In 1953 young surgeon Robert H. Ruby began work as the chief medical officer at the hospital on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He began writing almost daily to his sister, describing the Oglala Lakota people he served, his Bureau of Indian Affairs colleagues, and day-to-day life on the reservation. Ruby and his wife were active in the social life of the non-white community, which allowed Ruby, also a self-trained ethnographer, to write in detail about the Oglala Lakota people and their culture, covering topics such as religion, art, traditions, and values. His frank and personal depiction of conditions he encountered on the reservation examines poverty, alcoholism, the educational system, and employment conditions and opportunities. Ruby also wrote critically of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, describing the bureaucracy that made it difficult for him to do his job and kept his hospital permanently understaffed and undersupplied. These engaging letters provide a compelling memoir of life at Pine Ridge in the mid-1950s.

On a September day in 1877, hundreds of Sioux and soldiers at Camp Robinson crowded around a fatally injured Lakota leader. A young doctor forced his way through the crowd, only to see the victim fading before him. It was the famed Crazy Horse. From intense moments like this to encounters with such legendary western figures as Calamity Jane and Red Cloud, Valentine Trant O'Connell McGillycuddy's life (1849–1939) encapsulated key events in American history that changed the lives of Native people forever. In Valentine T. McGillycuddy: Army Surgeon, Agent to the Sioux, the first biography of the man in seventy years, award-winning author Candy Moulton explores McGillycuddy's fascinating experiences on the northern plains as topographer, cartographer, physician, and Indian agent. Drawing on family papers, interviews, government documents, and a host of other sources, Moulton presents a colorful character—a thin, blue-eyed, cultured physician who could outdrink trail-hardened soldiers. In fresh, vivid prose, she traces McGillycuddy's work mapping out the U.S.-Canadian border; treating the wounded from the battles of the Rosebud, the Little Bighorn, and Slim Buttes; tending to Crazy Horse during his final hours; and serving as agent to the Sioux at Pine Ridge, where he clashed with Chief Red Cloud over the government's assimilation policies. Along the way, Moulton weaves in the perspective of McGillycuddy's devoted first wife, Fanny, who followed her husband west and wrote of the realities of camp life. McGillycuddy's doctoring of Crazy Horse marked only one point of his interaction with American Indians. But those relationships were also just one aspect of his life in the West, which extended well into the twentieth century. Enhanced by more than 20 photographs, this long-overdue biography offers general readers and historians an engaging adventure story as well as insight into a period of tumultuous change.

Original publication and copyright date: 1999.

Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) physician Robert H. Ruby arrived on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to oversee the health needs of the Oglala Sioux tribe during a period of significant transformation and change in federal Indian policies. As Ruby came to know the individuals living on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and as he grew more acquainted with the stories, traditions, and cultural systems of the Sioux, he was compelled to collect his observations and opinions on this tribe, considered at the time one of the most resistant to white culture and BIA “civilizing” efforts. Originally published in 1955, Ruby’s book The Oglala Sioux presents a vibrant picture of the ways in which the lives of these American Indians were altered under the influence of the U.S. government, and it details the deep and in many ways heroic struggle of the Sioux to recover and maintain their culture and sovereignty. Through Ruby’s work as a doctor on the reservation and through this compelling and informative narrative, he advocated understanding, compassion, and, in keeping with the tenor of the times in which he both lived and labored, change.