My Friend the Indian (Expanded, Annotated)

"If his sense of justice had led him to fine discrimination in these matters, the [Native American] would long ago have made an attack on the national Capitol."

So wrote James McLaughlin, who spent decades on the Northern Plains as an Indian agent and inspector, witnessing firsthand the final decades of Lakota independence. In My Friend the Indian (1910), he records those years in vivid, often intimate portraits of the men and women he knew-among them Sitting Bull, Gall, Rain-in-the-Face, and other leaders whose names are inseparable from the story of the Little Bighorn. Drawing on long conversations and years of daily contact, McLaughlin preserves first-person accounts of Custer's last battle as his Lakota acquaintances remembered it, along with stories of reservation life, political maneuvering, and cultural clash. Some of these testimonies have been revised or challenged by modern research, but many remain essential primary sources for students of the Indian Wars. What makes the book enduring, however, is not only the Custer material but McLaughlin's complicated loyalty to the people he served. He admired the Sioux as individuals and as a nation, yet worked inside a federal system that pushed them toward allotment, schooling, and dependence. His pages capture both empathy and blind spots, offering a candid window into the mindset of a well-intentioned official caught between two worlds.
For readers interested in: - First-hand nineteenth-century accounts of the Sioux and the Little Bighorn

• Ground-level views of reservation policy, agency politics, and daily life
• A primary source that combines frontier memoir, ethnographic observation, and historical testimony

My Friend the Indian remains one of the most revealing and human documents to come out of the Indian Wars era-indispensable to anyone who wants to hear how the participants themselves described a world in the midst of disappearing.