A CREEK CALLED WOUNDED KNEE (1978) by Douglas C. Jones

On December 29, 1890 Custer's old command, the Seventh Cavalry, attempted to disarm a band of 120 Minneconjou Sioux warriors led by Chief Big Foot that had surrendered the day before.  

When one warrior resisted surrendering his rifle and a trooper attempted to wrest it from him, either the rifle or some other weapon fired, and the soldiers began to fire indiscriminately into the group of Sioux, who then began to retrieve their stacked weapons and to fire back.  Since most of them had no weapons they began to flee in an effort to avoid annihilation.  

The Seventh had mounted four Hotchkiss cannons on a nearby knoll and the soldiers manning the guns began to fire into the Sioux encampment located some distance from where the meeting between the Seventh and Big Foot's men had taken place.  It is estimated that 230 women and children were in the camp at the time.  As they and a number of the men attempted to make their escape down a dry ravine, the guns were turned on them and the canister shells from the Hotchkiss guns rained deadly shrapnel up and down the ravine.

Soldiers and Hotchkiss guns at Wounded Knee

On that day, 153 known Sioux, including Big Foot, were killed. Over half of the dead were women and children.  Since many of the captured Sioux later died from wounds and others who were wounded but made their escape probably died as well, some estimates place the total dead as high as 300.

Twenty-five solders were killed and thirty-nine were wounded. However, because the two troops that were charged with the responsibility of disarming the Sioux were formed in an L shape in close proximity to the warriors, there is evidence that most of the Seventh's casualties were the result of friendly fire.

Body of Big Foot frozen into a grotesque shape by a winter blizzard

Monument marking mass grave in Wounded Knee cemetery

A Creek Called Wounded Knee (1978) was the third entry in what became a de facto trilogy on the Indian-white conflict on the northern plains.  The first two were The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer (1976) and Arrest Sitting Bull (1977).  Since the massacre at Wounded Knee occurred exactly two weeks after Sitting Bull's death, the third novel represents a natural progression.

The latter two events are closely related not only in terms of time, but also because it was the Ghost Dance movement that was spreading like a prairie grass fire among the Lakota Sioux that aroused fear among settlers, U.S. Indian Agents, and the U.S. cavalry.  Sensationalist reporting by competing newspapers not only added fuel to the fire, but also fanned the flames of hatred and distrust.  Adding further symmetry to the three novels is the fact that it was George Custer's reconstituted Seventh Cavalry regiment that was responsible for the massacre.

As he did in the first two novels, Jones utilizes both historical and fictional characters to tell the story, but within the plot he makes the story as factual as possible.  I always knew that he was a thorough researcher, but I discovered in rereading this novel that he was even more meticulous than I first imagined.  

I won't give them away, but there are two incidents in the story that just did not ring true for me.  I thought they were cases of a novelist doing what a novelist is supposed to do, in fact is obligated to do.  I assumed he had manufactured a couple of fictional events in order to spice up the story. However, in doing a little further research I discovered that both were documented events.  I also ran across other examples of a similar nature.

For some readers, this story will at first move slowly, but as a reviewer wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch "[t]he ominous presence of the coming tragedy is on every page."

In the beginning, Jones sets the stage by vividly detailing the fear and distrust that pervaded Big Foot's band as well as the nervous anxiety of the relatively inexperienced raw recruits who comprised a majority of the reconstituted Seventh Calvary, a regiment that had earlier sustained a stunning defeat at the hands of the Sioux and Cheyenne on the Little Bighorn.  Fourteen years later, near a creek in South Dakota, the Seventh and the Sioux clashed again in what was initially called the battle of Wounded Knee, but today is almost universally known as the Wounded Knee Massacre.






  

ARREST SITTING BULL (1977) by Douglas C. Jones

"Jones displays sympathy for whites and Indians but never slips into a maudlin sentimentality.  The villains of his novels are not the people caught up in the event but a government that repeatedly dealt with Indian-White conflict ineptly and insensitively." 

-- Cheryl J. Foote, Twentieth-Century Western Writers

Douglas C. Jones’ first novel was THE COURT-MARTIAL OF GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER (1976); a “what-if” story that asked (and answered) the question of what Custer’s fate would have been had he survived the battle of Little Bighorn.  His second novel, The Arrest of Sitting Bull (1977), was also a fictional account of a controversial chapter in the history of Indian-white relations.  This time it is the events surrounding the death of Sitting Bull on December 15, 1890. 

At the time, the Lakota Sioux chief was living on the Standing Rock Reservation on the borders between the recently created states of North and South Dakota. The authorities had become deeply concerned about the Ghost Dance movement that had spread among the Lakota.  The movement, sharing many of the characteristics of a religion, promised the eminent arrival of an Indian Messiah who would bring back the buffalo and free the Indians from their white oppressors.

The U.S. Indian Agent at the reservation, James McLaughlin, who believed that Sitting Bull was one of the moving forces behind the movement, sent a group of Indian policemen, thirty-nine in all, to Sitting Bull's cabin to arrest him. The botched effort by the policemen ended in tragedy.

Ten days later the Wounded Knee massacre occurred on the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.  That tragedy was the subject of Jones’ third novel, A Creek Called Wounded Knee (1978). 

As in his first novel, and as he would do in subsequent novels, Jones intertwines historical and fictional characters, intermingles fact and fiction, and uses the eye of a painter (which he was), the ear of a journalist (degrees in journalism and mass communications), and the research skills of a historian to bring history alive in a way that no historian could.

THEIR FATHERS' GOD by O.E. Rolvaag

O.E. Rolvaag (1876-1931) was born in a small fishing village in northern Norway about five miles from the Arctic Circle.  In 1896 he immigrated to South Dakota to work on his uncle's farm.  He later enrolled in St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1905, and becoming a professor of Norwegian literature at the school the following year.  In 1910 he earned a master's degree at St. Olaf.
 

Two years earlier, he had become an American citizen and had married Jennie Marie Berdahl.  They would have three sons and one daughter.  One of the sons, Karl, would become governor of Minnesota in the 1960's.

All of Rolvaag's books were written and originally published in his native Norwegian language and were then translated into English.  They were popular in both Norway and the United States.

He published the first of his six novels in 1912.  But it was in 1927 that his masterpiece, Giants in the Earth, was translated and published in America.  It is a classic study of the immigrant experience in America and even more so the classic book about the Norwegian immigrant experience.

It is a book about the reality of contending with the harsh elements that characterized the South Dakota plains -- drought, locust swarms, blizzards, and, especially for women, loneliness, isolation, and often despair.  And the wind -- always the wind -- and the flat, treeless plain, where there was a

[b]right, clear sky over a plain so wide that the rim of the heavens cut down on it around the entire horizon. . . . Bright, clear sky, to-day, to-morrow, and for all time to come.

. . . And sun! And still more sun! It set the heavens afire every morning; it grew with the day to quivering golden light--then softened into all the shades of red and purple as evening fell. . . . Pure colour everywhere. A gust of wind, sweeping across the plain, threw into life waves of yellow and blue and green. Now and then a dead black wave would race over the scene . . . a cloud's gliding shadow . . . now and then. . . .

It was late afternoon. A small caravan was pushing its way through the tall grass. The track that it left behind was like the wake of a boat--except that instead of widening out astern it closed in again.

Yes, as in the rest of the West, life was harder for women.  Men tended to be optimistic that whatever the obstacles might be, they could be overcome.  And sometimes it was necessary for them to travel many miles to the nearest town in order to purchase necessary equipment and supplies.  But the women remained at home to care for their children and tend the livestock and they rarely saw anyone outside of the family.

There are stories of how the monotony of this existence drove women out of their minds.  And in one case in Giants in the Earth it does that very thing.

Two years later, a sequel, Peder Victorious: A Tale of the Pioneers Twenty Years Later, was published.  Whereas Giants in the Earth was epic in scope, the sequel narrowed its focus.  There were still occasional droughts and harsh winters, but because of the growth of population in the ensuing years the isolation and monotony had lessened as did the despair.  The land had been conquered.

The great struggle now became one of how to become Americans.  And an essential element of that struggle was the pain and dismay among the immigrants who resisted but could not prevent the Americanization of their first-generation children.  This struggle is at the heart of the story of young Peder Holm and his Norwegian mother, Beret.

Two years after Peder Victorious, the third book of the trilogy was published.  Their Fathers' God begins in the late 1890's and extends into the new century.  The farmers of the South Dakota plains have to contend with a long drought and, like the rest of the country, with an economic depression.  But there is another struggle, one that is much more deep-seated and more lasting than the others.  It is the division that exists between two groups of immigrants, the Norwegian Lutherans and the Irish Catholics.

The two groups are able to live as accommodating neighbors as long as -- well, as long as each is able to maintain its own culture, including language, but especially religion, without any interference from the other; and as long as there is no intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics.

But there is that.  Peder Holm, the young rebel from the second book, has married Susie Doheny, a devout Catholic.  Peder thinks the Catholic religion is no more than myth and superstition and he probably could live with that except he and his young wife live on the farm and in the house owned by his mother, Beret, who is as devout in her Lutheran faith as her daughter-in-law is in her faith.

Peder, of course, has been raised in the Lutheran church, but in truth he opposes any organized religion.  But he is caught in the middle.  Soon his marriage is being severely tested.  It is tested not only by drought and depression, but even more troublesome it is tested by family bickering, and maybe, as Susie believes, it is being tested by their father's god.  

There might have been a fourth book in the series.  In fact, the conclusion of Their Fathers' God would seem to point in that direction.  But it was not to be.  O.E. Rolvaag died the year that book was published.  He was fifty-five years old.