 | This article consists almost entirely of a plot summary .(October 2013) |
 First edition | |
| Author | Dan O'Brien (author) |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Western fiction |
| Publisher | Fontana |
Publication date | 1988 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 272 pages |
| ISBN | 0006176526 |
Spirit of the Hills is a 1988 western mystery novel by Dan O'Brien. [1]
Jimmy McVay is shot to death in Toledo, Ohio while buying marijuana and his twenty-five thousand dollars is stolen. Tom McVay, his older brother and a Vietnam veteran, finds out that the murderer is a man named P J Billion from Medicine Springs in South Dakota and sets out to recover the lost money and revenge himself. In the meantime something begins to kill the livestock around Medicine Springs. Some believe that a wolf is the culprit. Buffalo wolves used to roam the prairie but they are extinct now. As incessant livestock killings arouse fear and anger among the farmers, local authorities hire Bill Egan, a seventy-year-old retired wolf trapper. When Tom McVay arrives at Medicine Springs, he happens to pass himself off as a reporter after the wolf. Kattie Running, an attractive Sioux, returns to Medicine Springs from Minnesota to join a new breed of Sioux Indians. They are mostly peaceful political activists who intend to reclaim the Black Hills that once belonged to their ancestors. But a few extremists have evil plans to blow up Mount Rushmore.
The Crow, whose autonym is Apsáalooke, also spelled Absaroka, are Native Americans living primarily in southern Montana. Today, the Crow people have a federally recognized tribe, the Crow Tribe of Montana, with an Indian reservation, the Crow Indian Reservation, located in the south-central part of the state.
The Cheyenne are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains. Their Cheyenne language belongs to the Algonquian language family. Today, the Cheyenne people are split into two federally recognized nations: the Southern Cheyenne, who are enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in Oklahoma, and the Northern Cheyenne, who are enrolled in the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana.
Dances with Wolves is a 1990 American epic Western film starring, directed, and produced by Kevin Costner in his feature directorial debut. It is a film adaptation of the 1988 novel Dances with Wolves, by Michael Blake, that tells the story of Union Army Lieutenant John J. Dunbar (Costner), who travels to the American frontier to find a military post, and who meets a group of Lakota.
Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa Lakota leader who led his people during years of resistance against United States government policies. Sitting Bull was killed by Indian agency police on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation during an attempt to arrest him at a time when authorities feared that he would join the Ghost Dance movement.
Crazy Horse was a Lakota war leader of the Oglala band in the 19th century. He took up arms against the United States federal government to fight against encroachment by White American settlers on Native American territory and to preserve the traditional way of life of the Lakota people. His participation in several famous battles of the Black Hills War on the northern Great Plains, among them the Fetterman Fight in 1866, in which he acted as a decoy, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, in which he led a war party to victory, earned him great respect from both his enemies and his own people.
Plenty Coups was the principal chief of the Crow Tribe and a visionary leader.
The Sioux Wars were a series of conflicts between the United States and various subgroups of the Sioux people which occurred in the later half of the 19th century. The earliest conflict came in 1854 when a fight broke out at Fort Laramie in Wyoming, when Sioux warriors killed 31 American soldiers in the Grattan Massacre, and the final came in 1890 during the Ghost Dance War.
Charles Butler McVay III was an American naval officer and the commanding officer of the cruiser USS Indianapolis which was lost in action in 1945, resulting in a significant loss of life. Of all captains in the history of the United States Navy, he is the only one subjected to court-martial for losing a ship sunk by an act of war, despite the fact that he was on a top secret mission maintaining radio silence.
Run of the Arrow is a 1957 American Western film written, directed, and produced by Samuel Fuller and starring Rod Steiger, Sara Montiel, Brian Keith, Ralph Meeker, Jay C. Flippen, and Charles Bronson. Set at the end of the American Civil War, the movie was filmed in Technicolor.
Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer is a 1931 book by Thomas Bailey Marquis about the life of a Northern Cheyenne Indian, Wooden Leg, who fought in several historic battles between United States forces and the Plains Indians, including the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where he faced the troops of George Armstrong Custer. The book is of great value to historians, not only for its eyewitness accounts of battles, but also for its detailed description of the way of life of 19th-century Plains Indians.
The Black Hills is an isolated mountain range rising from the Great Plains of North America in western South Dakota and extending into Wyoming, United States. Black Elk Peak, which rises to 7,244 feet (2,208 m), is the range's highest summit. The Black Hills encompass the Black Hills National Forest. The name of the hills in Lakota is Pahá Sápa. The Black Hills are considered a holy site. The hills are so called because of their dark appearance from a distance, as they are covered in evergreen trees.
The Great Sioux War of 1876, also known as the Black Hills War, was a series of battles and negotiations that occurred in 1876 and 1877 in an alliance of Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne against the United States. The cause of the war was the desire of the US government to obtain ownership of the Black Hills. Gold had been discovered in the Black Hills, settlers began to encroach onto Native American lands, and the Sioux and the Cheyenne refused to cede ownership. Traditionally, American military and historians place the Lakota at the center of the story, especially because of their numbers, but some Native Americans believe the Cheyenne were the primary target of the American campaign.
Sean McVay is an American football coach who is the head coach for the Los Angeles Rams. He became the youngest NFL head coach in the modern era when he was hired by the Rams in 2017 at the age of 30. McVay is also the youngest head coach to win a Super Bowl and be named NFL Coach of the Year. Prior to becoming Rams head coach, he served as a tight ends coach and offensive coordinator for the Washington Redskins.
The Little People of the Pryor Mountains are a race of ferocious dwarfs in the folklore of the Crow Nation, a Native American tribe. The Little People were also seen as imparting spiritual wisdom, and played a major role in shaping the destiny of the Crow People through the dreams of the iconic Crow chief, Plenty Coups.
Spirit Mound Historic Prairie is a state park of South Dakota, US, featuring a prominent hill on the Great Plains. The Plains Indians of the region considered Spirit Mound the home of dangerous spirits or little people; members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition climbed it on August 25, 1804. The park was established in 2002. It is located about 6.5 miles (10.5 km) north of Vermillion, South Dakota.
The Big Fight at the Jenkins Saloon, also known as the Tascosa Gunfight or simply the Big Fight, was an incident that took place in the Old West town of Tascosa, Texas, on March 21, 1886, between members of two Texas Panhandle ranch factions: the LS Ranch's Home Rangers and a group of small ranchers and cattle rustlers known as "The System".
A Signal of Peace is an 1890 bronze equestrian sculpture by Cyrus Edwin Dallin located in Lincoln Park, Chicago. Dallin created the work while studying in Paris and based the figure on a member of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, which he attended often. He exhibited the original plaster version of the sculpture at the Paris Salon of 1890, where it won honorable mention.
Walking Thunder is a 1994 film starring James Read, John Denver and David Tom and Bart the Bear, written and directed by Craig Clyde. It relates the memoirs of a young boy Jacob McKay who travels with his family on a wagon on their way to California and become stranded in the Rockies. There they learn to survive, adapt to their surroundings and make the most of what they have with the help of a mountain man, an elderly Sioux medicine man and a legendary bear known by the Native Americans as Walking Thunder. The film won a Silver Award at the Worldfest Film Festival. It was released in 1995, but was not widely distributed until 1997.
Porcupine was a Cheyenne chief and medicine man. He is best known for bringing the Ghost Dance religion to the Cheyenne. Raised with the Sioux of a Cheyenne mother, he married a Cheyenne himself and became a warrior in the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers.
The Sean McVay effect is a term used to describe a trend beginning in 2018 regarding the hiring practices of National Football League (NFL) teams towards employing young head coaches that specialized in offensive strategy, but would later be expanded to describe the trend of hiring young head coaches in general. The phrase originates from Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay, who when hired at 30 years old in 2017, became the youngest NFL head coach in the Super Bowl era (1966–present). McVay rapidly changed the culture of the organization and turned the Rams into the league's highest-scoring offense, resulting in the team becoming perennial title contenders and eventual champions in Super Bowl LVI. In light of McVay's quick success, NFL teams increasingly began to hire relatively younger head coaches.