Known as Plenty Kill, young Standing Bear belonged to the Western Sioux tribe that inhabited present-day North and South Dakota. In My Indian Boyhood he describes, with clarity and feeling lent by experience, the home life and education of Indian children. Like other boys, he played with toy bows and arrows in the tipi before learning to make and use them and became schooled in the ways of animals and in the properties of plants and herbs. His life would be very different from that of his ancestors, but he was not denied the excitement of killing his first buffalo before leaving to attend the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Luther Standing Bear is the author of Land of the Spotted Eagle, My People the Sioux, and Stories of the Sioux (also Bison Books).

    One spring day back in 1821, Jim Slater stole out of his father's farmhouse before daybreak and ran away to Providence to become a sailor. He signed up with the first ship he could find, and it was only when they were six days out at sea that he discovered he was one of the crew of a slave ship bound for Africa for its cargo. On the return trip there came an opportunity to escape when the ship was in the Gulf of Mexico, near New Orleans. His struggles in the wilderness, his meeting with the naturalist, John James Audubon, and his final homecoming are as exciting and real as if the reader had lived the story himself.