The border of northwestern Nebraska and the Pine Ridge area of South Dakota may always be contested ground, with conflict flaring sporadically in small towns where some descendants of Natives and non-Natives of the 1800s continue their forefathers’ battles.

Other people along the edges of the Oglala Lakotas’ Pine Ridge Reservation find their lives soothed by commerce, as banks and some businesses in the border towns prosper and contemporary Indians from Pine Ridge play golf at the country club in Gordon, Neb.

Those observations are from “The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder” by Stew Magnuson, a journalist and former foreign correspondent who is currently managing editor of National Defense Magazine, Arlington, Va.

In the book’s account, Yellow Thunder, 51, was abducted in February 1972 in Gordon by white men who had been drinking, as had he. They punched him, took his pants, pushed him partly nude into a packed American Legion Hall, thrust him twice into the trunk of a car, finally let him out, and then left him. He was found dead eight days later.

As the title implies, the author wants to tell the story of Yellow Thunder’s death and, from that vantage point, truths about the border towns, their Native and non-Native citizens, their storekeepers, activists, judges, attorneys and editors, while tracing early Lakota history through white settlement, the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation by the American Indian Movement, and the next three decades.

Added into the mix are tales of AIM activist Bob Yellow Bird and his family; the Shalds, whom the author regards as a bridge between cultures, and many others, including noted author Mari Sandoz.

In terms of artistry, the story is a grand sweep of history told in the best tradition of literary journalism. Border town inhabitants come to life and past and present merge seamlessly.

Pekka Hamalainen, an author and teacher who is a member of the Plains Histories series editorial board, asserts in the book’s forward that Magnuson’s “sympathies certainly lie with the Lakotas, but he resists the all too common scholarly tendency to demonize the whites and absolve the Indians as innocent victims or freedom fighters.”

Given that assumption, the trial of Yellow Thunder’s killers two-thirds of the way through the book yields no real surprises. All non-Natives are not bad people, so two white brothers are convicted of manslaughter, but the system is not flawless, so they are never charged with murder and they serve, respectively, two years of a six-year sentence, and less than a year of a two-year sentence.

Almost by process of elimination, if nearly everyone is contextualized into blamelessness, the remaining villain is alcohol, sold in massive quantities in the hamlet of Whiteclay, Neb.: “For as long as the Oglalas have been here, Nebraska merchants across the border have sold alcohol to the dry reservation. Four million cans per year from the tiny hamlet. Would anyone ever adopt this stretch of highway for litter control? The troubled two miles of pavement (between Whiteclay and Pine Ridge) is an unwanted orphan.”

With alcohol as demon, the thrust of the book is that neither side was correct in its beliefs about the other. Concerning the deaths of two Oglala men in Whiteclay, the author states “Ask folks in Sheridan County and Whiteclay, and they’ll say Indians were the killers. Ask folks in Pine Ridge, and they’ll say racist whites were responsible. These are the attitudes of people who want to believe the worst of each other.”

Nevertheless, Magnuson says, “The dirty war at Pine Ridge reached its darkest day on June 26, 1975, when two FBI agents followed two fugitives into an AIM stronghold” and were killed by gunfire. It is worth noting that, appalling though their deaths were, others would regard as equally abhorrent the deaths of AIM member Anna Mae Pictou Aquash and others on Pine Ridge during the FBI-AIM wars of the 1970s.

The details of individuals’ lives pull the reader into this book and lend it humanity. One is invited to learn and enjoy without being judgmental. But collective histories are more than the sum of individual circumstances, however skillfully they are recounted. When the author describes “a flood of whites washing over the prairie to claim it for themselves just as the Lakotas had taken it from their rivals over a century before,” he seems to place intertribal warfare on the same scale as the vast ethnic cleansing of Manifest Destiny. One Native tribe’s pushing another into a different, but resource-rich area is equated with a much larger civilization’s attempt to destroy a smaller one by forcing it onto a shrinking, resource-poor area unwanted by others.

When Hamalainen says that his “is only one of many readings this open-ended book yields” he may be summarizing the book’s greatest virtue – it is deeply thought-provoking about issues in a starkly beautiful area where myth sometimes trumps fact and where present and past join in unresolved strife.