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Grounded in meticulous research and written with an uncanny understanding of the military and of American Indian culture, Blake offers soulful profiles of the participants, both Indian and cavalry.
Indian Yell is filled with accounts of harrowing sacrifice and tragic misdeeds of real people. Blake tells of their lives and loves, their bravery, and their shortcomings in a way that lends a new perspective on America's greatest insurgency. Some of the stories are well documented in the annals of history, while others are more obscure. Large or small, Blake weaves them together to show that bitter memories of this war still haunt the American West. These are the struggles that initiated the end of one way of life and the beginning of another; this struggle must not be forgotten.
About the author
Michael Blake began writing while serving in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War when he was stationed at Walker Air Force Base, where he wrote for the base newspaper. He studied journalism at the University of New Mexico, and later studied at a film school in Berkeley, California. He also attended Eastern New Mexico University in Portales. In the late 1970s, he moved to Los Angeles; during the 1980s, only one of his screenplays was produced, called Stacy's Knights. The movie starred Kevin Costner, who later encouraged him to continue to write, and introduced him to key figures in the Hollywood Industry. Dances with Wolves was the result; Kevin Costner then asked him to write a screenplay for the film based on the novel, for which he won an Academy Award. He died in 2015.
