Empty Ground

In 1849, a seventeen-year-old Irish immigrant named Declan Shea stands at the Powder River and watches sixty million buffalo come over a rise. By 1883, he rides the same country and cannot find eleven.Between those two moments lies a life. Declan learns his trade on the northern plains—the Sharps rifle, the skinning knife, the arithmetic of a hide taken clean. He takes a Cheyenne name he did not c...