attempt to preserve the Sioux way of life. His greatest triumph against Custer at the Little Bighorn, was a pyrrhic victory marking the end of everything this gallant man had fought to preserve. Little Bighorn led to the virtual extinction of the Indian nations as free peoples, their mass hypnosis by the Ghost Dance movement, the tragic Wounded Knee Massacre, and Sitting Bull's own death at the hands of fellow Sioux.
During his life and after, Sitting Bull became a symbol of resistance and determination, a living legend and a man whose heart and mind did not countenance surrender.
A fine book, well worth your time and attention, THE LANCE AND THE SHIELD is a testament to one man's spirit and fortitude in the face of an ultimate disaster.
Powerful, gripping September 12, 2006
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
A proud man. Chief of chiefs.
Sitting Bull was one of the last to give in to the encroachment of manifest destiny. He fought countless battles, of which the Custer clash being the most famous, to save his people's way of life, culture and heritage. Seems as though every time he attempted a compromise with the government, he was duped.
With provisions running low and no where to go, he went into exile to Canada, the "grandmother land", where he and his people were treated kindly.
After a few years of Canadian hospitality, provisions and food ran low again. The U. S. government once more convinced him to surrender ponies and weapons and to live at the reservations. Due to hunger he and his people went back to the Dakotas. Little did Sitting Bull realize he was to be held as prisoner of war for a year and a half.
Then it was life on the reservation which must have been agonizing for him. He did get to travel and see other parts of the country (Buffalo Bill Show, etc.) but his way of life had changed forever. His death was piercing and still somewhat of a mystery.
Great Biography! August 21, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Utley has written a fascinating account of the life of Sitting Bull, perhaps the best known and certainly one of the most influential chiefs of the Sioux Indians. Relying substantially on interviews of Sitting Bull's contemporaries conducted by Professor Walter Stanley Campbell in the 1920s and 1930s, Utley also draws upon other Indian and Anglo accounts and a wealth of military documentation.
Sitting Bull was born in the 1830s, probably 1831, and probably at Many Caches in what became Dakota Territory. His father Sitting Bull was chief of the Hunkpapa tribe of the Sioux nation. Notwithstanding his lineage, the activities and lessons of his youth were the same as those of other young Hunkpapas. He learned to pray, fight, and live according to Sioux principles. By the time he was a young man, he had surpassed nearly everyone, peers and elders alike, in those capacities. His faith in Lakota spirituality was unshakeable; his fighting capability, including the extent of his bravery, was the greatest of the Hunkpapas, and ultimately would become the greatest of the Sioux nation; and he lived with concern not for himself but for his people, generous to the point of poverty. In the mid-1850s, he became a Wichasha Wakan, or someone with the gift of periodical prophesy through dreams and visions. Among the best known of these would be his stunningly accurate prediction of Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn.
Sitting Bull's first interactions with white people came in trade. The Hunkpapas would exchange buffalo robes with French Canadians for firearms and metal tools. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 would mark the beginning of new, less friendly relations with whites. Terms of the treaty were much too difficult for either party to uphold, precipitating the conflict that would last until Wounded Knee nearly forty years later. In fairly short order, the Sioux would realize that the arrival of whites necessitated a war if they were to survive as a people. At this point, Sitting Bull became almost literally and certainly figuratively the lance of his people, employing his favorite weapon in leading his warriors in battle. By 1868, however, fractures were apparent in the never particularly cohesive Sioux nation, and many Sioux chiefs thought of accepting the whites' offer of a reservation. Sitting Bull and several others, most notably Crazy Horse, refused to consider abandoning the free life the Sioux had always led, choosing instead to live free or die trying. Gradually, however, those who felt as did Sitting Bull dwindled in number, unable to survive the war of attrition the whites fought and the decline of the buffalo. In the early 1870s Sitting Bull, now about forty by most accounts, completed Utley's metaphor by becoming the shield for his people. His exceptional prowess as a warrior had granted him the loyalty of and leadership over many Sioux peoples beyond even his own Hunkpapas. Growing older, however, he increasingly, although grudgingly, turned over the actual fighting to younger warriors and became a leader of his people in faith and life.
In 1877, following devastating winters and defeats, Sitting Bull led what remained of his followers into Canada. Having gained freedom from American persecution, he then tried to keep his people alive even as the buffalo continued to disappear. Notwithstanding good relations with some of the Canadian troops, and generally favorable arrangements, he created political difficulties for Canada. Besides pushing aside existing Canadian Indians, his presence also impaired Canada's relationship with the United States. Canada then pressured him to leave, and partly as a result of this pressure, but more because the buffalo had vanished and his people were starving, Sitting Bull returned to the United States in 1881 and surrendered.
His life thereafter was a mixture of the remarkable and the mundane. At various times he lived on a reservation, resided in jail, and toured the country as a kind of national sensation, the latter most famously with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Throughout he continued to push for the rights of his people and the return of their native lands, even though his followers grew fewer and fewer. Having once been among the greatest warriors in the history of the Sioux, then having ascended further into the unprecedented position of leadership over the Sioux nation, he struggled with subordination to white peoples he considered well beneath him. For nine years he accumulated enemies--both white and Indian--and lost followers as a result of his vanity and pride. Furthermore, even if he would not realize it, life had changed for the Sioux people, and he was no longer a respected spokesperson. In December of 1890 he was murdered by his own people during a botched arrest, which itself was to have been an artificial means of removing him from the scene. Largely considered a disgrace to the Sioux, he was buried with no honor whatsoever, and his actual gravesite remains unknown even today.
Utley's biography is an exceptional piece of history. His greatest challenge throughout was providing a scholarly biography of a man from a completely different culture, without letting his own culture seep in. In that, he succeeds admirably. His second greatest challenge was the lack of primary source material on the pre-white days of his subject; the Sioux did not keep written records, and later white interviewers were not interested in recording such relatively dull facts as comprised Sitting Bull's early life. Utley adroitly maneuvers around this substantial obstacle by telling the story of the Sioux nation as best it is known, thereby providing a foundation from which would spring the Sitting Bull of middle-aged life about whom much was recorded. A brilliant approach, and one not easily carried off. Utley does it as flawlessly as one possibly can. Furthermore, although his approach was to build his biography by historical methods as opposed to the methods of literature his predecessor Campbell employed, his book remains as readable as popular western fiction. The prose is so fluid and the story so gripping, one ought to be forgiven if one forgets he is reading nonfiction. From an academic perspective, this book is of value to scholars on Sitting Bull for obvious reasons, but also for those needing a factual foundation for Sioux culture and its interplay with white invaders. Therefore, I heartily recommend this book to all readers, regardless of background.
Compelling narration of a great leader June 27, 2004
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Ever since my childhood, I have always been enamored of the Native Indians. It wasn't the Indian of the Cowboy tv shows where they were portrayed as idiots or savages ~~ but as the people who were close to nature and the spiritual world. This book does not disappoint. This is a very concise portrayal of Sitting Bull from an author who took great pains to portray Sitting Bull as how the Indians viewed him and as how as the Whites viewed him. He didn't allow his emotions cloud the facts ~~ it was very obvious that he took time to research the facts and present them without boring the reader to tears. He showed Sitting Bull as the greatest Sioux leader of all time and how he worked to unite the Lakotas and the Hunkpapas as well as other Indian nations together to defeat the White invasion. He also presented the facts that allowed the readers to be aware of why the Indian battles were a losing cause ~~ simply because there were more of the Whites coming. There were not enough Indians to keep populating the land. This is one of the most in-depth research I've read and enjoyed on any Indian leader. This one goes beyond Sitting Bull and talk about the problems the Indians faced ~~ and yes, it does have some moments in there where you just allow your emotions to override the story ~~ Sitting Bull may not have had it easy but he sure didn't make it easy for the US military or the Indian agents on the reservations. He gave back as good as he could ~~ and he never quit fighting for his people. He is admirable not only as a man, but as a leader. This is definitely a worth-while reading for anyone who is interested in history ~~ especially Native American Indian history. 6-26-04
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