The Watchers of the Plains

A disinherited Englishman calling himself Nevil Steyne keeps a hut on the White River, opposite the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations. A letter finds him: the younger brother who got the family money is crossing the plains by wagon with his wife and small daughter to hand over a share of it. Steyne rides to the tepee of the war chief Big Wolf instead. Days later a young plainsman named Seth shoots Big Wolf and lifts a fair-haired child from his arms, alive, with a bullet graze that has erased everything she knows of herself. Raised at White River Farm and called Rosebud, she grows up an heiress in ignorance, watched by the one man who knows her name. Cullum’s Sioux are drawn in the terms of 1908 popular fiction.