In 1859 violence ruled the nation, recruiting innocence and requiring it to bend its knee. An unforeseen recruit appeared in the shape of a nineteen-year old antebellum boy reporting for his first day of work in an unsettled part of western Virginia. His only assets were a quick tongue, a likable wit, and obstinacy to bending his knee.In the span of two hours, violence--in the shape of a boss's mule club-strikes at an iron foundry. Iron workers strike, ejecting the boy into a thirty-year odyssey, running from the hanging rope. Violence threw Crazy Ol' Brown and Harpers Ferry at him; threw the Civil War at him; threw the Kansas Redlegs and the Missouri Bushwhackers at him; threw the great Sioux wars onto his path--still this boy refused to bend his knee. His innocence earns him Touch the Cloud--the much desired cousin of the Sioux War Chief Gall, and he finds love as only the Sioux know it, only to lose her to violence. His exploits on the plains bring him a second love, Speaks to Sky--the most gifted of all Sioux women, only to lose her. To further taunt him, violence gives him Little Howling Dog--the infant with cyclone lungs--a son he must protect from the devastation raging across the plains after the Civil War. Even after violence takes his loved ones, the frontiersman will not kneel to her. Instead, his odyssey gives him a savage's hurt, and he takes on a savage's revenge and for a time violence owns him.Violence sends its foremost lieutenant--a demented ex-rebel officer, earlier disfigured by the boy--who stalks him across Virginia and the plains territory until the fateful day at Wounded Knee when his pursuer catches him, and violence bend its knee.