The book remains a detailed and largely authoritative account of the legal dimensions of the dispute, though later scholars have noted that its perspective was shaped by its connection to the legal team that pursued the monetary judgment.

The scholarly literature has wrestled with the specific question of whether pursuing the monetary judgment through the courts was the right strategy, or whether it foreclosed other approaches.

There are historians who argue that the decision to accept the Fifth Amendment monetary compensation framework, however pragmatically reasonable it seemed at the time, set the claim on a path toward a resolution — money — that the Sioux would never be able to accept.

There are others who argue that the Supreme Court ruling was the best available outcome given the tools the legal system provided, and that the alternative to pursuing it would have been continued denial without even the acknowledgment of wrong.

Vine Deloria Jr., the Sioux scholar and activist whose work has been influential in Native American studies, wrote extensively about the Black Hills dispute and was consistently skeptical of the monetary compensation approach.

His argument was that framing the claim in terms the American legal system could address — Fifth Amendment compensation — inevitably produced a remedy the legal system was capable of providing, which was money, rather than a remedy that would actually address the wrong, which was land.