America 's last conflict with its first people raged from Wounded Knee, South Dakota, to Gallup, New Mexico, in the spring of 1973. Death, a police shoot-out, and political intrigue drive the true story of the abduction of a small-town mayor by two young members of the American Indian Movement, then calling itself AIM, as they marched him at gunpoint through downtown Gallup. The siege and taking of eleven hostages in Wounded Knee overshadowed, at least nationally, the now largely forgotten story of Larry Casuse, activist, and Frank Garcia, idealist. But as the fictional characters in this novel learn, both stories started with the takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969.