This is the story of a town, a Western town trying to grow up in the Dakota flats and prairies; and it is the story of a man, Blue, mayor in name alonThis is the story of a town, a Western town trying to grow up in the Dakota flats and prairies; and it is the story of a man, Blue, mayor in name alone, who wanted to save it, populate it, and make it grow into something good and viable. But, the town is named “Hard Times�, and it lives up to its name in every possible way.
The story opens with a visit from the worst kind of evil bad man, The Man From Brodie. He murders indiscriminately and then he burns the town to the ground, leaving only a handful of survivors. When the burying is done, most leave, but Blue stays, with a badly burned prostitute and an orphaned boy to take care of. The struggle to survive is visceral and punishing, and through Blue’s narrative we come to know what the cost of surviving is both mentally and physically.
This might be a study in what happens when good men do nothing, but I kept asking myself what exactly the good men could have done other than die with their fellows. Perhaps it is more about the way life tricks you into thinking that survival is winning, or how easily opportunities are missed that might alter the trajectory of your life completely
What is sure, is that there are moments of decision, turning points, when we lose the life we know and step into the future that we can only hope to shape into something better.
When was the moment, I don’t know when, with all my remembrances I can’t find it; maybe it was during our dance, or maybe it was some morning as a breeze of air shook the sun’s light; maybe it was one of those nights of hugging when we reached our ripeness and the earth turned past it; maybe we were asleep. Really how life gets on is a secret, you only know your memory, and it makes its own time. The real time leads you along and you never know when it happens, the best that can be is come and gone.
Whatever you decide the theme of this novel might be, there is no denying that E.L. Doctorow tells a story that you will never forget. The writing is powerful and dynamic; graphic and moving. If you are thinking you do not like Westerns, fear not–this is not typical of that genre at all. Rather, you will find here the soul of a man, laid bare with all its regrets; a glimpse at pure evil, free of any trace of remorse or humanity; and a revelation of how the aftermath of such evil can make the ordinary heart harden into stone.
Doctorow was a city boy from the East who must have given a lot of thought to how people survived the travails of the westward expansion. He must have searched for the element in a human being that makes him go on in the face of total failure and destruction. I think he believed that element to be hope.
A person cannot live without looking for good signs, you just cannot do it, and I thought these signs were good.
A huge thank you to my friend, Howard, who ferrets out the books that no one seems to read anymore and gives them to me like gifts. ...more
“Hewey Calloway tries to live a life that is already out of its time. He attempts to remain a horseback man while the world relentlessly moves into a “Hewey Calloway tries to live a life that is already out of its time. He attempts to remain a horseback man while the world relentlessly moves into a machine age. He tries to hold to the open range of recent memory even after that range has been cubed and diced and parceled by barbed wire. He lives in an impossible dream, trying to remain changeless in a world where the only constant is change.� - Elmer Kelton, Introduction
The way Hewey saw it, the Lord had purposely made every person different. He could not understand why so many people were determined to thwart the Lord’s work by making everyone the same.
Hewey Calloway is a man out of time. He is a cowboy in a world that is rapidly becoming infested with automobiles. He likes to believe his way of life is indestructible, but he looks around him and sees fewer men like himself and more like his brother, Walter, who has succumbed to the lure of a farm and responsibilities of a family.
This novel is written in a light and humorous tone, and there is much to laugh at in Hewey. He is marvelously candid and logical, and I found myself rooting for his survival.
He had never seen any harm in an occasional small liberty with the facts, provided the motive was honorable.
I always liked God better when I found Him outdoors. He always seemed too big to fit into a little-bitty cramped-up church house.
Lots of people talk about what the Lord wants. Wonder how many has ever asked Him.
Looks to me like if they want people to pay attention to the rules, the rules ought to make sense.
Therein lies the problem, because the only life that makes sense for Hewey is a free one, and all he sees around him are ways in which men’s freedoms are curtailed. None of the joys of the town can usurp the pleasures of the range for Hewey. He still breaks mustangs, and in many ways he is one.
Despite the humor, there is a current of sadness that runs through this novel for me. It is the sadness of loss. If we are honest, each of us who lives a long life will see our way disappear to make room for whatever changes the future brings. I have felt it myself with the advent of technology. I live with it, even relish parts of it, but I know in my heart that I would trade it in a heartbeat to go back to that world in which a book could only be found at a library, a bookstore, or a drugstore paperback rack; when summer meant pedaling all over town on bicycles with your friends and an occasional milkshake at the pharmacy lunch counter; when Sundays were for church and dinner at Grandma’s and excitement was bag lunch day at school.
The world moves on, and if you do not move with it, it will leave you behind. But, there are worse things than being a “good old boy�, worse things than being an anachronism, provided you can manage to keep the part of you that makes you who you are....more
A year like this one anything you do is a mistake. Just being a rancher is a mistake. Only real difference I see between ranching and poker is, witA year like this one anything you do is a mistake. Just being a rancher is a mistake. Only real difference I see between ranching and poker is, with poker you got some chance.
This is an age-old story of man against nature, man against man, and man against government; and Elmer Kelton tells it so well that you can feel that he has lived much of it in his own lifetime. There is a drought in West Texas, where Charlie Flagg owns a ranch and leases another large section of land to run cattle and sheep. Drought is not a new experience for Charlie, he has lived through the big drought of 1933, but this drought is to prove different, this one continues beyond the limits of memory and leaves few men standing in its wake.
It was a comforting sight, this country. It was an ageless land where the past was still a living thing and old voices still whispered, where the freshness of the pioneer time had not yet all faded, where a few of the old dreams were not yet dark and tarnish.
Charlie loves this land and he lives in the memories of the old days, when the line between right and wrong was less gray and more black and white. He is a bit of an anachronism, but that is because he still has the honor and dignity of the best of his generation. He pulls his own weight, and he doesn’t want a handout.
His son, Tom, has a young man’s view of life. He wants to make the rodeo circuit. He doesn’t understand his father’s brand of pride and principle, and he certainly fails to have his wisdom.
Tom Flagg said behind him, “I’d testify to anything for a free trip to Washington.� Charlie grumbled, “There’s damn little in this life that ever comes free. One way or another, you pay for what you get.�
Charlie’s hired man is Lupe Flores, who has lived in the house next door to Charlie’s, raised his large family, and managed the ranch, working alongside Charlie for years. Through Lupe, and his son, Manuel, we get a chance to look at Mexican-Anglo relationships and the fight a man like Charlie has between what is expected, which is to look down at the Mexican population, and what he truly feels, which is respect and a knowledge of how much he depends on this good man who works beside him.
To make things worse, the government programs that were promised as help for the farmers and ranchers in the region are proving to be a sand trap in themselves, and those who might have survived otherwise are being pulled down by them.
There was a time when we looked up to Uncle Sam; he was something to be proud of and respect. Now he’s turned into some kind of muddle-brained sugar daddy givin� out goodies right and left in the hopes everybody is going to love him…It’s divided us into little selfish groups, snarlin� and snappin� at each other like hungry dogs, grabbin� for what we can get and to hell with everybody else.
This book might be labeled as a “western�, but like so many great books, it is more than the label it is slapped with…it is a book about humanity, about struggle and about perseverance; it is a book about survival–it just happens to be set in the West.
My thanks to the Southern Literary Trail for making this our August selection and to Howard, whose remarkable review let me know that regardless of what I had planned, this book was not one I wanted to miss reading.
These Thousand Hills is the fourth of A. B. Guthrie’s Big Sky series that I have read. Much to my disappointment this is an okay, but not stellar, booThese Thousand Hills is the fourth of A. B. Guthrie’s Big Sky series that I have read. Much to my disappointment this is an okay, but not stellar, book. It is much in the vein of the cowboy movies we watched as children, Shane and 3:10 to Yuma, the struggle of a good man in a violent world, and it incorporates almost all the standard plot lines of that time.
Lat Evans is the son of Brownie and Mercy Evans, two characters we met in The Way West. He is basically a good man, but he has more than his share of hang-ups, and I would call some of his decisions at the least questionable. After a very slow start, the novel did pick up, but in the end, I didn’t care enough for any of the characters to shed a tear over their fates.
Guthrie’s great strength is his ability to write a scene that comes to life under his pen. He engages all the senses, so that I can see the breath of cold air, hear the coyotes, envision the stretches of white falling mile upon mile. As here:
In the distant darkness a squaw wailed for her dead, and dogs chimed in, joined by coyotes on the hills. They sent a shiver up the spine, of chill and lonesomeness and dread and hope of things to come.
Or as here:
It had been cold before but not close to this. This was as cold as cold ever could be. Even the campfire at night was only a whisper of warmth, a promise of heat somewhere in the world, maybe far off in Texas; but here in itself was the whole world, lapped white from skyline to skyline, with no end to be seen and none to be hoped for.
I highly recommend the first three books of this series. The Way West won a Pulitzer, and well deserved it. But, when you have finished Fair Land, Fair Land, you are done with the story. This book was not a continuation, it was another story altogether, not as fine a tale, and not as well told. ...more
There is there all right, until a man gets to it. Then it ain’t there. It’s here, and here is what you wanted to get away from in the first place.There is there all right, until a man gets to it. Then it ain’t there. It’s here, and here is what you wanted to get away from in the first place.
In the third installment of A.B. Guthrie’s Big Sky series, Guthrie continues the story of Dick Summers, mountain man and wagon train guide and, now, a man searching for a way to face life in a changing west. Setting out to revisit the wild places of his youth, Summers and his friend, Higgins, stumble across Teal Eye, an Indian girl from Summers� past.
Perhaps the tales of how the West was won have become cliches, but the plight of the Indians and the destruction that came with the taming of the West are very hard to witness in the hands of a skilled storyteller. I mourned for their way of life, disappearing before their eyes, and for the inability of the army and settlers to recognize them as human beings and offer any respect or concern.
There is a new character, a Methodist preacher named Potter, who contributes another view of the well-intended, but sorely misguided, missionary. I loved his goodness and his philosophy concerning God. Too few of those around him heeded his advice.
“I worship a glad lord,� Potter told him. “We have set our faces against sin, as indeed we must, but in doing it I fear we have lost sight of joy. Joy, Brother Summers, delight in what we are given. Often I think God not only wants us to be good but to be radiant.�
Dick Summers will go down in my ledgers as one of the most wonderful characters ever written. In a preface, Guthrie tells us this book was written much later than the earlier ones and was intended to fill a gap that had been left. I, for one, am so glad he decided to fill that gap. I would have hated to have left this part of Dick Summers� story untold--to have just seen him wander off, seeking wilderness, at the end of The Way West, and never to have been heard of again.
So many good men who have lived have been forgotten and carried all they knew and loved to the grave. In fact, that is the case with most men, but, even unremembered as individuals, they may have had a huge impact on the shaping of a country and the lives that came after them.
“Live and Learn, they say, but don’t say all the while you’re learnin�, you’re forgettin�, too, until maybe at the last it’s just a big forgettin�. ...more
The Big Sky is the first in A.B. Guthrie’s series of novels about the settling of the American West. It is the story of three men, Boone Caudill, Jim The Big Sky is the first in A.B. Guthrie’s series of novels about the settling of the American West. It is the story of three men, Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers, each of whom braves the unknown and difficult life in the cold mountains west of civilization, for his own unique reasons. It is a portrait of what a mountain man was and what it took to be such an adventurer.
There is nothing sugar-coated in this book. It is often raw and coarse and startling.
They were a heap better than squaw meat, which men had been known to butcher and eat, probably after bedding with the squaws first.
This is a hard, cruel and unforgiving life, and the men who live it are sometimes little more than animals. Boone Caudill, fleeing an already hard and abusive life with his father, becomes a kind of savage survivalist. Dick Summers, in many ways the most skilled and intuitive of the three men, is only half a mountain man. He has altered his life, but not his soul. He likes to get to town and doesn’t mind the idea of farming, and he is the only one who still manages to fit into the world of white men.
One of the main characters of The Big Sky is the West itself. Guthrie paints it the way Ansel Adams photographed it, large and beautiful and powerful.
From the top Boone could see forever and ever, nearly any way he looked. It was open country, bald and open, without an end. It spread away flat now and then rolling, going on clear to the sky. A man wouldn’t think the whole world was so much. It made the heart come up. It made a man little and still big, like a king looking out.
This is God’s country, but even the men who love it and choose it, question what kind of God rules in such a wilderness. Jim Deakins contemplates his relationship with God and what God expects from him fairly frequently, and I particularly enjoyed his thoughts, because I think having such close connections to nature, but also experiencing its cruelties up close, would raise doubts and wonder.
These men are like the wildness of the country they inhabit, they are being worn away, being lost, becoming the last of their kind. The country is on the cusp of westward expansion, the buffalo are being slaughtered into extinction, Greeley is about to urge young men to go west, and the young men are going to take young women with them and build and plow.
It was strange about time; it slipped under a man like quiet water, soft and unheeded but taking a part of him with every drop--a little quickness of the muscles, a little sharpness of the eye, a little of his youngness, until by and by he found it had taken the best of him almost unbeknownst.
A historical picture of life in 1830s Montana, The Big Sky is also about change--the change in the country and the change in the people who populate it. There is no room for the Indians in the society that is coming, and there is no room for the mountain men either. Both are dying breeds. Both are living on borrowed time.
I must note that the portrayal of the Indians in this book seems remarkably accurate to me. They are seen as both victim and aggressor, but neither the noble savage nor the devil’s spawn. The attitude of the white men toward them is primarily one of exploitation or dread, and only a few, like Boone and Summers, come to really know anything about them individually. There is a graphic chapter that deals with the devastating effects of smallpox on the Indian population, that is one I will find it hard to ever forget.
Wallace Stegner wrote the foreward to the volume I was reading. If you would truly like to recognize the importance and meaning of this novel, you need do nothing more than read it.
Boone Caudill is “both mountain man and myth, both individual and archetype, which means that the record of his violent life is both credible and exhilarating.� Don’t think anyone could have said it better than that. ...more
This book might be as close as you will ever come to knowing what it was like to leave Independence, Missouri in 1836 and make your way by wagon alongThis book might be as close as you will ever come to knowing what it was like to leave Independence, Missouri in 1836 and make your way by wagon along the Oregon Trail to the wilderness that was Oregon. Lije Evans, his wife Rebecca, and his son Brownie are one of a group of families who sign on with a wagon train to make the journey, and they represent, in my eyes, the perfect depiction of the kind of strong individuals who carved out this new land into civilization. During the journey, Lije discovers himself as a leader and we discover that a good man can be a strong man; that a quiet man can make all the noise that is needed.
There is one more member of the Evans family that I have not mentioned, but for whom I developed a great attachment, the dog, Rock. At the outset of the story, there is a move to kill all the dogs, many thinking they would be a nuisance on such a long trip. Evans figured he would have some business with the man who came to shoot Rock. That was the moment I knew I was going to love Lije, no going back.
My favorite character, by far, however, was Dick Summers. A seasoned mountain man who has been farming in Missouri, he signs on to pilot the group as far as the Dalles. I recognized right away that without men like Dick, none of the others would have ever survived to do the settling. In fact, they would hardly have known how to get where they were going. What I loved the most about him, however, was his open mind; never thinking the world should be like him or give him any particular homage.
He didn’t blame the Oregoners as he had known old mountain men to do. Everybody had his life to make, and every time its way, one different from another. The fur hunter didn’t have title to the mountain no matter if he did say finders keepers. By that system the country belonged to the Indians, or maybe someone before them or someone before them. No use to stand against the stream of change and time.
I felt I got to know Dick Summers in a way that I could strangely relate to. Of course, his lost youth was danger and mountains and the capability to survive, but wasn’t he longing for what most of us older people long for?
At the nub of it did he just want his youth back? Beaver, streams, squaws, danger--were they just names for his young time?
When I went back to review the passages I had marked while reading, almost all of them were Dick. His was the voice that spoke to me.
Guthrie shows us the physical hardships of the journey, which would surely be enough to defeat most of us, but which we could all fairly well imagine; but he also shows us the emotional toll that such a choice entails. Makes you wonder how anyone ever had the courage to set out, particularly with children in tow. The thought of the women, visibly pregnant, prodding the oxen while walking the trail, wore me to a bone. Guthrie’s men are both strong and weak, as are the women, and he seems to know both sexes well...what makes them the same and what makes them different, and how much both were needed to make such an undertaking work at all.
She wondered if he felt the same as she did. Did any two people ever feel the same? Did ever one soul know another, though they talked at night, though sometimes in hunger and in isolation they sought to make their bodies one, the all-mother in her loneliness trying to take back home the lost child-man?
I could picture these people, a mix of quite different backgrounds and incomes, growing closer and more understanding or more leery and wiser as the migration became a way of life. I could feel how tired and weary they felt at the end of even a good day. I could see the young faces becoming withered and crusted by exposure to wind and sun, and the older faces becoming hardened and set. At the same time, I could feel the yearning they all shared to start a new life, find a new adventure, see something they had never seen before. If they were still heading trains West, and if I were thirty years younger, I could see myself being convinced by Guthrie that the travails would be worth it; that Oregon could be home, and that a sturdy wagon and a good man might be all you would need. ...more
In a momentary lapse of self-control, I picked up my copy of Lonesome Dove and got lost once more in the wonder that is Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call anIn a momentary lapse of self-control, I picked up my copy of Lonesome Dove and got lost once more in the wonder that is Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call and all the assorted characters that people their world. If anyone ever asked me if I had been to Montana, I would have to say “yes�, and every step of land between the Milk River and Lonesome Dove, Texas. Never has a story felt more real, been more packed with personalities, more genuine in its depiction of place, or more perfectly told.
Even the characters you do not admire, you sadly understand. When McMurtry says of Elmira Johnson:
She wanted July and Joe to be gone, suddenly, so she would not have to deal with them every day. Their needs were modest enough, but she no longer wanted to face them. She had reached a point where doing anything for anyone was a strain. It was like heavy work, it was so hard.
you momentarily understand what drives her. She is living a life she does not want in being a wife and mother, and the attempt to do that is a burden she can no longer carry. It doesn’t matter that her life is not a bad life, what matters is that it is not, any longer, “her� life.
In fact, this book might mostly be about people seeking, often to their own detriment, the lives they have lost. Each of them has an ideal in their head that they are chasing: Call has Montana; Gus has Clara; Lorie has San Francisco; Ellie has Dee Boot; Clara has the idea of a son, all yearnings based on losses they have already experienced.
The book is peppered with wit and humor, and with wisdom. Even in its tragic moments, Gus is able to infuse both of those elements into the situation. He gives advice in such a folksy, off-hand, manner, but the truth lying beneath his observations is never lost on the reader.
Life in San Francisco is still just life. If you want one thing too much it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds and buttermilk--and feisty gentlemen.
This is the fastest 900 page novel you will ever read. It never slows or hits patches that you want to speed through. You feel the elements in the descriptions of the weather, the weight of the losses, the constant danger of just living in this place and time; but you never want it to stop. You want to travel beyond the next river, scrape off the mud, and then cross another plain or find another grassland. You want to sleep in the saddle because you are exhausted and then share a plate of Bol’s beans or Po Campo’s fried grasshoppers.
If there was ever a versatile writer, it was Larry McMurtry. This is far from being the only magnificent novel he produced, but it is far and away his best. It is iconic and unparalleled in its scope and its accomplishment. If you like character driven novels of epic proportions, but you’re thinking you don’t like “westerns�, don’t miss this remarkable book. It is a masterpiece that happens to be set in the West and deals with so much more than a simple review, like this one, can ever express. ...more
I find myself unsure what to say about this 1930 Pulitzer winner. It is the tale of a Navajo couple, Laughing Boy and Slim Girl. Laughing Boy is an InI find myself unsure what to say about this 1930 Pulitzer winner. It is the tale of a Navajo couple, Laughing Boy and Slim Girl. Laughing Boy is an Indian through and through–he knows the ways, the gods, the rituals, the customs. Slim Girl was stolen from her home and forced into an American school–she has lost all her connection to her people, and she is trying to find her way back.
One feels the doom that hangs around these two characters as they struggle to exist in a no-man’s land between the world of the Navajo and that of the white man. There is a sense, however, that something is missing from the book that, if found, would make it have a more truthful resonance. I felt sorry for both Laughing Boy and Slim Girl, but I did not relate to either of them, and Slim Girl's way of thinking was a bit confusing to me.
The story is not badly done, but the writing is almost juvenile, and I cannot help thinking the reasons for awarding this book the Pulitzer had little to do with its literary merit. ...more
Butcher's Crossing is, in part, a coming-of-age story. Will Andrews, a young man of twenty-three, under the influence of reading Emerson, leaves HarvaButcher's Crossing is, in part, a coming-of-age story. Will Andrews, a young man of twenty-three, under the influence of reading Emerson, leaves Harvard and his Boston home and heads for the West and an untamed nature that he hopes will help him to define himself. He is offered a desk-job by Mr. McDonald, an old acquaintance of his father, but he decides instead to throw his lot (and all of his money) into a buffalo hunt with a wily and skilled hunter named Miller; Miller’s side-kick, Charley Hoge, who indulges his Bible and his whiskey bottle in equal measure; and a buffalo skinner named Schneider.
Sometimes after listening to the droning voices in the chapel and in the classrooms, he had fled the confines of Cambridge to the fields and woods that lay southwestward to it. There in some small solitude, standing on bare ground, he felt his head bathed by the clean air and uplifted into infinite space; the meanness and the construction he had felt were dissipated in the wildness about him.
He is green and inexperienced and he is going to have to grow up quickly to survive in this tough world he is entering. McDonald sees this; Miller probably sees it too, but he is a tough himself and believes whatever is green should be purged from a man. The whore, Francine, states it outright–she knows he will not return from this hunt the same young and gentle man, and she says so.
Almost from the moment Miller entered the story, I began to hear echoes of Moby-Dick or, The Whale. The buffalo are Miller’s white whale, and in many ways Andrews is Ishmael, observing and learning, as he is drawn into another man’s obsession. Miller is not going out into the wilderness separate from nature, as Andrews is--he is a part of this vast, complex ecosystem. He is an agent of destruction.
Often, as the group approached out of a hollow a slight rise of land, Miller, no longer outlined against the horizon, seemed to merge into the earth, a figure that accommodated itself to the color and contour of the land upon which it rode. After the first day’s journey, Miller spoke very little, as if hardly aware of the men who rode with him. Like an animal, he sniffed at the land, turning his head this way and that at sounds or scents unperceived by the others; sometimes he lifted his head in the air and did not move for long moments, as if waiting for a sign that did not come.
Williams explores so many themes in this work that one can barely touch upon them in a review. The descriptions of the senseless slaughter of the buffalo are chilling, but what is more chilling is the way in which Will Andrews changes from his initial distress to full acceptance. He has come to find himself, but we fear there is much of the better part of himself that might be lost.
...it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before proud and noble and full of dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of itself; or it was not that self that he had imagine it to be. That self was murdered; and in that murder he had felt the destruction of something within him, and he had not been able to face it.
Butcher’s Crossing is a coming-of-age story, Will Andrew’s story; but it is also an Odyssey, a journey that is a search for self and for home; and it is strangely, at the same moment, Moby Dick, Miller’s story, a search for the white whale, a struggle to destroy nature or be destroyed by it.
John Williams was a subtle, understated writer, who gave us the incomparable Stoner, a quiet and introverted tale. He was also a writer of epic proportions, penning this boundless adventure tale that is as large as the wilderness it portrays. Vastly different, both are equally stirring, with characters that take hold of your imagination and which you know will now live with you forever.
I am elated that I still have Augustus ahead of me. I intend to savor it. ...more
We spend our lives in worlds remote from one another. We imagine we all live together on this round earth but we do not.
Sometimes the things that diviWe spend our lives in worlds remote from one another. We imagine we all live together on this round earth but we do not.
Sometimes the things that divide us are of our own making, and sometimes they are insurmountable misunderstandings. Jiles recognizes both, and shows them to us without flinching.
This is the story of Britt Johnson, a free black man from Kentucky, who comes West to settle his family, along with his hopes of owning and operating a freight service. One of the first blood-curdling events we encounter is the taking of his wife and children by the Comanche and Kiowa.
One of the complaints I have heard from others regarding this novel is that it is starkly, brutally violent. Well, the times are starkly and brutally violent and Jiles is no liar, no softener of history; she tells it as it was. Her ability to provide detail that makes us feel we are present among the sights, the textures, and the smells, ranks among her greatest assets as a novelist.
Mary lay half awake all night to watch the flickering light of the fire shifting on the tipi walls and the liner, a hypnotic and incessant dashing of light and shadow, the noise of the tipi cover and liner belling in and out accompanied by the unpredictable stanzas of the wind. The fire smoke shot upward, carried by the chimney of air that rose between the liner and the walls. It blossomed up into the smoke flaps and out. Whirling eddies of snow sifted down between the flaps and flashed in the light of the fire, and vanished. The fire threw shadows of moccasins hung up to dry so that they seemed to walk against the tipi walls, the fire threw shadows of a fishnet and a gourd dipper snaring the evaporating snowflakes.
I’ve never spent a snowy night in a teepee, until now.
This is Britt’s story, but it is more than that, of course. Jiles is an even-handed historian; she takes no sides and gives no quarter. And, in doing so, she makes us understand, in a way we might not have done before, how impossible this situation was for both the settlers and the Indians. This is a clash of cultures. What is murder to outsiders is ritual and courage to the Indians; what seems like an offering of a better way for the Quaker agent is the destruction of freedom and life itself for the Indian. There can be no simple resolution. The more powerful group will win, and in doing so, annihilate the other.
Much of what Jiles tells us about Britt and his family, friends and life, is conjecture. This is, after all, fiction. However, it mattered very much to me that Britt Johnson was a real man and that the larger fabric of this story is based on true events and real courage. In her afterward, Jiles states that Britt’s story “returned to me repeatedly as I read through north Texas histories over the years, and I often wondered why no one had taken it up. And so I did.� I’m so glad she did. ...more
There is little better than a well-done coming-of-age story, and Montana 1948 is absolutely that. David Hayden is twelve years old and at the center oThere is little better than a well-done coming-of-age story, and Montana 1948 is absolutely that. David Hayden is twelve years old and at the center of life-altering events that shake his world and his understanding of what family means, what justice is, and the difference between what is right and what is expected.
David’s father is the town sheriff, a job he inherited (wanted or not) from his own father, a powerful man in the town of Bentrock. Bentrock is located near an Indian reservation, and Indians make up a portion of the town population. One of those Indians is Marie Little Soldier, the Hayden’s housekeeper, and someone whom David loves as if a member of his family. Marie is at the center of the tragedy that overtakes the Haydens and marks the end of David’s childhood.
As the story unfolds, David learns about the difference between justice for the white population and justice for the Indians. He experiences the prejudice against these people in a different way than he has before, and what happens directly involves both David and his family, particularly his father, who must choose between what is right and what is expedient.
I read this book in one sitting, because I had no desire to lay it aside, even to fix lunch for my poor husband, who waited patiently to be fed. Larry Watson writes in a very straightforward manner, but in a way that conjures up place and time and feels real and urgent.
That night I thought I felt death in our house. Grandmother Hayden, a superstitious person, once told me about how, when she was a girl, her brother died and for days after, death lingered in the house. Her brother was trampled by a team of horses, and his blood-and-dirt streaked body was laid on the kitchen table. From then until he was buried my grandmother said she could tell there was another presence in the house. It was nothing she could see, she said, but every time you entered a room it felt as though someone brushed by you as you went in. Every door seemed to require a bit more effort to open and close. There always seemed to be a sound--a whisper--on the edge of your hearing, something you couldn’t quite make out.
There is a haunting feeling to this novel. Perhaps it is the ghosts of people, or perhaps just the ghost of the past, David’s past. A story that insists on being told.
My thanks for my friend, Howard, for pointing me to another obscure masterpiece.
Most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than of anything else, and a lot more afraid of being thought physical cowards than moral ones.
Let Most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than of anything else, and a lot more afraid of being thought physical cowards than moral ones.
Let me say that this book will wrench your soul right out of you, and mainly because you fear deep within yourself that you would not have the courage to stand against the mob and stop a miscarriage of justice, that you would be too afraid to be the voice in the wilderness, that you might be more afraid for your own skin than worried for the preservation of a principle that matters more than all of us.
This is a western, set in the days of cowboys and posses, but it is not really that. It is a diatribe on the frailties of human beings, their ability to be manipulated by stronger, bullying voices. It is about the inability to choose the moral high ground when the mob is against you. It is about being the mob, being swept away by group frenzy.
I'm slow with a new idea, and want to think it over alone, where I'm sure it's the idea and not the man that's getting me.
But, very few do think about this idea, most of them are just following the man, buying the rhetoric, swimming in the illusion of power. Sadly, this group of men is going to be living for a lifetime with the decision of a moment.
Along with the moral lesson which you cannot escape in this book, you are treated to some of the most vivid descriptive passages I have ever come across in literature. I knew both the physical makeup and the moral character of every single person Clark depicts in the story. I felt the wind and the snow and the tightness of the pass. I felt the grip in my throat and my chest as the moment of truth grew closer and closer.
Every moral premise is presented in such a way that it never feels like preaching or like it is existing outside the context of the story. The moral dilemma is the fabric around which the story is woven, but the story exists in the outside, wider world, as much as in the moment of this occurrence.
"If we go out and hang two or three men, without doing what the law says, forming a posse and bringing the men for trial, then by the same law, we're not officers of justice, but due to be hanged ourselves." "And who will hang us?" Winder wanted to know. "Maybe nobody." Davies admitted. "Then our crime's worse than a murderer's. His act puts him outside the law, but keeps the law intact. Ours would weaken the law."
Loading...
