The Long Way Home

In October 1878, a Crow scout named Watches Twice stands on a ridge in western Nebraska and sees a column of Northern Cheyenne moving north against every order the United States Army has given them. Among them is a young woman who has walked from Indian Territory toward a country she has never seen.

Between that ridge and the reservation lies seven years. Watches Twice rides for the Army that has paid him and against the people who are running for their lives. The woman's name is Emeskeha'e. She survives the march from Darlington Agency, the breakout from Fort Robinson in the snow of January 1879, and the long quiet of the years that follow. They cross paths twice, briefly, and remember it after.

Told in the spare, unsparing prose of American literary realism, The Long Way Home is the story of a people who walked fifteen hundred miles toward a country that had become someone else's-and of the men sent to stop them.