Montana's era of "Indian Wars" consisted of nearly a century of skirmishes, battles, and large-scale wars between the U.S. military and native nations, including Blackfeet, Sioux, Northern Cheyennes, Arapahos, Gros Ventres, and Nez Perces -- and the army's Crow and Shoshone allies. These battlegrounds remain today, a testament to the clash of cultures that defined the region in the nineteenth century. Author Barbara Fifer takes readers on a historic journey to the solemn sites of Montana's most fascinating and storied battles, from Two Medicine Creek to the Little Bighorn and on to the Sweetgrass Hills, revealing engaging tales -- from fighters and witnesses on both sides.

Stationed in Montana during the height of the Indian Wars, Captain Charles Rawn proved an unlikely hero and an indispensable leader in numerous battles. He took command from a drunken Major Baker at the Battle of Pryor's Creek, saving the 400 soldiers from possible annihilation at the hands of 1,000 Sioux. As commander of Fort Missoula, he led 35 soldiers and 200 volunteers in an attempt to halt 850 Nez Perce warriors. When Colonel Gibbon suffered an injury at the Battle of the Big Hole, Rawn's experience and leadership of the 7th Infantry helped prevent another Custer debacle. Author Robert M. Brown catalogues the career of this outstanding officer and the transformation of the frontier army from a Civil War legacy into an elite fighting force.

The Benton Road ran from Fort Benton to Helena, Montana. It was the life line for settlers, miners and the military during Montana's pioneering days. Freight and pioneers would board steamships at St Joseph, Missouri and travel the Missouri River to Fort Benton. From there it was up to this road and its feeder roads to provide the people and goods necessary for settling and mining the vast wealth contained in that portion of the Rocky Mountains. Freight wagons, and caravans of people would travel the road. Eventually, stagecoach travel was added to the traffic along the way.

Since the shocking news first broke in 1876 of the Seventh Cavalry’s disastrous defeat at the Little Big Horn, fascination with the battle—and with Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer—has never ceased. Widespread interest in the subject has spawned a vast outpouring of literature, which only increases with time. This two-volume bibliography of Custer literature is the first to be published in some twenty-five years and the most complete ever assembled. Drawing on years of research, Michael O’Keefe has compiled entries for roughly 3,000 books and 7,000 articles and pamphlets. Covering both nonfiction and fiction (but not juvenile literature), the bibliography focuses on events beginning with Custer’s tenure at West Point during the 1850s and ending with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Included within this span are Custer’s experiences in the Civil War and in Texas, the 1873 Yellowstone and 1874 Black Hills expeditions, the Great Sioux War of 1876–77, and the Seventh Cavalry’s pursuit of the Nez Perces in 1877. The literature on Custer, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and the Seventh Cavalry touches the entire American saga of exploration, conflict, and settlement in the West, including virtually all Plains Indian tribes, the frontier army, railroading, mining, and trading. Hence this bibliography will be a valuable resource for a broad audience of historians, librarians, collectors, and Custer enthusiasts.

On the morning of January 23, 1870, troops of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry attacked a Piegan Indian village on the Marias River in Montana Territory, killing many more than the army’s count of 173, most of them women, children, and old men. The village was afflicted with smallpox. Worse, it was the wrong encampment. Intended as a retaliation against Mountain Chief’s renegade band, the massacre sparked public outrage when news sources revealed that the battalion had attacked Heavy Runner’s innocent village—and that guides had told its inebriated commander, Major Eugene Baker, he was on the wrong trail, but he struck anyway. Remembered as one of the most heinous incidents of the Indian Wars, the Baker Massacre has often been overshadowed by the better-known Battle of the Little Bighorn and has never received full treatment until now. Author Paul R. Wylie plumbs the history of Euro-American involvement with the Piegans, who were members of the Blackfeet Confederacy. His research shows the tribe was trading furs for whiskey with the Hudson’s Bay Company before Meriwether Lewis encountered them in 1806. As American fur traders and trappers moved into the region, the U.S. government soon followed, making treaties it did not honor. When the gold rush started in the 1860s and the U.S. Army arrived, pressure from Montana citizens to control the Piegans and make the territory safe led Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan to send Baker and the 2nd Cavalry, with tragic consequences. Although these generals sought to dictate press coverage thereafter, news of the cruelty of the killings appeared in the New York Times, which called the massacre “a more shocking affair than the sacking of Black Kettle’s camp on the Washita” two years earlier. While other scholars have written about the Baker Massacre in related contexts, Blood on the Marias gives this infamous event the definitive treatment it deserves. Baker’s inept command lit the spark of violence, but decades of tension between Piegans and whites set the stage for a brutal and too-often-forgotten incident.

You’ve followed his wicked misdeeds and cuss-filled rants on the HBO series Deadwood (as played by Ian McShane), now go inside the life—and death—of the real Al Swearingen with Farcountry Press’ newest release, Deadwood’s Al Swearingen: Manifest Evil in the Gem Theatre. Meticulous research and lively writing by Deadwood historian and HBO consultant Jerry L. Bryant and co-author Barbara Fifer shed new light on Al’s scandalized childhood in Oskaloosa, Iowa, his nefarious dealings at his saloon and brothel in gold-rush-era Deadwood, and his brutal death (was he murdered?) in a Denver rail yard.

Through his incredibly varied fifty-year career, John J. Healy left an indelible mark on the Canadian and American west. At different points in his storied life, Healy was a soldier, a trapper, a prospector, a free trader, an explorer, a horse dealer, a scout, a lawman, a newspaper editor, a speculator, a merchant, a capitalist, a historian, and a politician. He defied classification while defining the lifestyle of a frontier adventurer and buccaneer capitalist in the late nineteenth century. In Healy's West, Gordon E. Tolton cuts through the mythology and controversy of this larger-than-life character, giving us the most complete and truly balanced account of Healy's life ever published. From Irish famine to army saddle; from scouting on the Oregon Trail to digging for mountain gold in Idaho; from taking on powerful monopolies to trading with the Blackfoot; from political manoeuvring to hunting down rustlers behind a sheriff's badge, Healy challenged life, nature, enemies and, governments head on-in print, in business, and in physical combat. An entertaining and critical portrayal of the west's most charismatic figure, Healy's West is a must-read for any history buff .