WARRIORS OF THE FIRST NATIONS -Courage, Resistance, and the Fight for the Continent ★

From the bestselling author of Empire of Fear, War Beneath the Waves, Lions and Foxes, and the Human Condition Quartet

Every tribe called ferocious was, in fact, a nation fighting for survival.

For four centuries, the peoples of Native America fought one of the longest and most consequential wars in human history — against Spanish conquistadors, French missionaries, British redcoats, and American cavalry. They fought for their land, their families, their ceremonies, and their right to exist on the continent they had inhabited for ten thousand years.

Warriors of the First Nations is the definitive narrative military and cultural history of Indigenous North America — sweeping, rigorously researched, and compulsively readable.

Meet the Comanche horsemen who built an empire larger than France. The Apache guerrillas who evaded the US Army for three decades. The Nez Perce who conducted a fighting retreat of twelve hundred miles, defeating the Army battle after battle before being caught thirty miles from safety.

Meet Geronimo, who held two national armies to a standstill with thirty-eight people. Crazy Horse, whose genius destroyed Custer at the Little Bighorn in under an hour. Tecumseh, who came closer than any man to uniting the continent against expansion. Chief Joseph, whose surrender — From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever — is one of the great documents of human dignity.

Drawing on decades of research, Quentin Drummond Anderson brings twenty chapters of unsparing history to a story buried under two centuries of mythology.

This is not a book about defeat. It is a book about what human beings are capable of when they refuse to stop fighting for what is theirs.

The nations are still here. The warriors are still at their work.


20 chapters · Four centuries · Little Bighorn, Pueblo Revolt, Wounded Knee, and more · Full portraits of Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Tecumseh, Chief Joseph, and others · Extensive notes and bibliography