"Focusing on a single 1868 photograph by Alexander Gardner, celebrated photographer of the most deadly decade in American history, this book leads readers on an historical treasure hunt that uncovers new and unexpected stories about the American West in the aftermath of the Civil War. In May 1868, Gardner traveled to Ft. Laramie to document the negotiations between native tribes and federal officials who sought to push them onto a reservation. There, he took the enigmatic photograph that came to haunt historian Martha Sandweiss. In the photo, six members of the federal Peace Commission stand on either side of a young unnamed Indian girl wrapped in a blanket. Who was the girl, and why was she posed with the men? In her book, Sandweiss will take readers from the diplomatic event captured in Gardner's photograph into the complicated personal lives of the people who met up for one brief moment on a nondescript patch of earth at a military fort in Indian Country. Her greatest interest is reserved for the subject at the center of the mysterious photo: a mixed-race girl whose metis life on the northern Plains collapsed amid growing American settlements in the West. Many years after the photo was snapped, she married a white Civil War veteran. After that marriage ended in abandonment, she married a half-Lakota man and had eight children. She died in a sod house on an Indian reservation. The lives of Sandweiss's subjects were buffeted by the military orders and national laws that governed so many aspects of American life in the decades before and after the Civil War. But they were also shaped by disease and domestic violence, racial hierarchies and family dramas. Tracking the individual subjects in the photograph, Sandweiss aims to tell a fresh story of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and their intimate entwinement with the Indian Wars"--