The White Man’s Road by Benjamin Capps

Abstract

304 Western American Literature The White Man’s Road. By Benjamin Capps. (New York: Harper & Row, 1969. 319 pages, $6.95.) Benjamin Capps, of Grand Prairie, Texas, who writes as well as anyone in his native state, has done his second novel on the Comanches. His first, A Woman of the People (1966) put new life into the story of Cynthia Ann Parker and showed how a white girl could come to prefer a primitive people and a primitive life to “civilization.” The time was middle nineteenth century, a comfortable distance from the shocks and problems of today. The White Man’s Road brings the tribal chronicle down to 1900 —a time when the old life was gone and no satisfactory pattern had emerged for a new one. All the tribesmen, but especially the young and sensitive ones, are trapped in a situation from which there is no apparent exit. Joe Cowbone, the central character, is half white and half Comanche and belongs nowhere. Slow Tom Armstedt, though apparently a fullblood, is even more confused. Freddy Bull, who has been a student at Carlisle, pretends that he doesn’t know how to read. George Longwater committed suicide two years before the story begins. These young men seem strangely contemporary, as Mr. Capps no doubt intends. The narrative begins with a party, a “feast” given by a down-at-heels Comanche named Great Eagle, apparently because he has nothing whatever to celebrate. His wife has left him. His home consists of a sheet of canvas and a few poles. He is drunk when his four guests arrive. He wants everybody to be happy, so he tries to be amusing by telling how he rented his wife out to his friends among the soldiers. Joe Cowbone and Slow Tom detach them­ selves from this sad exhibition in embarrassment and disgust. They realize that Great Eagle’s plight is symptomatic of the failure and defeat which have come to the Comanches. Joe knows he must find his way out of this spiritual swamp. His mother, Little Brown Girl, can’t help him. She is living in a dream which he cannot share —convinced that his father, a fiddle-footed trader who vanished long before, will come back and things will be as they were. His girl, Lottie Manybirds, can’t help him either. Trying to find his way to manhood, he visits the last survivor of the great days, an ancient Indian named Mad Wolf, who gives him a vision of what men were like in the old raiding times. As a result, Joe organizes a horse-stealing raid of his own, as exciting —for a short time —as an Indian could wish. Eventually, of course, Joe has to come to terms with his own time and situation, but by then his father has really come back and is able to help him. Reverend Fairchild is there to urge him into the paths of responsibility and righteousness. And Lottie has begun to make it all seem worth while. Benjamin Capps is as much a child of his times as Joe Cowbone and is therefore as deeply concerned as the rest of us about man’s life and fate. Reviews 305 Aspiration interests him more than defeat. He can be as realistic as any modern novelist in describing the degradation and stagnation and despair of an Indian village, but he is not despairing about the efforts of the human spirit to break its chains and find fulfillment. He recognizes defeat as part of the human condition, but he never accepts the view that defeat is permanent or inevitable. Recent fiction about the Indian seldom shares this attitude. Take the Comanches in Edwin Shrake’s Blessed McGill (1969). They are crafty, dirty, and somewhat stupid— hardly people at all. Or take the young Kiowa in N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, House Made of Dawn. Abel, home from World War II, finds no place for himself among Indians or white men and disintegrates completely. Capps’ men and women, be they cowboys, Indians, or captives, may be lost, but they have an integrity which keeps them from degradation. When the fiction of the 1960’s...