"The Last Frontier" is a gripping and historically significant masterpiece by Howard Fast, based on the tragic real-life events of the 1878 Northern Cheyenne Exodus. The novel chronicles the heartbreaking saga of a small band of roughly three hundred Cheyenne Indians—consisting mostly of women, children, and the elderly, along with a few dozen warriors. After being forcibly relocated by the United States government to a disease-ridden, barren reservation in Oklahoma where they faced starvation, the tribe makes a desperate, defiant decision. Refusing to wither away, they break out of the reservation and begin an epic, thousand-mile journey back north to their ancestral homelands in Wyoming and Montana. Across this vast expanse, they are relentlessly pursued by thousands of heavily armed U.S. cavalry troops tasked with capturing or wiping them out. Fast delivers a deeply empathetic and raw portrayal of Native American resistance, shifting away from traditional Western tropes to present the Cheyenne not as savages, but as a noble people fighting for their dignity. It is a haunting classic about human endurance and a desperate, heroic struggle for the ultimate freedom—the freedom to live or die on one's own terms.