The Lost Wife

"Minnesota, 1862: As a woman fleeing from a dark and secret past, Sarah Wakefield leaves Rhode Island quietly and quickly under cover of night for the long journey to Minnesota where she has been advised there is good work to be had. She soon finds a husband who becomes a resident physician for a Sioux town there but the political backdrop of that moment is volatile: white settlers are breaking treaties, Native American land is shrinking, and mass starvation and disease looms over the Sioux community. As the earliest settlers in this area, Sarah anticipates unease and tension, but instead she finds acceptance and kinship. Through the caring Sioux women, Sarah learns to cook, make clothes, speak the Sioux language, and ultimately finds companionship with the women which far exceeds that with her strange and distant husband. But the Sioux aren't receiving what they were promised from the White settlers, and a succession of devastating treaty breaks result in widespread famine, territory loss and conflict. What follows is one of the most influential Native uprisings of all time, the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. As the war erupts around her, Sarah is separated from her husband, and rescued by the Sioux who are seeking safety from the fighting, and ultimately a home that was stolen from them. She will heroically but unsuccessfully try to protect them during the Dakota Trial that ensues. Intimate, raw, compelling and brilliantly subversive, Susanna Moore explores a complicated history of female captivity and Native American suffering"--