On Thanksgiving Day in 2016, Vernon Benjamin, aged 70, loaded his pickup with supplies for the protesters at Standing Rock opposed to a new oil pipeline and left his home in upstate New York for a journey across America unlike anything he'd ever done. He cared deeply about Native American causes. But Trump had won the election. The country was falling apart. Benjamin had always been a journalist, a historian, a poet. Now could he be an activist who put his heart and soul on the line? What he found at Standing Rock and in himself changed his life. Vernon Benjamin was the author of The History of the Hudson River Valley: From Wilderness to the Civil War and The History of the Hudson River Valley: From the Civil War to Modern Times .