Remember the Wind A Prairie Memoir Author:William McKissack Chapman It was mid-August of 1958 when William Chapman first saw the Sioux Standing Rock Reservation on the South Dakota prairie. Hot, desolate, windswept, it was quite a change from Paris, London and other places to which his fortunes had taken him. — Chapman and his wife, Ann, had moved their family to the West hoping that the dry climate might help th... more »eir youngest son's asthma. When the Episcopal bishop of South Dakota asked them to take over running of St. Elizabeth's School on the Standing Rock Reservation, they consented-and found themselves in the unaccustomed role of teachers to some sixty enigmatic young Indians.
This book is Chapman's forthright and wryly humorous account of his three years at St. Elizabeth's, which gave him an education in prairie life and Indian ways. Here you'll meet Lyman Bad Yellow Hair, who quit school rather than debase his manhood with dishwashing, and Elita Dog, a maiden with a face like a moon goddess. You'll meet the author's special friends, Ambrose Little Ghost and Harry Bone Club. You'll get to know Ernest Eagle Shield, who is deliberately run down and killed one moonlit night-and you'l see what happens when a well-bred young woman from Manhattan falls in love with a handsome brave.
As an acute and unromanticized description of life as it really is on an Indian reservation, Remember the Wind is probably without parallel. Read it for information -- and especially for pleasure. The author is a storyteller and the story he tells is of genuine joys and sorrows, with an occasional contretemps at his expense.« less