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The Last Frontier: A New Edition with a Special Introduction by the Author
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Comments/Reviews
Description: The story of the Cheyenne Indians in the 1870s, and their bitter struggle to flee from the Indian Territory in Oklahoma back to their home in Wyoming and Montana.
Selected Contents:
Foreword
1: July 1878; The Incident at Darlington
2: August 1878; Three Men Who Ran Away
3: September 1878; The Chase Begins
4: September 1878; A Washington Interlude
5: September 1878; Cowboys and Indians
6: September 1878; The Trap Closes
7: September-October 1878; Matters of Justice
8: October-November 1878; The Victors and the Vanquished
9: November 1878-January 1879; Freedom
10: January 1879-April 1879; The End of the Trail
An Afterword
Comment(s): "An amazing restoration and reconstruction. The characters breathe, the landscape is solid ground and sky, and the story runs flexibly along the zigzag trail of a people driven by a deep instinct to their ancient home. I do not know any other episode in Western history that has been so truly and subtly perpetuated as this one. A great story lost has been found again, and as here told promises to live for generations." -- Carl Van Doren
Review(s): "Mr. Fast's novel will stand or fall upon its value as a dramatic, finely presented story. It is all of that: a model, which may easily become a classic example, of what to put in and what to leave out in the writing of a historical novel. ... I do not believe it is saying too much to suggest that in the person of Mr. Fast we may have the next really important American historical novelist." -- Joseph Henry Jackson, New York Herald Tribune Books
"Fast's writing, austerely polished and austerely poetic, is admirably suited to this epic tale of a desperate effort for dignified survival. ... Fast has gotten to the core of this incident and made it into a rich American novel." -- New York Times Book Review
"Largely based on oral histories conducted in 1939, Fast's characterization of the ambivalence felt by the Army officers responsible for hunting down the Cheyenne particularly enriches our understanding of an important, but oft overlooked, incident in Native American history." -- JOW
    
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