The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder: And Other True Stories from the Nebraska-Pine Ridge Border Towns. By Stew Magnuson. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2008. xx, 361 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-89672-634-5.)

Abstract

In this book Stew Magnuson uses his considerable journalistic talents to chronicle the cross-cultural exchanges along the border between the Pine Ridge Reservation (which is located in South Dakota) and Nebraska. Set largely in the Sheridan County, Nebraska, communities of Gordon, Rushville, and Whiteclay, most of his story occurs after 1972. But as in any stirring narrative such as this one, contextual material enlarges its coverage. In this case it includes accounts of the Sioux Treaty of 1868; the 1876 battle of Little Bighorn; the 1890 tragedy of Wounded Knee; the 1887 application of the Dawes Act; the in-migration of ranchers, homesteaders, and townspeople; and the implementation of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1935. Magnuson also incorporates detailed vignettes of individuals and families enmeshed in the principal story that begins with the senseless death of a member of the Lakota Sioux tribe, Raymond Yellow Thunder, in Gordon, Nebraska, in February 1972.