House Made Of Dawn Research Articles

Sending a Voice: The Emergence of Contemporary Native American Poetry

One of ironic aspects of Pulitzer Prize which N. Scott Momaday won in 1969 was that it was given for a novel. House Made of Dawn, which featured a silent protagonist stymied into inarticulacy by his confrontation with Anglo culture. In about same year James Welch, Blackfeet/Gros Ventre writer who has since become best known for his fiction, was writing poetry with deliberateness of someone sharpening a knife and announcing, the renegade wants words. Now, almost fifteen years later, many silenced Native Americans have found voices and gained an audience for words they have carved from history with care. After The New York Times hailed Welch's Winter in Blood as the best first novel of [1974] season, after award of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship to Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Silko, and with formation of a Modern Language Association Discussion Group on Native American Literature complete with newsletter, American Indian writers find themselves enjoying both critical acclaim and scholarly attention.1 Nevertheless,

Images of Drinking in "Woman Singing," Ceremony, and House Made of Dawn

the earliest contacts between Europeans and Indians until the present time.1 Already in the seventeenth century, the English explorer Henry Hawkes complained that Indians were soone drunke, and that the wine in Spaine and in France were not sufficient for the West Indies only,2 so great was the Indian thirst for alcohol. Similar views abound in the reports left by innumerable white explorers, trappers, soldiers, settlers, missionaries, and priests. Almost from the start, Native Americans themselves have also lamented the effects of drinking, viewing this activity not so much as a reflection on Indian as an attempt by whites to manipulate and destroy native people.3 The reasons for Indian susceptibility to alcohol have never been clear, nor have all tribes shown this susceptibility.4 Most white settlers in North America, however, were quick to see any instance of Indian intemperance as a sign of depravity and barbarism, as yet another manifestation of native inferiority to Europeans. Indeed, through most of the history of American culture, rarely has the Indian been seen except through the distorting lens of white prejudices and fantasies, so that sentimental images of the Indian as noble brave or maiden have vied with the equally unrealistic view of the Indian as a liquor-maddened savage on the one hand, and as a pathetic sot on the other. Alcohol in particular has been central to the white man's idea of the Indian, and its use has developed into an emblem of the Indian's own destruction in the face of white civilization. As Roy Harvey Pearce has observed, in seventeenthand eighteenth-century America, liquor was seen to be the most effective agent in dissolving savage character the that had to be dissolved because, so whites reasoned, it could not and would not be civilized.5 In the nineteenth century, with the expansion of the western frontier, white stereotypes of Indian intoxication became all the more deeply entrenched, for Indians increasingly epitomized the larger phenomenon of binge drinking associated with ages of Drinking in Woman ging, Ceremony, and House Made of Dawn

Indians in Indian Fiction: The Shadow of the Trickster

T HE RENAISSANCE in Indian writing in the past fifteen years has produced some fine fiction, but raised some disturbing questions. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, and James Welch's Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney,' are impressive novels, but what is the picture they paint of Indians? At first glance the protagonists appear to be a sorry lot: they are alienated, not only from white society, but even from their own tribe. They are incapable of attachments to lovers, friends or relatives-their closest ties are to those in the grave. They are passive, drifting without job or goal, drinking heavily. When they snap out of their torpor they commit acts of violence. They are loners without wife or family, and although they have relationships with women, they cannot seem to make these last, or do not want to. And, they are losers, very maladroit at surviving in either white or tribal society. Welch's description of his narrator could be extended to all three protagonists:

Tai-Me, Christ, and the Machine: Affirmation Through Mythic Pluralism in House Made of Dawn

TAI-ME, CHRIST, AND THE MACHINE: AFFIRMATION THROUGH MYTHIC PLURALISM IN HOUSE MADE OF DAWN Michael W. Raymond* Many critics interpret N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn as depicting disharmony, alienation, and the need for spiritual redemption in a squalid, hellish, temporal world.1 Martha Scott Trimble , for example, sees it as a story of how differences in "language and culture tend through their own territorial imperatives to encompass one, sometimes to a point of isolation."2 Even those critics not advocating themes of alienation see House Made of Dawn as an insider's novel. To them, it portrays "the orderly continuum of interrelated events that constitute the Indian universe"3 and "warns native Americans that they may lose more than they gain if they assimilate into the American mix."4 With its alternative to Christianity and to a modern civilization based on secular, technological structures,5 House Made of Dawn's optimism has to be inappropriate for an outsider. Neither of these approaches accounts for the full richness of Momaday's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Rather than denying the possibility of affirmation or suggesting that affirmation can come only through a monolithic cultural identity, House Made of Dawn focuses on the pluralism of ordinary contemporary life and the possibility of finding meaning in it. Depicting a pervasive cultural diversity in even remote, seemingly culturally isolated areas, the novel suggests that meaning in contemporary life comes when one finds his sense of place by recognizing and living within that large and diverse context. At the end of House Made of Dawn, Abel is "running on the rise of the song."9 By seeing and going among the runners, Abel unmistakably associates himself with the dawn runners of eternity: They were whole and indispensable in what they did; everything in creation referred to them. Because of them, perspective, proportion, design in the universe. Meaning because of them. They ran with great dignity and calm, not in the hope of anything, but hopelessly; neither in fear nor hatred nor despair of evil, but simply in recognition and with respect. Evil was. Evil was abroad in the night; they must venture out to the confrontation; they must reckon dues and divide the world (p. 96). "Michael W. Raymond is Nell Carlton Professor of English at Stetson University. He has published widely in the scholarly journals and is currently working on a book on the landscapes of the contemporary American novel. 62Michael W. Raymond Abel saves himself when he identifies with the dawn runners, sees them as a part of the whole, becomes a part of them, and feels significant. But Abel's path to the beginnings of salvation is not easy. Abel's story is one of a journey through and from placelessness.7 It is a sordid and seemingly chaotic journey through a self-conscious and reflective uninvolvement , an alienation from people and places, homelessness, a sense of the unreality of the world and of not belonging. Abel's choices and their outcome are neither simple nor clear-cut. It is more than just the matter of returning to the fulfilling pueblo from the nasty white man's world. Abel's tribulations involve all the complexities inherent in contemporary life. He is forced to face the army, the legal system, and the social service agencies of a society almost totally alien to him. He must deal with such personal tragedies as the deaths of his mother and brother and his own alcoholism. He is torn between personal pride and the necessity for survival in a hostile environment. Swirling around him are the complicated and often obscure promises of value systems inherent in at least three Native American cultures, in Christianity, and in modern technology. Clearly this journey through placelessness is not restricted to the white man's army, city, or values. He experiences the twentiethcentury sense of alienation before ever leaving the pueblo. At WaIatowa , Abel's father was an outsider of an undetermined tribe. His family is considered foreign and strange (p. 15). As an adolescent, Abel unexplainably strangles an eagle he captures during a ceremonial Eagle Watchers Society hunt. On his return to Walatowa in 1945, Abel is...

Self-Hatred and Spiritual Corruption in House Made of Dawn

Self-Hatred and Spiritual Corruption in House Made of Dawn

Anthropologists, Novelists and Indian Sacred Material

One of the threads that binds the bundle we are coming to call American Indian Literature is that of the Indian caught between two cultures; there are, to name but a few, Abel in Momaday's House Made of Dawn, Martiniano in Waters' The Man Who Killed the Deer, S. B. in Radin's Autobio- graphy of a Winnebago Indian, and, in a muted way, the unnamed protagonist of Welch's Winter in the Blood. Probably this preoccupation with personal identity and the impingements of culture is one of the major reasons for the rising popularity of American Indian books in a country which is stirring its melting pot ever more gingerly. But as the protagonists of such books writhe about in the nets cultures weave, they might be comforted to know that their creators share some of their problems—that the nets are there for authors as well as for heroes.

"Culture versus Anonymity in House Made of Dawn" in In Time and Place: Some Origins of American Fiction

"Culture versus Anonymity in House Made of Dawn" in In Time and Place: Some Origins of American Fiction

"Winter in the Blood" as Comic Novel

If my students are any indication, many white American readers expect any novel written by an Indian, about an Indian protagonist who meets hard times, to be a bitter protest about white oppression of noble red men. Although House Made of Dawn and Winter in the Blood are by Indians, about Indians who are pretty well buffeted by life, they are not protest novels, though they are often read that way.1 In my opinion to read them as protest novels is to reduce complex books into simplistic melodramas based on racial sterotypes of noble savage and white oppressor. It seems to me that there is something condescending and even bigoted about not allowing blacks and Indians to determine their own attitudes about life in America. Too often we expect, even demand, that they be furious with whites and concentrate their efforts on reviling them. Black poet Al Young ridicules this attitude:

The Bear’s Son Folk Tale in When the Legends Die and House Made of Dawn

N O R A B A K E R B A R R Y Bryant College The Bear’s Son Folk Tale in When the Legends Die and House Made of Dawn Long recognized in oral-traditional literature such as Beowulf and the Grettis Saga, elements of the Bear’s Son folk tale also are to be found embedded in contemporary novels where the protagonist is connected to a heroic cultural background. The native North American heroes of Hal Borland’s When the Legends Die and N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn1 exhibit traits of the Bear’s Son type, and the incidents associated with Bear’s Son heroes provide a structural framework for both novels. The European and Asian folk tales of the Bear’s Son type are told through a recurring sequence of motifs: I. The hero is raised by bears. The hero is frequently represented as having been brought up in a bear’s den. Sometimes he is the son of a bear who cap­ tured his mother. II. Strength and Adventures The hero has extraordinary physical strength but is often sullen, taciturn, and lazy in youth. He sets out on adventures with various companions. JHal Borland, When the Legends Die (Philadelphia: Bantam, 1972) ; N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York, New American Library, 1969). All fur­ ther references are to these editions and will be noted parenthetically. 276 Western American Literature III. Two struggles with supernatural foes Usually in an enclosure, the hero resists and often mutilates in the arm a supernatural being. His companions have been unable to defeat this foe in previous encounters. During this initial encounter, the hero wrestles with his enemy rather than attacks with a weapon. A minor motif is the presence of light shining from the monster’s eyes. A second struggle occurs after the hero tracks the creature to a spring or waterfall and then to a cave. The hero descends into the cave and overcomes another supernatural foe, often his former enemy or his enemy’s mother. In this confrontation a weapon is used but is not effective. A significant motif of both struggles is the abandonment of the hero by his companions.2 In the contemporary novels details often are blurred and characteristics associated with the monster in the folk tale often are transferred to the hero; however, the motifs are present in varying but aesthetically signifi­ cant forms. Borland’s novel conforms more explicitly to the folk tale sequence than does Momaday’s work. 1. The Hero is raised by bears. A Ute boy, Tom Black Bull, is taken by his mother into the wilder­ ness where his father has fled after killing a man. On their way to join the father, Tom and his mother briefly take refuge in an abandoned bear’s den (p. 16). Tom lives in the wilderness with his parents in the “old way” of the Ute tribe before they were confined to the reservation. Shortly after Tom’s father is killed in an avalanche, Tom takes the name Bear’s Brother, telling his mother: “This morning... I met a she-bear and she was not afraid of me. I was not afraid of her. We talked to each other. Then I killed a deer and I left a part of the meat for that she-bear. I shall call myself Bear’s Brother. That is a good name” (p. 22). After Tom’s mother dies, the boy seeks out the she-bear, who is killed along with a female cub by a white prospector. In this way the boy becomes the literal brother/companion to the she-bear’s other male cub (pp. 312Panzer ’s findings concerning over 200 European and Asian versions of the Bear’s Son folk tale are summarized by R. W. Chambers and C. L. Wrenn in Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1967), pp. 621 and 369. Nora Baker Barry 277 34). Borland gradually removes the boy from twentieth-century civiliza­ tion to the moment when Tom is living in the most “primitive” state. Leading the reader into the folk-tale in...

Momaday's House Made of Dawn

Momaday's House Made of Dawn

In Time and Place by Floyd C. Watkins

Reviews 293 he did, for he, and his kind, may become America’s Don Quixote—more admirable in his misplaced “cowboyishness” than his utilitarian detractors who try to force him into “reality.” OLENA H. SACIUK Inter American University of Puerto Rico San Germán In Time and Place. By Floyd C. Watkins. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1977. 250 pages, $10.50). Floyd C. Watkins’ In Time and Place is a study of eight novels selected —neither absolutely nor arbitrarily—to represent different cultures. The purpose is to examine the relation between authenticity and aesthetics. Specifically, does an accurate representation of culture seem to be a part of good art? Does a failure to get the facts right lead to a failure of art? Watkins concludes that artists must know the intimate details of the time and place they write about in order to write successful art, readers must know the cultural territory of a novel in order to read well, and critics should know the cultural details of a novel or disqualify themselves from writing about it. A preliminary chapter asserts that the community tradition is now dead. Cities are cold and impersonal. Citizens in the mass share no common language. The second chapter argues that The Grapes of Wrath “is often false and vague, so the characters are false also.” Over twenty errors are cited, for example the fact that “Muley eats prairie dogs in eastern Okla­ homa, where prairie dogs have never lived.” Other chapters argue that Gone With the Wind (which gives a propagandists, idealized, and Puri­ tanical picture of the South) and Main Street (a message novel, inaccurate to the reality Watkins finds by reading contemporaneous newspapers) are also artistic failures because they are not authentic. The Confessions of Nat Turner, Watkins believes, is inconclusive since there is no way to judge its authenticity. My Antonia is said to be a “simple book,” sometimes “nearly melo­ dramatic and nearly sentimental”; but, for reasons unexplained, it is “peculiarly American” and therefore successful. Watkins’ chapter on Death Comes for the Archbishop is largely a negative report. The good bishops are shown to be too good. The portrait of Father Martinez is “religiously wrong” because it contradicts Catholic ideals, and Cather is inaccurate to history in making him an evil priest, one guilty of “violent rebellion” against Americans. 294 Western American Literature Watkins, in brief, is advocating the same critical standards advocated by Hamlin Garland, William Dean Howells, and many others; and he encounters the same difficulties. Do the standards of authentic art mean, for example, that good people do not exist in history or, if they do, must be dirtied up a bit by the novelist? Why are Cather’s good bishops too good? If Paul Horgan’s biography of Bishops Lamy and Marchebeuf is accurate, it seems to me, then Death Comes for the Archbishop is also accurate. Watkins’ comments on Cather’s version of Father Martinez are even more disturbing, suggesting, apparently, that it is virtuous and realistic to accept conquest and racism. As always, the case for authenticity leads to retreat: fidelity to the facts is a standard for art and is not a standard for art; the artist must be a native to write well, and the artist does not have to be a native. Still, I am sympathetic with Watkins, and I value and recommend In Time and Place. The chapters on House Made of Dawn and As I Lay Dying are both superb, and Watkins’ knowledgeable use of authentic detail as a basis for intelligent criticism constitutes a powerful argument for his posi­ tion. Since an aesthetics of authenticity can produce two such fine essays on two excellent novels, we would all do well to share Watkins’ concern for further study of the relation between art and culture. MAX WESTBROOK, The University of Texas at Austin The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. By Jack London. Completed by Robert L. Fish. (New York: Penguin Books, 1978. 184 pages, $1.95.) “I have 20,000 words done on ‘The Assassination Bureau’,” Jack London wrote late in 1910 to Sinclair Lewis, who had sold him the idea for the story, “and for the first time...

The Assassination Bureau, Ltd by Jack London

294 Western American Literature Watkins, in brief, is advocating the same critical standards advocated by Hamlin Garland, William Dean Howells, and many others; and he encounters the same difficulties. Do the standards of authentic art mean, for example, that good people do not exist in history or, if they do, must be dirtied up a bit by the novelist? Why are Cather’s good bishops too good? If Paul Horgan’s biography of Bishops Lamy and Marchebeuf is accurate, it seems to me, then Death Comes for the Archbishop is also accurate. Watkins’ comments on Cather’s version of Father Martinez are even more disturbing, suggesting, apparently, that it is virtuous and realistic to accept conquest and racism. As always, the case for authenticity leads to retreat: fidelity to the facts is a standard for art and is not a standard for art; the artist must be a native to write well, and the artist does not have to be a native. Still, I am sympathetic with Watkins, and I value and recommend In Time and Place. The chapters on House Made of Dawn and As I Lay Dying are both superb, and Watkins’ knowledgeable use of authentic detail as a basis for intelligent criticism constitutes a powerful argument for his posi­ tion. Since an aesthetics of authenticity can produce two such fine essays on two excellent novels, we would all do well to share Watkins’ concern for further study of the relation between art and culture. MAX WESTBROOK, The University of Texas at Austin The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. By Jack London. Completed by Robert L. Fish. (New York: Penguin Books, 1978. 184 pages, $1.95.) “I have 20,000 words done on ‘The Assassination Bureau’,” Jack London wrote late in 1910 to Sinclair Lewis, who had sold him the idea for the story, “and for the first time in my life am stuck and disgusted. I haven’t done my best by it, and cannot make up my mind whether or not to go ahead with it.” Given its author’s fluid talent and revolutionary temper, “The Assassi­ nation Bureau” was the sort of book which could almost have written itself. Instead, London wrote himself into a cul-de-sac and cursed his inability to find the exit. For a writer who prided himself on finishing and publishing everything to which he set his hand, this kind of creative incapacity was no laughing matter. The novel, however, was. Unintentionally comic, it describes the verbal and tactical duel between “ethical anarchists” of a secret society dedicated Reviews 295 (for moral as well as financial reasons) to eliminating the enemies of mankind, and Winter Hall, “millionaire socialist” playboy who condemns the organization as a social nuisance. Hall cleverly cons the Bureau’s formidable chief, Ivan Dragomiloff, into accepting a contract which makes him his own agency’s next victim. A transcontinental chase ensues with the wily chief assassin always one jump ahead of his bumbling pursuers. The plot is compounded by the fact that Hall is in love with Drago’s lovely daughter, and that the elusive “victim,” as noble a sportsman as his adversary, wants to make Hall the next chief of the Bureau. No wonder London bogged down! This is the sort of plot which could get one expelled even from The Famous Writers School. While London was worrying what to do with his bizarre novel, the obliging Lewis (whom Jack was helping to support between jobs) sent him some incredible and thoroughly useless suggestions on how to wrap things up. One suspects that London’s worst fears about his work were confirmed as soon as he read Lewis’s letter, for he immediately retired the manuscript without revising it. One can only wonder how he would have received the news that his stalled story would ultimately be published (and even filmed) with a made-to-order ending supplied by a contemporary mystery writer famous for his Sherlock Holmes lampoons. On the fifteenth anniversary of the work’s first appearance, Penguin has issued The Assassination Bureau in quality paper format, making available a popular edition of this literary oddity. For those who enjoy watching the spectacle of one professional...

The Mountainway of the Navajo by Leland C. Wyman

Reviews 73 Poems will allow readers to appreciate his contribution to understanding the beauty and significance of the world he has known. T. M. PEARCE, University of New Mexico The Mountainway of the Navajo. By Leland C. Wyman, with a myth of the Female Branch recorded and translated by Father Berard Haile, OFM. (Tucson, Arizona: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1975. xv + 271 pages, illustra­ tions, tables, bibliography, and index. $14.50.) Navajo singers Yucca Patch Man and River Junction Curley told the myths which form the center of this book to Fr. Haile in the early 1930’s. After Haile’s death his notes were preserved through the special efforts of Drs. Fred Eggan (Univ. of Chicago) and Bernard Fontana (Univ. of Arizona) ; and, as Wyman prepared the materials for publication, Professor David P. McAllester (Wesleyan Univ.) revised Haile’s translations of many of the songs of Mountainway. The book, then, represents a strikingly cooperative enterprise. That Leland Wyman should bring it to completion is appropriate and predictable. Long the outstanding non-Navajo authority on Navajo ceremonialism, this is his fifth book-length study of a Navajo chantway, and he approaches the task with practiced method. Following a brief discussion of Navajo people and the larger design of their ceremonial system, Wyman treats in successive chapters the varieties of Mountainway and their uses, the ceremonial procedure of the chant, its major and minor mythic motifs, and, what is clearly his central interest, the sandpaintings of Mountainway. These chapters will delight and inform students of anthropology and folklore for their economy and precision, but students of literature will no doubt want to turn first to the songs and myths themselves. Washington Matthews estimated that over one hundred and fifty “songs of sequence” might be sung on the last night alone of a nine day Mountain­ way ceremony. Thus, the nineteen songs included in this book are but a small fraction of those sung at a performance of the ceremony. But they are tantalizing examples — all the more so because they are presented with Fr. Haile’s notes to help us aliens make connections among their litanies of deities and symbols. Making connections in the songs will take readers inevitably beyond Haile’s notes to the myths of Mountainway. Most of our favorite definitions suggest that the land was and remains the catalyst in the formation of western American literature, and we have come increasingly to speak of the western American writer’s “sense of place” in both descriptive and evaluative terms. The myth of Female MountainTop -Way as told by Yucca Patch Man is by that criterion western American 74 Western American Literature literature par excellence. The narrative is as Wyman describes it a “sus­ pense filled tale of flight and pursuit, of ‘wandering in the dust’ among the mountains surrounding the four corners of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico.” It is a classic example of the hero quest, and it is peopled with characters familiar to us in derivative connections. Bear Man, and Snake Man, and malevolent Changing Bear Maiden (Esdza shash nadle) from House Made of Dawn; Coyote now from seemingly everywhere. But it is the land, the cultural landscape formed by generations of such telling and wandering, which forms the center of interest — for protagonists and readers — in the eighty-six pages of the myth. Such a display of a broad and culturally deep knowledge of a particular landscape is sobering stuff for those of us who presume to make our own connections with the land in a generation or, through our grandparents, a century. There is some solace, I suppose, in the anthropological assurance that Navajos have been in the Four Comers area a scant five centuries. LAWRENCE J. EVERS, University of Arizona The Massacre at Fall Creek. By Jessamyn West. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. 373 pages, $8.95.) Twenty years ago, while reading in Smith’s Early Indiana Trials, Jessamyn West first encountered the “massacre at Fall Creek,” an 1824 slaughter of nine Senecas by Indiana settlers. In her “Valedictory,” she notes that only scanty, unofficial, and often contradictory versions have survived a century and a half, and that the event had no...

Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer by Alfred Kazin

BOOK REVIEWS Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. By Alfred Kazin. (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1973. 334 pages. $8.95.) Kazin’s new literary history of post-World War II American fiction does for us that necessary task of analyzing, synthesizing, and classifying the work of a recent period; necessary because the discussion helps to define the contexts of the age and thus provides frames of reference in which to view any individual work. Not only does Kazin chronicle the fictional history of the Atomic Age — an era that was supposed to witness the “death of the novel” but saw instead fiction’s increasing proliferation loom before us as though it were created by some kind of nuclear fission of the imagination — but he also writes in a rich interesting style that makes his criticism a coherent narrative itself. Moving into this enjoyable book, one encounters insights about individual writers and about whole schools of fiction, insights that make sense not only of the literature but of con­ temporary American experience as well. Yet for all its clear and useful discussion, the book, which Kazin says had “been conceived as an integrated account of the fiction written in the United States since the outset of the World War II,” fails almost completely to mention the novels and stories of an entire American region — the West. To talk about why Kazin ignores Western writers would be only to speculate; still, the names strangely missing from his Bright Book of Life include, to mention a few: John Steinbeck, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, H. L. Davis, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., Wallace Stegner, Paul Horgan, Frank Waters, Vardis Fisher, Jack Kerouac, Wright Morris, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, N. Scott Momaday, Frederick Manfred, and Richard Brautigan. Leaving out quite a few of those names might be necessary in order to talk intelligently about all of the American fiction of the age; but to pass by all of them without a word is a cold Eastern shoulder indeed (from a man who once taught at UCLA). Perhaps an inquiry more useful than an examina­ tion of Kazin’s possible motives is a consideration of just how profoundly his regional bias or ignorance affects his conclusions about particular move­ ments and about the age as a whole. The Bright Book begins with a balanced view of Hemingway’s postwar works, “A Dream of Order.” From showing how Hemingway’s stylistically faithful rendering of the “unmistakable” — “that instinctive unconscious connection with nature” — tried to keep “man and history in order by keep­ 142 Western American Literature ing them apart” (p. 14), Kazin turns for contrast to Faulkner, whose style serves to recreate in reason the history that man’s heart has forced upon us in blind passion: “thought alone puts the story together — the artist is a chronicler going back into the havoc that has never ended” (p. 28). As the chapter title, “The Secret of the South,” suggests, Faulkner and the other Southern writers seem to Kazin to have wrested from their regional agony a serviceable view of the past. Many of those Western writers Kazin has ignored show us from their regional standpoint a way of dealing with the past that does not restore our old idea of history but that does give a meaningful sense of time and place. Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, for example, contains both Indian time and non-Indian time. As Martha Scott Trimble points out in her recent pamphlet on Momaday, the juxtaposition of Indian and non-Indian time cannot be judged in conventional terms and forces us back upon the land. For it is in the land that Abel, Momaday’s protagonist, attempts to find himself; the rhythms of the land, if submitted to, lead into the house of beauty, the “house made of dawn.” Momaday’s is neither so optimistic nor so pessimistic a treatment of time as the treatments we find in Hemingway, Faulkner, and the Southern writers. After assessing Southern fiction, Kazin examines some American war novelists (Mailer, Jones, Heller, Vonnegut) and the social novelists he calls “Professional Observers” (Cozzens, O’Hara, Cheever, Salinger, and Updike...

The Correlation between Societal Attitudes and Those of American Authors in the Depiction of American Indians, 1607-1860

The problem in this research is to identify the changing attitudes of American fictional authors toward the American Indian and the roles they attributed to the natives from early America to the Civil War, and to explore the relationship of these attitudes and prescribed roles to changing societal views about the native Americans. From Captain John Smith's dramatic rescue by Pocahontas in the early seventeenth century down to N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1969), the American Indian has furnished inspiration to a multitude of writers. Specifically, the westward movement of an aggressive Anglo-Saxon culture left its imprint in the records of those who by force or superior cunning succeeded in taking the country from its original inhabitants. This tragic, yet colorful, drama imbues a large part of the literature that reveals the way American Indians have been portrayed to the reading public. Thus it is with the Indian portraits painted by some of the major writers in American fictional literature, and more specifically as they reflect the attitudes of society toward these original natives, that this paper is chiefly concerned. The first American writers compared the background and the mode of living of the Indians with the European ways of life in the seventeenth century and consequently felt the Indians were an inferior race. This notion of race superiority has been one of the most persistent themes throughout the history of American literature. Although the American Indian has formed a dramatic nucleus

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

Joshua Pilcher: Fur Trader and Indian Agent by John E. Sunder

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 is all written and evaluated, Ben Capps’ contribution may well turn out to be his conviction that life is an opportunity for learning and growth —not a trap or a sewer. C. L. So n n ich se n , University of Texas at El Paso Joshua Pilcher: Fur Trader and Indian Agent. By John E. Sunder. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968. xi + 203 pages, maps, illus., bibliography, index. $5.95.) Although Joshua Pilcher died in 1843, he has had to wait 125 years for this first full-length biography to appear. It traces all aspects of his life from his birth in Virginia in 1790 to his death in St. Louis after an eventful career in the fur trade of the trans-Mississippi West and finally, near the end, as Superintendent of Indian Affairs and successor to General William Clark in that office. Pilcher was an associate of Manuel Lisa in the Missouri Fur Company and a contemporary of the Chouteaus, Andrew Henry, the Sublettes, and other notables in the fur trade. He played his role on the frontier at the same time as William Ashley, whose “one-hundred young men” became famous in Western legendry as “mountain men” —Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpatrick, Jedediah Smith, Jim Beckwourth, and others. Yet, for all his industry, Pilcher never became the colorful figure that these others became. Nonetheless, he probably knew as much about the fur trade and Indian affairs as any man of his time. He moved indefatigably up and down the 306 Western American Literature Missouri tending to his business as trader or as Indian agent; he played an important role in the Arikara campaign in 1823; he ventured into the Rockies and traveled across much of western Canada; and he made numerous trips to Washington to report on Indian matters and to bolster his own political ambitions. A pulmonary illness took his life less than two years after he was removed from the Superintendency of Indian Affairs —apparently a victims of the spoils system— and, it is of interest to note, in the very year often taken as marking the real end of the Western fur trade. Sunder’s book is rich in factual detail, so replete in this respect, indeed, that the narrative suffers. For all the information in it, Pilcher never emerges as a personality. The facts are here, but the breath of life seldom if ever appears. Yet the book is built on firm data, and everything that Sunder writes is strongly buttressed by primary documentation. No one has ever investigated so thoroughly as he has the many hundreds of pieces of information lying in Pilcher’s extensive correspondence, in newspapers, and in government docu­ ments. As a result this biography has unquestioned authority, and probably no one ever again will feel the need to write a new biography of Joshua Pilcher. Mr. Sunder, who is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, is also the author of another biography, Bill Sublette, Mountain Man (1959), and of The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri, 1840-1865 (1965), both published as well by the University of Oklahoma Press. E d g e ley W. T odd, Colorado State...

The White Man’s Road by Benjamin Capps

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...