Song of Dewey Beard: Last Survivor of the Little Bighorn (Paperback)
**Book listings on our website do not always reflect the current availability of books on our store shelves. Check a book's in-store availability above the "add to cart" button. Or to be certain that a book you've found on our website is also here on our shelves, feel free to call us at 615-953-2243**
Beard was not only a witness to two major events involving the Lakota; he also traveled with William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West show, worked as a Hollywood Indian, and witnessed the grand transformation of the Black Hills into a tourism mecca. Beard spent most of his later life fighting to reclaim his homeland and acting as an advocate for his family and his people. With a keen eye for detail and a true storyteller’s talent, Philip Burnham presents the man behind the legend of Dewey Beard and shows how the life of the last survivor of Little Bighorn provides a glimpse into the survival of indigenous America.
Philip Burnham is an associate professor of composition at George Mason University and a former reporter for Indian Country Today. He is the author of So Far from Dixie: Confederates in Yankee Prisons and Indian Country, God’s Country: Native Americans and the National Parks.
"Burnham reignites a too-little-told story of one of the most extraordinary figures of Great Plains history."—Kevin Hooper, Great Plains Quarterly
"Song of Dewey Beard is an excellent study of a lesser-known Lakota warrior."—Paul Beck, Western Historical Quarterly
“A well-contextualized oral history of a remarkable man. . . . Highly engaging.”—Debra Buchholtz, American Studies
"This biography gives the Lakota people a written version of a story worth telling future generations."—Danielle Perez-St. Antoine, Chronicles of Oklahoma
“The remarkable Dewey Beard was a man who seemed to live forever—old enough to have fought at the Little Bighorn in 1876 and its last survivor when he finally died in 1955. What the old-time Lakota were like, and what they lived through in those seventy years, is the subject of Philip Burnham’s original, bracing, touching, surprising, and vigorously written book. Take note, this is something we have never seen before: a serious, and sometimes funny, and often dramatic, and always interesting account of a Lakota life after the buffalo were gone. That’s where the story usually stops. Burnham lets Beard tell us what happened next.”—Tom Powers, author of The Killing of Crazy Horse
“By scouring the archives and conducting personal interviews, Philip Burnham has helped clarify the historical record, teasing out new information and dispelling lingering myths. Song of Dewey Beard is a thoroughly researched, well-written, and engaging book.”—Akim Reinhardt, author of Ruling Pine Ridge: Oglala Lakota Politics from the IRA to Wounded Knee