I received this from Netgalley.com,.

Interesting telling of Crazy Horse and events leading up to epic battles. Included are historical notes and mini-bios of the main character's.

2.75☆

When I saw the author's name, getting this was a no-brainer for me even though I don't normally read Westerns. The characters are interesting and well-crafted, along with good dialog, and an engaging plot. It's an imaginative (since on one knows) and effective telling that involves real events. This one will stick with me for a while. Recommended.

I really appreciate the ARC for review!!

’The full story of what happened in that brief hour of bloody carnage at high noon under the wintry sky of December 21, 1866, will never be known.’ -- Dee Brown - The Fetterman Massacre: Fort Phil Kearny and the Battle of the Hundred Slain

Ridgeline, Michael Punke’s second novel, is set to be published on Jun 1, 2021, just 9 days short of 19 years since his first novel, The Revenant was published. I have not read The Revenant, but I did see the movie which was not a movie one easily forgets.

Ridgeline is another incredibly memorable story, which shares a fictionalized account of the true story of those U.S. Army officers, some who had recently fought in the Civil War, sent to settle the West, establishing a US Army outpost in northeastern Wyoming - Fort Phil Kearny. As many were then travelling, hunting for gold in the hills of Montana, a fort was needed to offer protection and avert Native American attacks. Some of the military men brought their wives, and other women, laundresses, were also there. Initially, the lifestyle was on the rough side, living in makeshift tents, but as time passes some of the higher ranking married men will have officers’ quarters, while most are roughing it. Their supply of the supplies they’d been promised doesn’t live up to their expectations. Guns, ammunition are antiquated and insufficient in number for their need, and of the one hundred and eighty infantrymen, only around half spoke, let alone understood, anything bearing a resemblance to English.

This alternates between the stories of those living inside the fort, and those of the indigenous people living on the surrounding land, which includes the renowned Crazy Horse, who has seen the women along with the children, making him realize that they intend to settle the area, the idea of them doing so leaves him deeply disturbed.

Crazy Horse is aware of the military’s belief that they aren’t capable of planning any kind of strategy, which he believes will play out in their favour. The battle that inevitably ensues ends up being an epic one. A battle fought with an almost blind arrogance on one side, and brilliant strategy on the other.


Pub Date: 01 Jun 2021


Many thanks for the ARC provided by Henry Holt and Company / Henry Holt & Co.

Three summers ago, a friend with longtime family ties to Wyoming suggested that we visit Fort Phil Kearney while I was wandering around that part of the country. About the only thing that sounded remotely familiar to me at the time was the name of the Civil War general for whom the fort was named. I knew nothing about the history of the fort itself or what had happened there. Fort Phil Kearney is in such a remote location even today that it is easy to envision how scary it must have been there when the fort was constructed by military personnel in 1866, but it was only after hearing the fort’s history from an excellent Wyoming State Parks ranger that I wondered why it was still such a well-kept secret. Why were there no movies or novels about Fort Phil Kearney and the “Fetterman Fight” that happened there on December 21, 1866? After all, the Fetterman Fight, right up until the massacre of troops at the Battle of the Little Bighorn almost ten years later, was the worst defeat the US army ever suffered in battle against united tribes of American Indians.

Well, finally, someone has written a novel about Fort Phil Kearney, and as it turns out, it was well worth the wait because Michael Punke’s Ridgeline brings it all to life for today’s readers. Punke is, of course, best known for his novel The Revenant and the successful film version that followed some years later, and this seems like a natural for the Wyoming native who as a teenager was himself a National Park Service employee at the state’s Fort Laramie National Historic Site.

No one can know exactly what happened on that bloody day — or why it happened the way that it did — but Punke’s combination of historical fact and logical speculation is certainly plausible. The basic facts are these:

Several Indian tribes, some of them longtime enemies, worked together to bring approximately 2,000 warriors to the battlefield.

Tribal chiefs, with the help of a young warrior called Crazy Horse, concocted a precisely coordinated plan to lure soldiers from the fort into an ambush from which they could not possibly escape.

Despite being directly ordered not to cross the ridge that placed them out of sight from fort observers, a combination of 81 calvary and infantry soldiers did exactly that.

Within an hour (some say thirty minutes) of having crossed that point, all 81 soldiers were dead.

The Indians knew they were fighting for their very survival as a people. A lesser threat would not have allowed longtime mortal enemies, as some of the tribes were, to put aside their differences even long enough to defeat a common foe. The soldiers were there because of the country’s inevitable western expansion and its hunger for gold. The troops were a mixture of Confederate and Union veterans, and not all of them were even soldiers by choice.

The story Punke tells, because he tells it in alternating sections from the points of view of both sides, has a little of the feel of watching two runaway trains approach an unavoidable head-on collision. It has a tragic feel about it, especially because all of the key characters in Ridgeline are based upon historical figures and what historians know about them. Among the Indians, there are: Crazy Horse, his friend Lone Bear, his brother Little Hawk, and chiefs Red Cloud and High Backbone. Soldiers include: the fort’s commander Colonel Henry Carrington, Captains William Fetterman and Tenador Ten Eyck, and Lieutenant George Washington Grummond (the wild card in this story). In addition to the troops, a few families, including children, were also inside Fort Phil Kearney, and Punke uses two of the wives, Frances Grummond and Margaret Carrington, to illustrate some of the personality conflicts and jealousies that existed in the officer ranks. Scouts Jim Bridger (who played a key role in Punke’s The Revenant) and James Beckwourth also add to the mix.

Bottom Line: Ridgeline is the kind of historical fiction that reminds readers that those who came before us were not all that different from the people we are today. Punke does not take sides. Instead, he gives the reader a sense of how — and why — something as tragic as what ultimately happened to this country’s native peoples happened. This is a memorable account of one little known fight between two very different cultures that had a much greater impact on American history than anyone could have realized at the time.

What a great historical fiction!! I loved “The Revenant” and this one is just as good. I have started reading more books on the wild west and this one is an especially great representation of the events leading up to the battle between Crazy Horse and the Army in the late 1800’s, not only a great read but shock full of education. I loved the way the chapters went from how the Lakota viewed their lives, then goes to a couple of the Army soldiers’ versions and the best was the wife’s descriptions of what it was like living in the rugged wild west.
We learned how the soldiers arrived and built from scratch an Army Fort while the Indians watched on as the white man destroyed everything they revered. The writing is excellent, the descriptions are beautiful and the fighting was graphic and intense. Great research, great book. High 5 stars. I will read anything Michael Punke writes.
I want to thank Henry Holt & Company along with NetGalley for allowing me the opportunity to read an ARC. This one is a true 5 star read.

384 pages

5 stars

It is 1866, just after the cessation of the civil war, when General Sherman selects Colonel Henry Carrington to lead a party of three hundred men, women and children to build a new fort in the Montana Territory. It will be called Fort Phil Kearney. Also with him are Lieutenant George Washington Grummond, scout Jim Bridger, Captain Tenador Ten Eyck, Captain Fetterman and others. More than half of the “new” soldiers do not speak English, or speak it very poorly.

Fort Kearney is built in the middle of the Lakota Sioux hunting ground. Red Cloud, chief of the Lakota wants to foster good will with the soldiers (with the eventual aim of waging war), but Crazy Horse, who is somewhat of a mystic and visionary, wants the white men gone now. They start a series of small raids to irritate the soldiers and to learn their tactics.

Metzger, the German who is also a very proud and meticulous bugler plays a large part in explaining to the reader what is happening on the ground.

Red Cloud invites the Arapaho, Northern Cheyenne and Minnicoujou Sioux to join his war party. He and Crazy Horse devise plans for corralling and decimating the soldiers.

Meanwhile, inside the fort, tempers are flaring between the officers. Grummond is making several scences and generally being insubordinate. Fetterman and Ten Eyck are discussing ways to rope him in as Carrington is proving to be an indecisive and poor leader.

Interspersed with all of this is the secret journal of Frances Grummond. She reveals some very telling facts about the unstable Lieutenant Grummond.

I like how Mr. Punke tells what happened to the key characters in the book. This is a creative imagining of what might have actually occurred to Fetterman and his men at this battle. I thoroughly enjoyed the story and went immediately to Amazon to look for others of Mr. Punke's novels. The story was very well written and plotted. The transitions were nearly flawless, the characters real. The reader got a very good sense of what the individuals were about, their thoughts and motives.

While the Native Americans may have won this battle, the overall history of the white men's dealings with them was reprehensible.

I want to thank NetGalley and Henry Holt & Company/Henry Holt & Co for forwarding to me a copy of this remarkable book for me to read, enjoy and review. The opinions expressed here are my own.