Sunrise

50 pages1-hour read

Fiction

Novel

Adult

Published in 2026

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Summaries & Analyses
Plot Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Character List
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Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
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Background

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and death.

Historical Context: The Northern Cheyenne and Broken Treaties

The westward expansion of European colonizers across the United States precipitated a number of conflicts with the Indigenous nations that had already long lived in these territories. These conflicts were collectively known as the American Frontier Wars and lasted from the start of the 17th century to the end of the 19th century. Leveraging its large military, the United States government killed or displaced hundreds of thousands Indigenous peoples, either forcing them to retreat to new (and often hostile) territories or into reservations where the government could moderate their socioeconomic development (“Genocide of Indigenous Peoples.” Holocaust Museum, Houston).

Among these conflicts was the tenuous relationship that the United States government held with the Plains tribes. In the mid-19th century, the United States government signed two key treaties at Fort Laramie with Plains tribes, including the Cheyenne, that deeply shaped their relationship in the years to come. The 1851 treaty established tribal territories and promised annuities in exchange for safe passage for settlers on the Oregon Trail. However, the discovery of gold and continued expansion led to frequent violations by miners and settlers. The 1868 treaty formally created the Great Sioux Reservation, which included the Black Hills, and designated unceded territory for Cheyenne hunting grounds. This treaty was also broken after a gold rush in the Black Hills led to the Great Sioux War of 1876.

Following the end of the Great Sioux War, in 1877, the US forcibly removed the Northern Cheyenne from their ancestral lands to the Darlington Agency in territory that corresponds to modern-day Oklahoma, where they suffered from disease and malnutrition. In response, a band of approximately 300 Northern Cheyenne led by Dull Knife and Little Wolf began a desperate 1,500-mile journey back north in 1878, an event known as the Northern Cheyenne Exodus. Though one group of Cheyenne succeeded in reaching Montana, the remainder of the Exodus was captured and incarcerated in Nebraska. Those who completed the journey were allowed to remain in the north on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, established in 1884.

This history of displacement and resistance directly informs the radicalization of Doctor “Preacher” Maclean in the embedded narrative, “Sunrise.” Fred Kipley’s recording explicitly notes that Preacher “especially abhorred our two-faced dealings with the Cheyenne, given what the government just put them through, dragging them down to Oklahoma to starve, and then setting the whole damn army on them…when they broke free for home” (192). Preacher’s plan to attack Fort Searles is thus a direct political response to the American government’s broken promises and atrocities, grounding his character’s motivations in verifiable historical injustice.

Literary Context: The Dime Novel Western

The dime novel, an inexpensive and sensational form of popular fiction, flourished in the United States from the 1860s through the early 1900s. These paperback books, often costing just ten cents, made literature accessible to a mass audience. The Western was one of the genre’s most popular subjects, creating a powerful and lasting myth of the American frontier.

Dime novel Westerns typically featured heroic, larger-than-life protagonists, clear-cut conflicts between good and evil, and romanticized depictions of violence and conquest. Authors often took real-life figures like Buffalo Bill Cody or Wild Bill Hickok and transformed them into legendary heroes, simplifying complex histories into thrilling adventures. These embellishments often misrepresented the figures in order to advance agenda that likely did not align with the truth. For instance, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody became a household name after he established Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, a circus-type show that staged scenes of life in the American West. Though Cody’s show often portrayed Indigenous Americans as villains determined to ambush and pillage the white settlers, adding to their antagonization in American history, Cody himself suggested that he carried great sympathy for the plight of the Indigenous nations and their attempts to resist the American government, complicating the story that his own show told (Boissoneault, Lorraine. “Murder, Marriage and the Pony Express: Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Buffalo Bill.” Smithsonian Magazine, 10 Jan. 2017.) James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok enjoyed similar fame shortly after he faced down gunman Dave Tutt in 1865. Though reports vary on which of the men shot first, the version that survives into popular memory is the one written by Colonel George Ward Nicholas, who published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine that Tutt and Hickok fired at the exact same time but only Hickok’s bullet found its target in Tutt’s heart, inspiring a new heroic trope in American Westerns (Historynet Staff. “Wild Bill Hickok.” Historynet.com, 12 June 2006.) The process of myth-making helped sanitize the brutal realities of westward expansion, framing it as a noble and destined civilizing mission rather than a violent colonial project.

Téa Obreht’s novel directly engages with this literary tradition by embedding a fictional dime novel, An Incident at Greyrock, within its pages. This text exhibits all the genre’s classic tropes, portraying Anton Vargas as a dashing hero who directs a chaotic gunfight “like a ballet choreographer” (71) and effortlessly defeats villainous bandits. The novel then deconstructs this myth through the “Sunrise” manuscript and Fred Kipley’s interview, which reveal a more complicated and less glorious reality. The young character Dillon even notes the discrepancy between the legend and the man, telling Vargas, “You’re shorter. Darker, too” (93), showing the gap between dime novel fantasy and historical truth.