Morning Star, Let Us Make a New Way

Benjamin Cooper bears witness, from his early days in Denver City as a child, through his adult life as an Army officer, to his government's relationship with a tribe he comes to know well. As the years unfold, he is unsettled by a strong spiritual pull to recognize the Cheyenne people's prayerful relationship with the Creator. Frighteningly, as he holds a bible, which he has considered the sacred guide that was shaping his country's manifest destiny, he comes to recognize another manifest destiny taking shape in the tribe being decimated. Trembling, at times, with the impact of this insight, he draws closer to the old man chief of the Cheyenne Tribe, known outside the tribe as Dull Knife and known to his people as Morning Star. Against all odds, he becomes driven to try to protect the old man and his family from further hardship. Separated by overwhelming differences, standing much of his life with the forces responsible for the tribe's devastating losses, he is faced with a last order. He is to stop the Cheyenne Exodus, the tribe's desperate effort by a remnant of three hundred men, women and children to return, from Indian Territory, to their homeland against the full force of the United States military power.