Spirit Lake

It is a hundred stories in one: the story of emigrant and immigrant, the outlaw's story, the little girl's story, the murderer's story—the story of the dedicated young surgeon, hog-breeder, poetess, religious exhorter—of the Indian woman who harvests her crops in the midst of simmering violence.

Within these pages swarm the men, women, and children who, in the 1850s, plunged from New England, the Ohio Valley, or the central crowded East to wide Iowa country, led in passion by their dream. They came to make new homes. Nor did they move against an anonymous foe. In this mighty book the American Indian rises in full-fledged reality to make the reader conversant at last with the Indian manner and heart. Spirit Lake is as much the saga of those who resisted, as it is of those who came to take the land.

The prayer is here, so is the mas­sacre. The rape is here, the dove and meadowlark, the blizzard, the fragility of love, the roaring laughter by day, and tears in the night. High over all, above Dakota war chant and rumbling wagon wheels, rises a choral hymn to the eternal dream which will not be put down—which will resound as long as there are Americans to sing it.