This book is adapted for young readers and general readers. It cuts though non-Indian expansionist rhetoric to provide the reader with an American Indian perspective of the conquest of the trans-Mississippi West during the last four decades of the nineteenth century.

The book is based on primary source materials such as treaty councils, pictographic and translated autobiographical accounts of American Indian participants in the events and contemporary newspaper and magazine interviews. The chapters and contents of the book focus on the Navaho, Apache, Cheyenne, and Lakota-Dakota-Nakota. Topics focus on the breaking of treaties, warfare, and the final years when the above tribes surrendered and were placed upon American Indian reservations.