The Indian Agent - Hardcover

Dan O’Brien’s earlier award-winning novel, The Contract Surgeon,introduced readers to Valentine McGillycuddy, the U.S. Army contract surgeon who became a friend of the great war chief Crazy Horse. Through McGillycuddy’s eyes, the novel recounted the friendship that so deeply impacted history. It also chronicled the great Sioux Wars, one of the most violent periods in this nation’s history.
The Indian Agent is the riveting sequel to The Contract Surgeon. After Crazy Horse’s death, McGillycuddy went on to become the youngest agent in history for the Red Cloud Agency, renamed the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, of the Oglala Lakota band of the Sioux. Red Cloud and McGillycuddy have diametrically opposing views, though they have more in common than either knows. They both love the land and they both love the past. The politics and the enormous tensions of the early days on the reservation are depicted in fascinating detail, as McGillycuddy (known as “the most investigated man” in the government) urges the Sioux to adopt a life of farming. He had lived on the vast plains with them. No white man knew better what the Sioux had given up—nor understood more fully the impossibility of returning to the old life.
Full of the dynamic history of the Plains, The Indian Agent is the true story of the conversion of this land from one of free nomadic people to one of settled commerce—achieved only at an unfathomable cost. The Indian Agent is a masterpiece that leads us through one of the most painful periods of the West to the novel’s devastating climax at Wounded Knee.

DAN O'BRIEN, one of the West's most celebrated writers, is the author of nine books. The Contract Surgeon won the 2000 Western Heritage Award for Fiction. His collection of short stories, Eminent Domain, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and O'Brien is the recipient of many national awards and grants. He lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota.