The Heartsong of Charging Elk: A Novel

From the award-winning author of the Native American classic Fools Crow, James Welch gives us a richly
crafted novel of cultural crossing that is a triumph of storytelling and the historical
imagination.

Charging Elk, an Oglala Sioux, joins Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show
and journeys from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the back streets of nineteenth-century
Marseille. Left behind in a Marseille hospital after a serious injury while the show
travels on, he is forced to remake his life alone in a strange land. He struggles
to adapt as well as he can, while holding on to the memories and traditions of life
on the Plains and eventually falling in love. But none of the worlds the Indian has
known can prepare him for the betrayal that follows. This is a story of the American
Indian that we have seldom seen: a stranger in a strange land, often an invisible
man, loving, violent, trusting, wary, protective, and defenseless against a society
that excludes him but judges him by its rules. At once epic and intimate, The Heartsong
of Charging Elk echoes across time, geography, and cultures.