Sudden Country by Loren D. Estleman

Abstract

254 Western American Literature The ultimate destination of the Wanamaker Expedition is the Dakotas’ Standing Rock reservation, where, in 1890, Sioux reservation police killed Sitting Bull in an early morning shoot-out. Dispatched by McLaughlin to arrest Bull for his part in the emerging Ghost Dance troubles, the tribal police lose control of the situation and bloody disaster follows. This reader wanted to like Shadow Catchera great deal more than he finally did. First novelist Fergus has carefully researched his topic, and he writes well. Place description and historical detail are among the novel’s strengths. Unfor­ tunately, depth of characterization is not. Fergus has a great character in McLaughlin, but he fails to allow the old man to come to life. McLaughlin and the other characters, both true-life and fictional, represent political points of view, more so than flesh and blood people. The author’s politics overwhelm his better instincts as a storyteller. Consumed by the idea that native Americans received a raw deal from white America, Fergus, for the most part, fails to take Shadow Catcher beyond that brutal fact. If he had, he could conceivably have created both the social state­ ment that he has, as well as a literary work of lasting power. JAMES B. HEMESATH Adams State College Sudden Country. By Loren D. Estleman. (New York: Doubleday, 1991. 182 pages, $15.00.) Sudden Country is the most recent effort by the prolific Loren D. Estleman, whose other Westerns (or “frontier novels” as they are called on the dust jacket—shades of Louis L’Amour) include Aces andEightsand Bloody Season. The narrator of the novel is a thirteen-year-old boy (must they always be thirteen?), David Grayle (a bit of symbolism there), who is being raised in his mother’s boarding house in Texas; the father, of course, deserted them. Like many a western writer, Estleman uses the half-orphan motif, so that David has to look for father figures to replace his absent parent. Young David’s major dilemma stems from his choosing the wrong father substitute, in this case a former member of the infamous Quantrill's raiders. Through a series of incidents, some amusing, some violent, David ends up going to the Black Hills with a motley group of men to search for gold buried years before by another of Quantrill’s men. Since most of the travelers are unsavory, and the Sioux are reportedly using the Ghost Dance ceremonies in a last-ditch effort to agitate their people against the whites, the reader knows David is riding into big trouble. The book has a few nice touches—the point is made that the Sioux “upris­ ing”is more ajournalistic than a real threat, and the “dime novel West”is taken Reviews 255 to task. In David’s tone as narrator, one hears echoes of True Grit, and the boybecoming -a-man theme is nicely handled. Unfortunately, too many characters make the action hard to follow, and the story doesn’t really take off until twothirds of the way through when David is left alone to fend for himself in the wilderness; at that point, the tale becomes quite absorbing. All in all, Sudden Country is a readable but generally forgettable book, although that is common in popular Westerns and not altogether a bad thing: one can put the book away for a year and then re-read it as if it’s new—a kind of literary recycling. It’s probably best to wait for the paperback of this one. CANDY KLASCHUS University ofHartford The Sharpest Sight. By Louis Owens. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. 263 pages, $19.95.) On the most superficial level, Louis Owens’s The Sharpest Sightis an exciting “whodunit” with plenty of suspense, suspects, and sex. The victim, a mixedblood Vietnam vet, has been murdered after his escape from a state hospital, where he had been imprisoned for killing his girlfriend. As in most murder mysteries, the investigator of the crime—in this case Mundo Morales, the Chicano deputy sheriff of a small town in California—serves as the novel’s center of consciousness. But in what potboiler would one find such an original character...