Tag Archives: Native Americans

The Women Behind the Legend: Traces

30 Monday Jan 2023

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Traces, by Patricia L. Hudson
Fireside/Univ. of Kentucky, 2022. 278 pp. $28

One night in 1760, Daniel Boone returns unexpectedly to the cabin he’s built for his family at the fork of the Yadkin River in North Carolina to tell his wife, Rebecca, they have to leave. Now. Native American warrior bands have attacked nearby settlements and are surely headed the Boones’ way. There’s not a moment to lose; while Daniel tends to the livestock, Rebecca must gather the children.

Rebecca’s furious, because her husband’s always away, and because she never wanted to move to Yadkin in the first place. But after their wedding, he insisted, so there they are. To uproot seems natural to Daniel, another source of conflict, and as Rebecca quickly assesses what she must leave behind, she hates every second of it:

Her mother’s prized pewter platter—too heavy. The rug beneath the rocker was her sister Martha’s handiwork, but hardly a necessity, no matter how much her heart ached to leave it behind. She focused on packing foodstuffs—bags of dried beans, a slab of salt-cured fatback, her best iron stewpot—even as her eyes continued to circle the room, saying a silent goodbye to possessions she’d thought would be lifelong companions.

You can guess that this scene will recur throughout Rebecca’s life. Her husband has wanderlust, and despite his charm, patience, and tenderness, she wishes he could settle down—or keep his promises about how many months he’d stick around each year before traipsing into the forest. Since Martha has married Daniel’s younger brother, Ned, who’s more responsible and a homebody, this interconnected family has intriguing conflicts.

A 1907 photograph of a cabin on one of Boone’s tracts, Jessamine County, Kentucky (courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Hudson has done a great service illuminating the women behind Daniel Boone’s legend, his wife and, as the story progresses, his daughters. You can’t help admire their spirit, dedication, and strength of character, whether to put up with male vanity or imperiousness, or simply to will their family to survive.

Hudson also knows eighteenth-century frontier life intimately, which her physical descriptions vividly re-create. I come away with a greater appreciation of how demanding and perilous that life was. The author portrays Boone as a man who respects and has some understanding of Native American life and customs; what a contrast to everyone else, whose bigotry forms another theme.

But as a novel, Traces doesn’t work well. There’s no particular question that the narrative must resolve, unless you count Rebecca’s smoldering anger toward her often-absent husband and what might result. Even there, you know how that’ll go, not least because her physical attraction for Daniel works against her (perhaps too easily, at times). Rebecca’s nascent attraction for her brother-in-law offers potential, but that too fades in substance, even if its legacy hangs around.

Generally, I like how Hudson has portrayed her two principal characters, though I think she’s done a better job with Boone–odd, considering he has no narrative voice. But he’s thought about the world and his place in it, whereas Rebecca, though you understand her conflicting desires, feels more limited in scope. (Many emotional moments also end with the narrative telling what Rebecca feels rather than showing it, which would have been an opportunity to expand her range.) One poignant aspect of their marriage is that he’s literate, and she isn’t; he’s tried to teach her, but she can’t keep the letters in her head.

However, their interactions feel repetitive, as they state (or, as Rebecca sometimes does, swallow) their wishes. There’s no unified plot or climax. Rather, Traces has episodes, each with its own external threat (disease, enemies within or without the settlement), perhaps under slightly different circumstances but, in the main, much like its predecessors. I would have wanted widening internal conflicts, not just external ones. And though the Boones suffer painful losses, I would have wanted at least two of those to be less predictable.

Maybe the storytelling style results, in part, because Hudson seems to hew closely to Boone’s biographical history. Such novels, I think, risk lacking a coherent, tightly woven plot or climactic punch because few lives lend themselves to drama, except in disparate moments. History’s unkind to novelists, that way. Also, to carry her story into angles and corners Rebecca might not have seen, Hudson has a couple Boone narrate daughters a few sections. Unfortunately, their voices don’t sound age-appropriate and remind me of Rebecca’s.

As for the political themes, I accept Daniel’s sensitivity toward and fascination with Native Americans and Rebecca’s friendship with a slave woman (though I suspect the white woman would have had lingering doubts and prejudices). But the last few sections seem determined to embrace forgiveness, capital F, a neat wrap-up that may be too easily earned—and, as with Rebecca’s voice occasionally, feels modern.

Read Traces, if you will, for the setting, the taste of frontier life, and the women behind the great man’s legend. For the rest, I can take it or let it alone.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

No Quarter: Wolves of Eden

04 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Wolves of Eden, by Kevin McCarthy
Norton, 2019. 350 pp. $26

It’s late 1866 at Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory, in the Black Hills. Custer’s Last Stand is still ten years in the future, but as this story begins, massacre is the order of the day. The Sioux and the U.S. Army show no quarter, and murder and mutilation — sometimes in reverse order — harden hearts.

Into this bloodbath come three soldiers from Nebraska, most particularly Captain Molloy and Corporal (later Sergeant) Daniel Kohn. Their orders: to investigate the killing of a sutler and his wife, who ran a brothel near the fort. With so much bloodshed going on, it’s a wonder the army would take the trouble to send a mission of inquiry, especially when nobody likes a sutler, a camp merchant who charges extortionate prices for necessaries and amusements alike. Moreover, most of the soldiers are native Irish, including many veterans of the barely concluded Civil War, and they distrust all officials, not least investigators.

Since Captain Molloy, native Irish himself, quickly winds up in the fort’s hospital with a broken leg, he leaves the sleuthing to Kohn. How he’ll fare, and what really happened to the sutler and his wife — as opposed to rumor or appearances — forms the plot.

Red Cloud, a gifted Lakota chief, in Charles Milton Bell’s 1880 photograph. In the late 1860s, he conducted a brilliant defense of Native American land in the Dakota Territory against great odds (courtesy South Dakota Historical Society, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

However, the narrative begins with Michael O’Driscoll, one of two key suspects, writing down in his jail cell the truth as he witnessed it, for Captain Molloy’s eyes. Michael’s brother, Tom, is also implicated in the murder. So Wolves of Eden starts with a prologue and a trope, the manuscript that tells all. And this account is written by a man who’s got an eloquent pen and a superb eye for detail, even as he claims he’s hardly lettered.

Despite that, Wolves of Eden works as a tale of hard men in a kill-or-be-killed world. Sometimes you look around in vain for a character with whom to feel sympathy — reader, be advised — but the narrative feels splendidly authentic. I believe this is how the common soldier lived, thought, and fought, and though Michael comes to appreciate his adversaries’ bravery and tenacity, even to toy with the idea that their cause is just, he still hates them, in virulent terms.

There’s a lot of hatred in this novel, which can test a reader’s resolve. But McCarthy performs several valuable services. First and foremost, he exposes the U.S. government’s willingness to exterminate Native Americans for the benefit of gold prospectors or “settlers,” who have entered the territory illegally. Secondly, McCarthy portrays that hatred as the war’s driving force on the ground, and the fighting men feel lonely in their struggle, knowing that only the participants understand what’s going on, certainly not officials at their desks in Washington. Finally, the author gives voice to Irishmen who made up a substantial part of American armies during the 1860s. Throughout, the Civil War lurks in vivid memory, and Michael will never forget it:

It was the wager a boy made when he took on in Uncle Sam’s big show in the South seeking a new start in the world. Never mind the racking fear we felt or the night visions or nerves that snapped like bullwhips or jangled like jailer’s keys. Never mind hands that shook & would not stop shaking so that a tin mug of coffee was hard to sip without slopping down a poor boy’s tunic. Never mind all that because in truth no soldier in this world does ever think he will be one a bullet picks to visit.

Since he’s writing from the fort stockade, the story answers whether he’ll swing for the murders. McCarthy does well keeping the pages turning, though Wolves of Eden isn’t a mystery. He calls it a thriller, but I don’t see that; there are setbacks but few examples of “no — and furthermore,” and the prologue gives away too much, as they always do.

I believe the Irish characters implicitly and all the soldiers, except Daniel Kohn. He’s supposed to be Jewish, but since he has little inner life to speak of, he could be anybody, despite his ability to speak Yiddish and the constant insults he receives. He has only one redeeming trait, his devotion to his alcoholic captain, whose life he’s trying to save. Yet since he’s the driving force behind the investigation — which Molloy seems to wish to restrain —Daniel’s single-minded obduracy, which pays little attention to rules of evidence, tickles my cultural antennae. Is he meant to be a Judas, intent on betraying Christian men? Fie. Does he represent the canard about the harsh Jewish God compared to the forgiving, Christian one? Fie again.

I can’t pretend to know what the author intended. All I do know is that I’m put off from reading his other books.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Life As a Messenger: News of the World

10 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Review: News of the World, by Paulette Jiles
Morrow, 2016. 213 pp. $23

The protagonist of this engaging, thoughtful novel, Jefferson Kyle Kidd, has an unusual profession. An itinerant version of a town crier, he travels the Texas frontier in 1870, reading carefully selected stories from out-of-town newspapers and charges his listeners a dime admission. Captain Kidd, as he’s known, dresses to project an image of an educated, experienced person of wide understanding, a role that comes easily, and chooses those stories that he thinks will fire the imaginations of his audience. He’s seldom wrong.

But it’s not just the captain’s profession or bearing that set him apart. A veteran of two wars, including that of 1812, and a southerner whose sons-in-law died for the Confederacy, Kidd has too much empathy to resort to race prejudice, reserving his hatred for viciousness, bullying, or predatory behavior. He likes his roving life, or so he believes, and there’s no tonic like his own company. And yet, he’s begun to realize that all isn’t what it could be.

He had become impatient of trouble and other people’s emotions. His life seemed to him thin and sour, a bit spoiled, and it was something that had only come upon him lately. A slow dullness had seeped into him like coal gas and he did not know what to do about it except seek out quiet and solitude. He was always impatient to get the readings over with now.

After this particular reading, he greets Britt Johnson, a black freedman whom he calls friend, who has a favor to ask. Britt has been given a fifty-dollar gold piece to bring a young girl to San Antonio, a four-hundred mile trip, returning her to her aunt and uncle following several years’ captivity with the Kiowas. Britt doesn’t want the job, partly because his two companions and he have urgent business elsewhere, but mostly because transporting a white girl would likely get him lynched. Kidd doesn’t want to be responsible for anyone, especially a ten-year-old who acts half-feral and will probably bolt at the first chance she gets. He’s raised two daughters, so he’s “done with all that,” he’s in his seventies, and he’s had enough trouble. But he can’t turn away from a friend, and the girl’s an orphan, after all, and no doubt saw the Kiowa kill her parents. She needs help.

“In Summer, Kiowa,” 1898, Frank A. Rinehart’s platinum, hand-colored print (courtesy Boston Public Library via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Johanna, as Kidd calls her, is a handful and then some. She has no use for shoes, clothes as he understands them, table manners, kindness, or conversation–not that he speaks Kiowa or that she remembers English. And yes, Johanna does try to run away. But she also possesses wilderness skills that he appreciates (except when she misuses them in embarrassing ways) and courage under fire, which tells him she’s seen armed combat. As you’d expect, over time and circumstance, the two unwilling traveling companions learn each other, a little, and protect each other a lot.

They have several adventures that don’t turn out the way they anticipate; Jiles understands how to work the “no–and furthermore.” The reason they work, however, is that each connects to Kidd’s outlook, particularly his views of the cultural and racial divides that lead people to hate perfect strangers simply for what they (apparently) represent. It’s a clear-eyed lesson and as up-to-date as you could want, but it’s also a primer on how to write a novel. The exposition of the theme and the main character’s inner life are inseparable, and this is why he’s such a winning protagonist. For Kidd, who’s seen much of life and is looking forward to rest and peace and quiet during his final years–and who therefore has a certain perspective on younger people scurrying around–the question becomes, What does it all mean?

And his answer, which fits his profession, his difficult errand, and his refusal to take himself too seriously, is very simple. “Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news.” He wonders whether each person has just one message to bring through life, which may or may not have anything to do directly with the bearer, but you have no choice. You have to carry it.

In reading News of the World, that idea gives me something to think about.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Westward, Ho!: The Way West

04 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Way West, by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
Mariner/Houghton, 2002 [1949]. 340 pp. $14

A wagon train sets forth from Missouri in 1845, bound for Oregon. That may not sound like much of a premise. Nor does Guthrie stud his plot with grand, sweeping action. Nevertheless, this classic Western (from the author who wrote the screenplay for Shane, also a classic) provides as gripping a tale as I’ve read in a while, simply by recounting the trials involved in traversing more than a thousand miles of unmarked wilderness, day after day, month after month.

Alfred Jacob Miller's painting, from memory, of Fort Laramie, Wyoming, before 1840 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Alfred Jacob Miller’s painting, from memory, of Fort Laramie, Wyoming, before 1840 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

His secret? The desires, dreams, and perceptions of his characters–their inner lives–spill from every page. I feel that I know these people intimately, so I care what happens to them, even if I don’t like them (and some are decidedly unlikable). At times, they act like a loose-knit family, with all its kindnesses, quirks, and dysfunctions. But their disputes, alliances, interests, and consideration for one another (or lack of it, sometimes), however minor or mundane they are, take on outsize proportions.

For instance, when one of the needier, less accomplished travelers pleads openly for help, his request sounds “womanish” to one man, prompting that listener to grapple with what he’d never reflected on before, notions of how men and women differ. It’s a recurrent theme in the novel, especially evident in how the supposedly weaker sex displays tremendous strength and fortitude. But the character’s reflections imply another, larger purpose. The people making this journey aren’t just finding a new home; they’re finding out who they are.

Guthrie handles this brilliantly. He portrays his characters from several angles–how they feel about themselves, how they want others to see them, how they behave in groups, and when by themselves. The politics, in the broadest sense, start from the first pages, when the self-appointed leader of the expedition tries to recruit men he thinks will be useful to him. It’s a vivid, involving scene, because you can already sense which way the power lines run; what each man hopes to accomplish; what seduces them; and who’s trying to seduce. Even the man serving them drinks has a viewpoint, subtly suggested–he’s worried that good customers will be leaving town. And the only thing that “happens” is that these men begin to think of pulling up stakes and heading west. I admire this kind of writing, which can make high drama out of a glass or three of whiskey.

Among my favorite characters is Dick Summers, a laconic mountain man hired to guide the wagon train. He always knows more than he says, which is why the more perceptive people seek him out, and he never rushes to condemn anybody. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a dead shot, a gifted tracker, understands and partly admires Native American ways, and knows the trail. However, as in many other novels about the American West, Dick also represents the man who’ll have no place in the society that the people he’s guiding will create. What sets him apart most is an outlook:

These [men] couldn’t enjoy life as it rolled by; they wanted to make something out of it, as if they could take it and shape it to their way if only they worked and figured hard enough. They didn’t talk beaver and whisky and squaws or let themselves soak in the weather; they talked crops and water power and business and maybe didn’t even notice the sun or the pale green of new leaves except as something along the way to whatever it is they wanted to be and to have. Later they might look back, some of them might, and wonder how it happened that things had slid by them.

At times, Dick Summers seems a little too good to be true–always on the right side, ever patient, never selfish, understands himself clearly. Yet the above passage strikes me as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. Reading The Way West, I have to wonder whether dreams are useless, if you miss what happens on your way to realizing them.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Novel As Synopsis: The Flight of the Sparrow

22 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Flight of the Sparrow: A Novel of Early America, by Amy Belding Brown
NAL, 2014. 331 pp. $15

Flight of the Sparrow depicts the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the mid-1670s and the bloody struggle between colonists and Native Americans known as King Philip’s War. The premise supposes that Indians raiding a Massachusetts settlement kill the men and a few women and children, while taking the rest captive, among them Mary Rawlandson, a minister’s wife. For Mary, as for the other captives, shock follows shock–the murders, separation from loved ones, enslavement, near-starvation after a life of relative plenty, the constant threat of death.

The Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the U.S.)

But Mary’s captivity involves much more than trauma, which is why Flight of the Sparrow is a fascinating book. Her church teaching has reinforced the common assumption among the English colonists that the devil drives Native American life, and that heathen depravity makes Indians less than human. No surprise there, but what Brown does with that gives rich thematic scope to her narrative. Mary learns that many aspects of native life compare favorably with her own, including kind playfulness toward children, the willingness to share, greater respect for women, and, perhaps most of all, the expression of deep, unconstrained feeling.

Though Mary dreams of returning to colonial society and her husband, Joseph–whose absence the day of the raid saved his life–she begins to rethink who she is and what she wants, questions she’s never asked herself. She’s a captive, yet her definition of freedom (and relationship with God) will never be the same. You sense that she’ll somehow resume her former life, and you want to know how she’ll deal with that, or how the other colonists will view her.

To her credit, Brown airbrushes nothing, seeking neither to excuse nor obscure the gruesome violence Mary witnesses, nor to patronize the Native Americans as noble savages. It’s a generally sympathetic portrait, but a mixed one, and I believe it, as I do her portrayal of colonial ways. I knew very little of this subject, so I was pleased to read her thoughtful, thought-provoking narrative. For theme and scope, Flight of the Sparrow deserves an audience.

But in other ways, this is an artless, frustrating novel. Mary’s the only character of any depth. Her husband’s fire-and-brimstone persona wears thin after a while, because you can’t tell what sin and salvation actually mean to him, or why he has his particular take. To say that he’s a Calvinist preacher or a man of his time and place gives Brown leeway at first, but sooner or later, she has to show us more to keep him a plausible character with more than one dimension. There are hints, here and there, of vanities, desires, and weaknesses, but I wish she’d explored them. It would have made him more sympathetic, and a true match for Mary. Likewise, the baptized Indian man, James, who protects Mary as best he can, seems more like a representative than a full person. He’s crucial to the themes, plot, and politics of the narrative, and he reflects her conscience, but I wanted more.

The writing also bothers me, especially the emotional transitions. Instead of using metaphor, memory, or sensory clues to show what Mary feels, Brown offers summaries, full of rhetorical questions and bald statements. “She begins to accept the fact that he [Joseph] will not come for her and her affection for him shrivels.” This is a key moment, surely worth exploration. Another is the night Mary approaches James’s tent, an action that should feel as if all the devils in hell are leering at her, even as her desperation to understand what only James can tell her drives her toward him. But Brown describes the action, so that the passage reminds me of an emotional synopsis, what she might have written in planning the chapter. In certain similar moments, you can even imagine the bullet points, as with, “She becomes abruptly aware of how her clothes restrict her and promote her submission.”

I don’t mean to pick on Brown or hold her up to ridicule. I think she’s an astute writer who’s told a story of psychological complexity; I only wish she’d carried it through. And I bring this up because I’m trying to figure out whether my insistence means I’m chasing rare air in the literary atmosphere. Reading The Flight of the Sparrow makes me wonder about other books in which the authors tell too much, and whether most readers prefer that.

What do you think?

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.