Red Cloud and the Indian Trader: The Remarkable Friendship of the Sioux Chief and JW Dear in the Last Days of the Frontier

Winner of the 2024 Will Rogers Medallion Award for Western Biographies

John William Dear was born in 1845 into a close-knit farming family in Northern Virginia. After the Civil War, when he fought as a Confederate soldier with Mosby's Rangers, he went West. For fifteen years, until his premature death, Dear lived a tumultuous life in the West as one of the last fur traders on the Upper Missouri and as the longest serving, government-appointed Indian Trader to Red Cloud's Sioux. But misfortun...