[2] She completed the novel and published it six months after the Massacre at Wounded Knee at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and the year following the Ghost Dance, major events in Native American history.
Her novel offered "the first fictional re-creation of both the messianic religious movement that reached the Pine Ridge Reservation in the spring of 1890 and the infamous slaughter of Lakota men, women, and children that occurred on December 29 of that same year.
His comments "validate the Native religion and emphasizes the threat of white hostility, turning dominant rhetoric on its head and thereby extricating the Ghost Dance from the violence to follow.
[2] Callahan used the novel to dramatize the issue of tribal allotments and breakup of communal lands, and dedicated it to the Native American population, calling for an end to injustices suffered by Indians.
"[2] According to scholars Gretchen M. Bataille and Laurie Lisa, the novel is "thin, and sometimes highly improbable, plots are woven through with themes concerning the importance of Christianity and education in English, fraud in Indian administration, allotments, temperance, women's rights, the Ghost Dance movement, and atrocities committed upon the Sioux at Wounded Knee".