The Last Frontier (PDF)

North Castle Books are designed to bring the global variety of knowledge to a broader audience. Primarily aimed at the general reader through bookstore distribution, North Castle Books makes available, in handsomely bound paper editions, titles of literary and cultural significance that our editors have found to be of lasting importance. Spanning the range of fields from Asian Studies to American Studies, from short stories to scholarly treatises, from myth to memoirs, from Economics to Government, from Russian Politics to Recent History, North Castle Books will occupy an important place on bookshelves. Each edition will be reasonably priced, affording students, scholars, and serious readers the means to expand their horizons and broaden their aesthetic understanding.The story of the Cheyenne Indians in the 1870s, and their bitter struggle to flee from the Indian Territory in Oklahoma back to their home in Wyoming and Montana."Mr. Fast's novel will stand or fall upon its value as a dramatic, finely presented story. It is all of that: a model, which may easily become a classic example, of what to put in and what to leave out in the writing of a historical novel. ... I do not believe it is saying too much to suggest that in the person of Mr. Fast we may have the next really important American historical novelist". -- Joseph Henry Jackson, New York Herald Tribune Books"Fast's writing, austerely polished and austerely poetic, is admirably suited to this epic tale of a desperate effort for dignified survival. ... Fast has gotten to the core of this incident and made it into a rich American novel". -- New York Times Book Review"An amazing restoration and reconstruction. Thecharacters breathe, the landscape is solid ground and sky, and the story runs flexibly along the zigzag trail of a people driven by a deep instinct to their ancient home. I do not know any other episode in Western history that has been so truly and subtly perpetuated as this one. A great story lost has been found again, and as here told promises to live for generations". -- Carl Van Doren