Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary

Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography • Winner of the Society of American Historians Francis Parkman Prize • Winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Western Biography • A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography

Named One of the Best Books of the Year by True West (Best Biography) and The Boston Globe

Black Elk is the definitive biographical account of a figure whose dramatic life converged with some of the most momentous events in the history of the American West. Born in an era of rising violence between the Sioux, white settlers, and U.S. government troops, Black Elk killed his first man at the Little Bighorn, witnessed the death of his second cousin Crazy Horse, and traveled to Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Upon his return, he was swept up in the traditionalist Ghost Dance movement and shaken by the Massacre at Wounded Knee. But Black Elk was not a warrior, instead accepting the path of a healer and holy man, motivated by a powerful prophetic vision that he struggled to understand.

In Black Elk, Joe Jackson has crafted a true American epic, restoring to its subject the richness of his times and gorgeously portraying a life of heroism and tragedy, adaptation and endurance, in an era of permanent crisis on the Great Plains.

ISBN-13: 9781250141255

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Picador

Publication Date: 11-07-2017

Pages: 640

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

JOE JACKSON is the author of one novel and six works of nonfiction, including, most recently, Atlantic Fever:Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic (FSG, 2012). His book The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire was one of Time’s Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2008. He is the Mina Hohenberg Darden Endowed Professor of Creative Writing in the M.F.A. creative writing program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Dramatis Personae
Map
Prologue: “A Sort of a Preacher”

Part I: If You’re Not Good, the Wasichus Will Get You
1. Chosen
2. A Casualty of the Hundred Slain
3. The Great Vision
4. Resurrection
5. The Black Hills
6. “It Is War”
7. When the Wasichus Come

Part II: Childhood’s End
8. The Burning Road
9. Killing Crazy Horse
10. Grandmother’s Land
11. The Fear
12. Dances with Thunder

Part III: The Messiah Will Come Again
13. The Land of Darkness
14. The Making of a Medicine Man
15. The “Show Man”
16. The Entrance to Hell
17. La Belle Époque
18. The Messiah Will Come Again
19. Dances with Ghosts
20. Wounded Knee
21. “ There Will Be a Better Day to Die”

Part IV: “What Is an Indian?”
22. The Underground 347
23. Black Robe Days 361
24. Vanishing Americans
25. Black Elk Speaks
26. Defenders of the Faith
27. Disciples

Epilogue: Besieged
Time Line
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

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