In the late Seventies, according to Howard Fast, who seems to have examined all the documents with the scrupulous imagination of a historical novelist, the Cheyenne Indians were the heroes and the victims of a persecution which will touch any American on one of his conscience's sorest spots. Mr. Fast tells the story in The Last Frontier. It is a great story, even if the book is something short of great. Mr. Fast is not sentimental, and the agonized sympathy with which one puts the novel down is the result of what happens in its pages, not of any tears Mr. Fast sheds himself or asks us to shed. Here is a solid and memorable addition to the vast literature about the American Indian. (p. x)

Mr. Fast tells [the story] from the white man's point of view. We see little of the Indians save as a pathetic...