Guy Vanderhaeghe, A Good Man

I wanted to like this novel more than I did. For its length (464 pages), it promises somewhat more than it delivers. I had the same reaction to the author’s The Last Crossing (reviewed here a while ago). There are a lot of ideas and food for thought in this novel about character, friendship, responsibility, Native Americans, the frontier, and U.S.-Canadian relations. But in the end it’s hard to say what it all adds up to. You can puzzle if you like over the title. Who among the novel’s male characters is the “good man”? Is there one at all?

Set in the late 1870s, partly in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan where Fort Walsh was headquarters for the North-West Mounted Police; but mostly in the frontier settlement of Fort Benton, Montana, on the upper Missouri River, the action takes place in the aftermath of Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn and settlers of the sparsely populated prairie live in terror of the Sioux and other tribes who seem to be organizing under the leadership of Sitting Bull to rid the West of whites altogether.

Film review: Jimmy P.

Actor Benicio del Toro is a personal favorite of mine, since we once lived in the same building in LA, and riding the elevator together one day I got to tell him how he made me cry at the end of Traffic. He plays a Blackfeet Indian in the new film Jimmy P., and he darn near made me cry again.

The film is based on a 1951 book, Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, by George Devereux, an ethnologist and Freudian psychoanalyst. Played by French actor Mathieu Almaric, Devereux comes to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, to diagnosis del Toro’s Jimmy Picard, who is suffering from brain injury-related trauma following service in Europe during World War II.

James Welch, The Indian Lawyer

First published in 1990, this is a thoughtful and suspenseful novel by a Native American writer from Montana. I had previously read his Winter in the Blood (1974) and The Death of Jim Loney (1979). All three novels concern the complexities of living as an Indian in a white-dominated world.

Unlike the struggling social cast-offs in the earlier novels, the protagonist of The Indian Lawyer has by all appearances successfully assimilated to white culture. Sylvester Yellow Calf has parlayed statewide recognition on the high school basketball court into a university education and law school. He is now one of the rising members of a high-end law firm in Helena.

With influential friends, he may well rise further from his humble origins on the Blackfeet reservation, where he was abandoned by parents and raised by a grandmother. Early in the novel he is approached by a member of the Democratic national committee to run for Congress.

His pleased but almost diffident response to that offer signals something not quite substantial in the identity he has assumed as a promising young lawyer. Beneath his confident surface is an uncertainty that the reader suspects and that he is mostly unaware of. The break from his reservation past has left him without either real roots or clear ambitions. Despite his achievements, he remains an outsider.

Blackfeet reservation, Montana

Single, he has known a good many women in his short life, and his current girlfriend is the daughter of a rancher and former Senator. While she is ready for a deepening relationship with Sylvester, he remains tentative, conscious of the disapproving glances of whites when the two are out together in public.

He lets her slip away, as he has done earlier with a high school counselor he was once fond of. Sliding into what seems to be an old groove, he violates all professional standards by allowing himself to be sexually intimate with a new client. It may be an old groove for him, but it’s also thin ice.

Race in early frontier fiction

Huck and Jim, 1884

For readers sampling early frontier fiction, one of the obvious differences between now and then is how unembarrassed writers were in their treatment of race. We know the arguments about the use of the n-word in Huckleberry Finn (1884), and that novel turns out to be a useful benchmark in the subject of race as it appears in the writings of others.

In Twain’s novel, the slave Jim is actually a full-fledged character, and Twain ascribes to him dignity as a member of the human race. You can’t really say that about most of the nonwhite characters in the novels of other mainstream writers. On the occasions when they appear in popular fiction, African-Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and Mexicans are typically peripheral characters portrayed in caricature. They may not even have names.

White supremacy is simply assumed in most novels, and there are degrees of whiteness. To call a man “white” carried the meaning of “decent,” “honest,” “generous,” and “honorable.” The word also meant “respectable” and “civilized.” Obviously, not all white men were. The connotation survives today in phrases like “that’s white of you.”

Occasionally one finds white supremacy actually voiced as a doctrine. Jack London’s A Daughter of the Snows (1902) applauds the survival of the fittest and sermonizes about the superiority of the white race. Rarely are notions of this caliber openly questioned or challenged by other writers, but the few examples that exist are worth noting.

Native Americans, 1900

Native Americans. In her novel Ramona (1884), Helen Hunt Jackson attempted to write an Uncle Tom’s Cabin to draw attention to the plight of Indian tribes in Southern California. Simple and trusting folk, her Indians are powerless against the unscrupulous land grabbers who are swarming into California. Confused like children in a suddenly alien and hostile world, they are ennobled by Jackson, who makes them patiently accepting of their fate.

The title character, Ramona, is the orphan daughter of a white father and Indian mother. Falling tragically in love with her is a young Indian, Alessandro, a gentle soul who has learned to speak Spanish and can also read and write.

Seeking sympathy and understanding for Indians, Frederic Remington takes a different tack in John Ermine of the Yellowstone (1902). The hero of this novel is a white man raised by Indians who attempts to reenter the white world as an Army scout. As he falls in love with an officer’s daughter, he is caught in a collision of cultures, and his story ends tragically, as well.

Pamela Nowak, Changes

This historical western romance is equal parts history and romance. Set in Omaha in 1879, it tells of a trial that was a milestone in advancing Indian rights. The central character is a young woman, one-quarter Sioux, who falls quite in love with one of the attorneys in the trial.

Plot. Lise Dupree is a survivor of the 1863 Sioux Uprising in Minnesota, which ended in the mass execution of 38 Indians and the tribe’s forced removal to the western prairies. Passing as white, she works as a librarian at the Omaha Public Library, a job she would not be able to hold if her Sioux background were known.

When a small band of Ponca Indians from the Niobrara refuses to be relocated to Indian Territory, they are taken prisoner, chiefly through the effort of an Indian agent, Rufus Christy. Their situation is abetted by a scheming politician, Adam Foster, who has groomed a protégé, Zach Spencer, for election as state senator.

The Ponca are being held by the Army at Fort Omaha without charge. To delay and hopefully prevent further action against them, they sue for a writ of habeas corpus. Spencer as district attorney is called upon to make the case in court in defense of the government. Foster welcomes the trial because it will ignite the anti-Indian vote and give Spencer free publicity in the newspapers.

What gets ignited instead is Spencer’s sudden attraction to Lise as he first meets her while using the library’s law books. And the attraction is mutual. Young and handsome, with a boyish charm, he thrills her with his flirtations. His only fault, in her eyes, is that he’s building a case against the Ponca rather than in their support.

Chief Standing Bear

She is already quietly helping Tom Tibbles, the editor of the Omaha Herald, and Susette LeFlesche, whose father is chief of the Omaha. Both are marshaling a legal team and doing research for the Ponca. Sympathetic to their cause is General Crook, commanding officer at Fort Omaha.

Thus is set in motion a courtroom drama in which an argument based on treaty law is pitted against one on Constitutional law. While Indians are not citizens, what’s at issue is whether they are people covered by the 14th Amendment. This dimension of the story is illuminating, and a reader is reminded of the Kiowa chiefs trial related in Johnny Boggs’ Spark on the Prairie, reviewed here recently.

Nowak has done some research, and she has taken most of her characters from the pages of history, including General Crook, Tom Tibbles, Susette LeFlesche and her father, the plaintiff attorneys, the trial judge, and the Ponca chief himself, Standing Bear.

Romance. Sharing the storyline of competing legal and political interests is the romance that flourishes between Nowak’s two fictional characters, Lise Dupree and Zach Spencer. Theirs is an affair heated by intense attraction and frustrated by a variety of obstacles. They are repeatedly drawn together and forced apart again by misunderstandings, divided loyalties, and the meddling interference of Foster and Christy.

Nonreaders of western romances—and I’m thinking mostly of males—will be more than a little surprised by the explicitness of Nowak’s love scenes. The sexual tension builds from the couple’s first encounter. Almost nothing is left to the imagination as their meetings escalate from fevered kissing and groping to unbridled intercourse.

Johnny D. Boggs, Spark on the Prairie

Review and interview

This fact-based novel is a modern-day treatment of a theme found in early western fiction—the coming of the law to the frontier. Writers from the turn of the last century presented the introduction of courts and lawyers as a mixed blessing. Due process slowed down the wheels of justice. Individuals and vigilance committees, with guns and ropes, lost the authority to enforce the law as they saw fit. Lawyers were regarded with particular disdain.

Today, popular fiction casts them in a somewhat different light. Lawyers are often presented as defenders of the wrongly accused or as advocates of justice for the powerless and oppressed. Thus, in this fine historical novel, they are quite honorable, if not heroic. It’s a story of a pair of court-appointed attorneys who, despite virulent public opinion, do their best to defend two Kiowa chiefs on trial for murder.

Plot. It’s 1871 on the Texas frontier. We know from the start that the chiefs have taken part in the brutal killing of seven overland freighters. Army general William Tecumseh Sherman has ordered them tried in civilian court. However, finding an unbiased jury of white men to decide their fate is a literal impossibility.

Satanta

Thomas Ball and Joe Woolfolk are assigned by District Court Judge Charles Soward to act as public defenders for the two chiefs, Satanta and Big Tree. Soward expects an open and shut case, since there is little doubt of the defendants’ guilt. But the two lawyers surprise him by putting up a good fight. As they match wits with the prosecutor, Sam Lanham, the novel turns into a suspenseful courtroom drama.

The trial attracts an unruly gathering of the public, as well as newspaper reporters from everywhere. Ball is thrown out of his boarding house as an “Indian lover,” and he is roughed up twice by local partisans before he takes to wearing a gun belt. Meanwhile, the July heat provides a wilting and withering setting for the proceedings.

The jury, of course, finds the men guilty, and both are to be hanged. Ball, determined to appeal the court’s decision, is blocked in his efforts by Judge Soward, who has a few cards of his own up his sleeve.

Themes. At issue for Boggs and his readers is how to understand the whole affair. Woolfolk comes closest to putting the killings into some kind of focus. In his summation to the jury, he argues that the attack on the wagon train was an act of war, not a criminal act. He reminds them that Confederate soldiers were not tried by the Union for killings on the battlefield.

Lanham’s wife, Sarah, witnessing the trial, is moved by what she comes to regard as a tragedy. The evidence against the two chiefs is circumstantial, and regardless of the chiefs’ guilt or innocence, the law is being used as an instrument of revenge. If they were two white men, a jury would likely acquit them.

Boggs layers a good deal of social context into the narrative as he takes us into the streets, residences, and places of business in Jacksboro, Texas, where the trial takes place. The terror and rage that Indian raids have evoked there in the hearts and minds of the whites are palpable. The almost universal epithet for Indians as “red niggers” says much about the common regard for them.

We are also reminded of post-war population shifts, as the Texas frontier has become a new home for emigrants from the devastated South. Meanwhile, among the ranks of the military are men who fought in that war on both sides. The distance of the past from our own age is measured by the unending reference to cigar smoking, chewing tobacco, and spitting into—or nearly into—spittoons. It’s also a time well lubricated with the drinking of alcohol.

Structure and style. The novel is structured as a series of datelines, each following one of more than a dozen point-of-view characters. We see the trial and the events leading up to it from the perspective of soldiers, officers, judge, lawyers, Indians, and civilians. Boggs uses a similar organizing principle to excellent effect in his novel of the James-Younger gang’s failed bank robbery in Northfield.

The novel’s particular achievement is the recreation of the trial itself, since no transcript of it survives. Boggs reconstructs testimony by witnesses and the lawyers’ opening and closing remarks to the jury, using newspaper accounts and other sources. Individual characters, nearly all of them taken from history, are sharply drawn, with vividly precise personalities.

The flourishes of rhetoric and courtroom tactics seem especially well grounded in a knowledge of the techniques and practice of legal persuasion. Crafty country lawyer Woolfolk is especially entertaining as he outmaneuvers the prosecutor’s strategies. He manages to trip up the super-confident General Sherman when he takes the witness stand. And his closing argument to the jury is cunning in its unvarnished appeal to both rank prejudice and common sense.

Wrapping up. Boggs’ notes at the end of the book disclose the extensive research involved in the creation of this novel. Here we learn that the cast of characters comes straight from history, and Boggs takes the time to give a brief account of the rest of their lives. While details of personality and incident derive from informed speculation, only a few scenes are pure invention.

One of those, a flash-forward that ends the novel, is especially fitting and brings the story to a close that softens the ending with a touch of both irony and sentiment—in nicely equal proportions. For another of Boggs’ courtroom dramas set in the Old West, definitely read Lonely Trumpet.

Spark on the Prairie, first published in 2003, is currently available at AbeBooks. For more of his fiction, go to amazon and Barnes&Noble. You can visit him at his website, and he can also be found at Facebook.

Interview

Johnny D. Boggs

Johnny Boggs has agreed to spend some time here at BITS to talk about writing and the writing of Spark on the Prairie. I’m turning the rest of this page over to him.

Talk about how the idea for this novel suggested itself to you.

I don't remember where I first came across the trial, but I was living in Dallas, Texas, at the time. So I started research, reading everything I could find, contacting libraries, the state archives, the state park at Fort Richardson in Jacksboro, the museum at Fort Sill.

Research turned into a borderline obsession—as often is the case with me. It just seemed like a great story. It was probably the novel I most wanted to write.

Did the story come to you all at once or was that a more complex part of the process?

I signed a three-book deal with Penguin-Putnam for what was called "Guns and Gavel," novels based on actual murder trials. I wanted to do Spark on the Prairie first, but my editor said we should start with a “name” to launch the series, so I had to write Arm of the Bandit: The Trial of Frank James first.

That set up the way those three novels would be told. Various points-of-views told in third person. I’d use actual quotes when I could find them, and follow the course of the trial as best I could based, mostly, on newspaper accounts. Transcripts don’t exist for any of the three trials—Frank James, the Kiowas and Billy the Kid—we covered in the series.

Did anything about the story or characters surprise you as you were writing?

My first idea was to follow Joe Woolfolk. But Cynthia Haseloff beat me to that when she published The Kiowa Verdict, a Spur Award-winning novel based on the trial. I thought I'd have to shelve the whole idea when I read her novel—that was well before I signed with Penguin—but at some point, I realized, "That was Cynthia’s story. Spark on the Prairie was my vision."

But I didn't want to follow Cynthia too closely, so I focused on Thomas Ball. And the more I looked at the prosecutor, Sam Lanham, the more he grew on me.

What parts of the novel gave you the most pleasure to write?

Pleasure? Writing? Those don't mix. Writing is a disease, an addiction. It’s seldom fun. But it’s something I can’t live without.

Robert J. Conley, Zeke Proctor: Cherokee Outlaw (1994)

Robert J. Conley brings to life a gripping chapter of Cherokee history in this novel set in 1870s Indian Territory. Based on historical records, the story begins with the marriage of a ne’er-do-well white man into a Cherokee family that sets in motion a string of bloody incidents worthy of a Greek tragedy.

At the center is Zeke Proctor, the man’s brother-in-law, an industrious Cherokee farmer with a reputation as a gunman following the violent years of the Civil War. That war had set Cherokee against Cherokee, as the tribe split along lines dating back to the Trail of Tears removal from their North Carolina homeland in 1838. During the War, mostly mixed-blood, slave-owning Confederate sympathizers took up arms against the mostly full-bloods who remained loyal to the Union.

Plot. Though of mixed-blood parentage himself, Proctor was a loyalist, and old hostilities become reignited when he accidentally kills a woman whose family fought for the South. The pursuit of justice in the matter being strictly a tribal affair, there is trouble from the start as the two factions cannot agree on the selection of a judge trusted to be impartial.

Indian Territory, 1881

Matters are further complicated as the dead woman’s family involves federal authorities from nearby Arkansas. Proctor had been trying to kill his brother-in-law at the time of the shooting, which made the man an alleged victim of attempted murder. Though technically a member of the tribe and subject only to tribal law, he is also a white man, and that draws the attention of federal law enforcement.

Acting as observers of the trial, but holding a warrant for Proctor’s arrest should he be acquitted, two U.S. marshals find themselves in the middle of the dispute. A shooting breaks out at the trial, leaving many dead, including one of the marshals. That puts Proctor in far deeper trouble, and he goes into hiding, with a small volunteer army of Indians for protection.

Ulysses S. Grant

Cooler heads eventually prevail, including the one belonging to President Ulysses S. Grant, whose orders prevent a firefight between Cherokees and the U.S. Army. In time, the feud between the two tribal families resolves into a grudging truce. And Zeke Proctor, Cherokee outlaw, lives out the rest of his years unmolested.

Character. A proud but honorable man, Proctor might have stepped across the state line into Arkansas to escape prosecution for the killing. Instead, he makes himself accountable to tribal law, immediately turning himself in to the sheriff. Thoroughly trusted, he is sent home in the company of two deputies to await trial.

For all that, Conley doesn’t give us a one-dimensional portrayal of a single-minded man. On the one hand, Proctor subscribes to the native belief that actions and failures to act have a ripple effect through a person’s life. When his wife dies of a sudden illness, he assumes there is a “life for a life” connection between her death and that of the woman he has accidentally killed. Thus he is responsible for both. When his brother is killed in the shootout at the trial, he believes himself responsible for that death as well.

Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona (1884)

First edition

Massively popular in its day, Ramona was the work of a well-meaning social activist in her declining days, and it seems ill-mannered to say anything disagreeable about her book. But there’s no way around it. Reading this long novel today is a chore.

Meant as an Uncle Tom’s Cabin to waken sympathy for the ill-treated native populations of Southern California, the publication of Ramona awoke instead an appetite for romance. Set on a Spanish land grant ranch in its dying days, it evoked a colonial past that is more myth than history. And its once-upon-a-time story of a sweet-tempered girl under the heartless thumb of a wicked foster mother comes straight from fairy tales.

Plot. Briefly, the title character is the mixed-blood daughter of a white father and an Indian mother. Given by the father to his childless former sweetheart unhappily married to a wealthy man, she is later bequeathed to the woman’s sister, who unwillingly agrees to raise her.

The Señora Moreno is a widow who rules over what’s left of a grand old ranch between the San Fernando Valley and the sea, and convenient to the Camino Real. The missions along that route of the Franciscan Fathers between San Diego and San Francisco are now crumbling. And the land once deeded to Spanish lords is falling into the hands of greedy, heartless Americans.

San Jacinto, (C) Ron Scheer

Alessandro, a young Indian sheepherder on the Moreno ranch, falls in love with the girl, Ramona, and the two elope, covering their tracks so well that no one is able to find them for years. During that time, misfortune follows misfortune for the young couple.

They are thrown out of their home by land developers, and their first child dies for lack of medical attention. They retreat to a hidden valley on the flanks of San Jacinto, a mountain now overlooking Palm Springs. Deranged with hopeless melancholy, Alessandro is shot and killed by a white man for the misappropriation of a horse.

Ramona is eventually found near death by Felipe, the son of the now-deceased Señora Moreno. Having rescued her and the couple’s second child, he offers marriage. Though Alessandro remains her true love even in death, Ramona accepts, and they leave California to live in Mexico.

Cahuilla woman, Edward S. Curtis

White and nonwhite. Jackson does Indians both a service and a disservice in her novel. She portrays them as uniformly sympathetic, but to achieve this she renders them as both child-like and dependent on the good will of the whites who have come to live among them. Peaceful by nature, they have been taught by the missionaries to be industrious agricultural workers. They have also gratefully absorbed without apparent conflict the pieties of the Church, with its veneration of the saints.

Simple and trusting folk, the Indians are powerless against the unscrupulous land grabbers who swarm into California after it becomes a part of the U.S. With the help of Congress and the courts, their rights to ancestral lands are being swiftly abolished. And as wards of the state, they find their lives being managed by Indian agents with little real concern for their welfare.

Confused like children in a suddenly alien and hostile world, they are ennobled by Jackson who makes them patiently accepting of their tragic fate. As they grieve their losses, there is anger among them but little resistance. They flee before the hated Americans like Adam and Eve from the Garden, starving and without shelter.

Elmore Leonard, The Bounty Hunters (1953)

This was Elmore Leonard’s first published novel, written in his late twenties. In it, already fully developed, is the trademark edge that he brings to his fiction. With its opening scene in a barbershop in Contention, Arizona, we get just that—an exchange of contentious dialogue that’s both bristling and funny. It’s the same mastery of verbal dispute between people at sharp odds with each other that makes “Justified” so much fun today.

Plot. Leonard’s central character is an Army scout, Dave Flynn, who escorts a fresh young lieutenant south of the border to bring back a renegade Apache chief. Flynn is a Civil War veteran who resigned his commission, disillusioned after witnessing a commanding officer’s act of cowardice. For the lieutenant, Bowers, the story tells of a fledgling officer learning how to use his wits and his own natural cunning instead of going by the book.

In Mexico, a bounty is being paid for Apache scalps. What the two men find is a gang of norteamericanos who are killing Mexicans and presenting their scalps for payment by chief of rurales, Lamas Duro. The rurales are a police force made up chiefly of untrained law enforcers and former bandits. Duro is a contemptible, terrified man, subduing his fears with steady drinking. The gang leader, Curt Lazair, is a soulless murderer of innocents, who has taken a young woman captive and is keeping her at the gang’s hideout.

Flynn rescues the girl. Meanwhile, Bowers discovers that Duro’s second in command, a veteran of the revolt against the French, is shamed by how he is being used as an instrument of injustice and incompetence. The novel’s climax involves both an Apache attack and armed retaliation by the men of the village against Duro. Motivation for all that happens in the closing chapters produces awkward and not so plausible complications.

Character. Flynn makes an enjoyable hero, much as Raylan Givens in “Justified.” He is sharply intelligent and steady, an individual too independent to take orders from men he can’t respect. He is his own authority, with a knowledge of the world and others learned the hard way. Yet he doesn’t venture all that far from social connections. Unwilling to give himself to a career in the Army, he still accepts a job as a scout for that same organization.

Flynn has seen it all. He’s witnessed the dishonorable behavior of men, shirking duty with impunity. Though disillusioned he could be utterly cynical, but he’s not. There is a man or two he still admires. Chief of scouts, Joe Madora, is one of them. He is astute, trustworthy, and a reliable friend. He also has a sense of humor. The Indian chief, Soldado Viejo, also wins Flynn’s respect. When the two meet, the scene evolves into a long match of wits that ends at best in a draw.

Robert J. Conley, The Saga of Henry Starr (1989)

Review and interview

The mythology of bank robbers has long seized the public imagination. It’s as American somehow as apple pie and Fourth of July fireworks. Henry Starr was one of the most remarkable of them, for both longevity and tenacity. He was also a professional. A Henry Starr robbery was clean and well organized, a job well done, with a minimum of fuss. At the end of his career, he was believed to have robbed more banks than anyone in history.

If he was better at anything besides bank robbery, it was doing time in prison. There he was always a model prisoner and a frequenter of the prison library. Such behavior invariably won him early parole. Once he volunteered to disarm another prisoner who’d somehow got his hands on a loaded gun. For that kind of bravery, he got a pardon from none other than President Theodore Roosevelt.

While he may have had every intention of going straight each time he was released, there was always the fact that had got him behind bars in the first place. He was an Indian and one of the Starr family, which had not been known for keeping a low profile. A previous generation of Starrs had reputations that enlivened the pages of dime novels, not the least of them the wife of Henry’s uncle Sam—Belle Starr.

Mt. Scott, Lawton, Oklahoma

The story. Conley’s book is an account of Henry’s life, from age 17 to his final bank job 30 years later. Born in what was to become Oklahoma of mixed-blood Cherokee parents, he is a decent young fellow, who finds himself wrongly arrested for stealing horses and gets taken to Fort Smith, Arkansas, to appear before so-called Hanging Judge Isaac Parker.

The charges are eventually dropped, but Henry has had his first taste of a judicial system that preys on the powerless. Another false arrest, for transporting whiskey, results in a $100 fine. With that experience, he turns a corner and starts actually committing the crimes he’s assumed to be guilty of.

Before long he’s doing real time, and so his story goes—in and out of prison and in and out again. Determining to outperform every other bank robber with a reputation, he and his gang attempt to do something the Daltons had brazenly tried in Coffeyville, Kansas—rob two banks at the same time.

What can best be described as a daring stunt took place in Stroud, Oklahoma, in 1915. Unlike the Daltons, who failed badly, Henry’s gang escaped with the take, but Henry got shot and was arrested again. At the age of 43, he was back in prison, where once more he won early release. It was now 1919.

Movie poster, 1919

This time he contributed to what is surely the oddest development in his career. He agreed to reenact the double bank robbery for the movie cameras, and at the actual scene of the crime. Called A Debtor to the Law, the film was a cautionary tale meant to aid in law enforcement.

Offered a job to go to Hollywood and work in the movie business, he wisely decided to stick to a more honest calling. In 1921, he engineered another robbery, this time with a getaway car. But entering the bank vault, he was surprised by a shotgun blast at close range, from which he did not recover—dead at the age of 47.

Character. Conley does not glamorize Henry, though he does show how he was wrongly treated by whites in his youth. He learns early that being law-abiding and hard working will not keep him out of trouble—or make him much of a living. Turning to robbery becomes a career choice more promising for him than honest work.

Except for that one fact, Henry remains a decent, honorable man. He doesn’t drink or smoke or even partake of coffee. He deals straight with the men in his gang. In a robbery, he was calm and respectful of employees and customers, making every effort to keep anyone from getting hurt. Folks like him and welcome him and his current sweetheart to a barn dance, where he is invited to play fiddle for a while.

Oklahoma cowboys, branding, 1917

Storytelling. In Conley’s telling of this story, he lets the facts speak for themselves. The style is unembellished by drama or sentiment. For that you have to read between the lines, and they are there.

A running thread is the way that Henry is almost always alone. With the other members of the gang, he remains separate from them, content to involve white outlaws rather than other Indians, which would compromise tribal ethics. After a robbery, the gang simply disbands, its members never to be heard from again.

Only one man, Kid Wilson, comes close to being a loyal friend, but the bond between the two men is unspoken and finally broken. There are sweethearts, too, but flights from the law and frequent jail terms mean abandoning them—including a wife and infant son. “I’ve always been on my own,” he says. “That’s just a fact of life.”

Conley also uses the narrative to note the passage of time and the flood of events that show how the Old West was rapidly invaded by the modern world. Part of that flood was the influx of whites into Indian Territory, and the efforts by the federal government and the judicial system to legalize what was a massive land grab.

Wrapping up. Robert J. Conley is the author of more than 50 books of fiction and nonfiction. With degrees from Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, Texas, he has taught at several colleges. He has also written stage plays and published poetry. A registered tribal member of the Cherokee Nation, he has received numerous awards, including Spur Awards for his fiction.

Readers can find his books at amazon and Barnes&Noble. The Saga of Henry Starr is currently out of print but copies are available through Barnes&Noble and AbeBooks.

Robert J. Conley

Interview

Robert Conley has generously agreed to spend some time here at BITS to talk about writing and the writing of The Saga of Henry Starr. So I’m turning the rest of this page over to him.

First of all, Robert, do you prefer “Indian” or “Native American,” or does it depend?

Personally, I don’t think it matters. I would rather say I’m Cherokee.

You’ve been able to watch western fiction evolve over the years. What current developments do you see?

I think I see more Indian writers getting published, and that’s a very positive thing. I even think I may have had something to do with that. D.L. Birchfield has credited me with “inventing” the popular novel with an Indian hero.

Your Saga of Henry Starr is now 25 years old. Would you write that novel differently today?

I probably would, but I can’t say exactly how it would be different.

Do you think there is a different audience for western fiction today?

I think it may be reaching out to more people, more women and more younger readers, but it is still not what it should be. There has been a trend by publishers to not label books “western” but something else like “frontier fiction” or even not labeled to place them on the “novels” shelf, perhaps “historical fiction.” That may help some. I don’t know. I’m not a publisher. I just write my books.

The Great Sioux Uprising (1953)

There was a weeklong “Great Sioux Uprising” in Minnesota in 1862 that took the lives of 100s, and 38 

Santee Sioux were later hanged. This is not that story. There was a Cherokee chief, Stand Watie (1806-1871), who served as brigadier general of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. This is not his story either. But both appear in this mash-up of western history and Hollywood imagination, as horse thieves make trouble between the cavalry and Sioux chief Red Cloud.

Plot. The cavalry in some unnamed frontier territory is eagerly buying up horses from off the range to deliver to the Union Army for its war effort against the South. Lady rancher and livery owner Joan Britton (Faith Domergue) and horse trader Steven Cook (Lyle Bettger) are friendly competitors in this enterprise. Each has their eye on the horse herds of the nearby Sioux.

It is rumored that Cherokee general Stand Watie (Glen Strange) is also in the market for horses. Given the Sioux’s growing distrust of the whites, he is believed to have an advantage in dealing with Red Cloud (John War Eagle).

Faith Domergue and the 1950s bra

Domergue approaches Red Cloud, but he sends her away empty-handed. Bettger and an eye patch-wearing partner Uriah (Stacy Harris) don’t bother with formalities. They run off a large herd of the horses, shooting any of the Indians who give chase. Enter Jeff Chandler as a disillusioned Army surgeon who treats both an injured brave and an injured horse, a favorite of the chief’s. Chandler promises to find the thieves and see that they’re punished. The chief scoffs.

In town, Chandler is persuaded by Domergue to set up shop as a veterinarian. Meanwhile, local ranchers are learning that as they contract their horses to Bettger for sale to the Army, he is cheating them. Chandler tells them to organize and sell directly to the Army. But only one has the courage to try it, and Harris kills him, stabbing him with a scalpel he has stolen from Chandler’s kit of surgical instruments.

Chandler is taken prisoner by Bettger, but when Chandler gets the best of him in a fistfight, Bettger collapses with an attack of appendicitis. So the good doctor performs an appendectomy with a sheath knife. Returning to town, Chandler finds the locals ready to string him up, his scalpel having been found by the body of the dead rancher. There follows an escape and a barn burning.

The big kiss - Domergue and Chandler

Back at the Indian camp, chiefs of all the Plains tribes gather to consider General Stand Watie’s offer to buy their horses, with several other Confederate officers standing by. Red Cloud is shocked when he sees the general smack down a black servant who has stood too close to him. While Chandler has to run a gauntlet between Indians with clubs to prove that he has an Indian heart, Bettger sends word to the fort to come stop an “uprising.”

Chandler makes his appeal to the chiefs.  The bluecoats, he says, have a belief that no man should be enslaved for the color of his skin. It’s the tipping point that turns the chiefs against Stand Watie.

After much gunfire, a horse stampede, another escape, another struggle between Chandler and Bettger, and the deaths of the villains, the cavalry is diverted before descending on Red Cloud’s camp. In the final scene, Chandler’s confidence has been restored, and he is heading back to the front to resume his duties as a field surgeon. There’s talk of marriage to Domergue when he returns, and they give each other a big kiss.

Stand Watie

History vs. Hollywood. The movie is standard brand western history mixed with bait-and-switch advertising. There is, in fact, no Sioux uprising in the film. And for his part, Stand Watie seems unlikely to have ventured onto the northern plains to buy Sioux horses. Though to give the screenwriters some credit for homework, it had to be news to audiences in 1953 (or today for that matter) that an Indian served as commanding officer on either side of the Civil War.

For a change in this western, Jeff Chandler is playing a white man, and Chief Red Cloud is actually played by an actor with an Indian name—but Indian in name only. John War Eagle, who played Indian roles in many movies, was born John Edwin Worley Eagle (1901-1991) in Leicestershire, England.