This is a work of imagination and while I have attempted to be as historically accurate as possible I remain more interested in what might have happened in history than what actually occurred.  For example, the meeting between the plains leaders never took place in the spring of 1880 as described in The New Nation.  I imagined it.

 

           However, many of the western plains nations were camped practically together in the Judith Basin during the previous winter and consequently the planned confederation would have been common knowledge.  The reason they were all together during the winter of 1879-80 was because the remnant of the northern buffalo herd was also there and it was during this winter that this herd was exterminated.  It never crossed into what is now Alberta again.

 

           Similarly, no one is certain at exactly what date the Blackfoot obtained horses and guns but it might have happened as described in The Real People. Knowing the date of the occurrence is less important than knowing the degree to which the lives of these people were changed by these radical new technologies.  Ways of living, millennia old, were changed forever in a very short space of time.

 

           In A Good Day to Die I have tried to examine the myths surrounding the conquest by Europeans of the western plains (and of the "New World" in general) and to create an alternative way of looking at our colonial history.  I do not see history as an inevitability.  My purpose here is to imagine a different kind of arrival, one in which the essential rightness of the native ways were recognized and incorporated.  We cannot change history but we can change how we respond to it and in so doing change the way we live.  I have done this writing and research in humility and have yielded to this knowledge.