During the Civil War, after Santee Sioux killed several hundred settlers in the fall of 1862, residents of Nebraska and Iowa feared for their lives. Washington supplied encouragement, enough supplies to muster a volunteer regiment of cavalry from each state, and a general to lead them against the Indians. This is the story of that long summer campaign by untrained Nebraska soldiers--mostly boys between seventeen and twenty--enduring extremes of weather and shortages of provisions before finding and defeating a large encampment of renegade Indians at Whitestone Hill.