Badger Boy by Elmer Kelton

Abstract

WAL 36.4 W INTER 2002 Badger Boy. By Elmer Kelton. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2001. 286 pages, $23.95. Reviewed by Dorys Crow Grover Texas A&M University-Commerce Elmer Kelton is back on the Texas frontier as this sequel to The Buckskin Line (1999) picks up with his hero, David “Rusty” Shannon, in the spring of 1865 as the war between the States is ending. Texas, having seceded to the Confederacy, is now reluctantly yielding to Union soldiers spreading across the state, even into dangerous Comanche country where Rusty has been a Texas Ranger. Duty-bound to protect settlers from Comanche raids, Rusty often philos­ ophizes about the Civil War: he “regarded secession from the Union four years ago as a grave mistake though fellow Texans had voted in its favor. He saw the war as folly on both sides, North and South” (10). Rusty is one of Kelton’s strong-minded individuals much like Charlie Flagg of The Time It Never Rained (1973), those four-section homesteaders in The Good Old Boys (1978), and Wes Hendrix of The Man Who Rode Midnight (1990). Kelton builds Rusty’s character through several unexpected incidents which occur in the novel. But Rusty’s one weakness is his unrequited love for Geneva Monahan. His exceptional strength surfaces in his love and care of Andrew Pickard, a White boy captured by the Comanches and named Badger Boy. Parallel to the main plot is the Comanche viewpoint presented in the thoughts of Steals the Ponies, a narrative method Kelton employed in his ear­ lier books The Wolf and the Buffalo (1980) and Slaughter (1992). One of the strengths of the novel is Kelton’s reliance upon Texas history, which he carefully weaves into the work. By the end of the novel, the war is over, the “buckskin line” (a term Kelton says he coined) is disbanded, and the federal government is establishing laws in Texas, a state that is now under its sixth flag. There are hostiles other than the Comanches, including hate-filled Confederates, overbearing Union soldiers, army renegades, and mean-minded neighbors such as the Dawkins and the obnoxious, thieving reprobate and coward Fowler Gaskin. Elmer Kelton is one of the most honored of western writers and was rec­ ognized by the Western Literature Association in 1990 and by Western Writers of America in 1995. He writes of early Texas with unerring authority and has published more than forty novels of the American West. ...