A riveting fictionalization of the life of Britt Johnson, little known African-American Texas hero, in the footsteps of Le May's The Searchers. Realistic and with the Indians' viewpoint - absent in other accounts. At times has an other worldly quality - the accounts of the returned abducted children and their fates read like space alien abduction stories - but maybe that is where alien abduction stories come from. ( )

... I loved the writing, there was a time in the beginning where I thought there was too much prose, but after that the story just took off and I was hooked. ...One of my favorite characters was James Deaver, the illustrator for the newspapers. His character offered the balanced look at the situation; there was no easy answer to the problem. ...The Texans was uncompromising and the Indians were barbaric and unrelenting in their kidnapping and slaughtering of innocents.
...There were a few amusing parts, the interpreter and the Indians, they knew the pitch from the government agents and pretended to listen all the while holding a conversation about something else.
...The government was arrogant and presumptive in believing that the Indians would want to live the life of a citizen of the U.S. They didn't want to farm; the land wasn't the government's to give away. The Indian perspective is the land belongs to no one. Was there another way to handle the conflict?
...The character of Britt Johnson was a great imagining of the real person who was known to have rescued his wife, children and others from the Indians; but little else was know about him or his family.
...Once again a book that makes me want to do further research is a winner. ( )

We spend our lives in worlds remote from one another. We imagine we all live together on this round earth but we do not.

Sometimes the things that divide us are of our own making, and sometimes they are insurmountable misunderstandings. Jiles recognizes both, and shows them to us without flinching.

This is the story of Britt Johnson, a free black man from Kentucky, who comes West to settle his family, along with his hopes of owning and operating a freight service. One of the first blood-curdling events we encounter is the taking of his wife and children by the Comanche and Kiowa.

One of the complaints I have heard from others regarding this novel is that it is starkly, brutally violent. Well, the times are starkly and brutally violent and Jiles is no liar, no softener of history; she tells it as it was. Her ability to provide detail that makes us feel we are present among the sights, the textures, and the smells, ranks among her greatest assets as a novelist.

Mary lay half awake all night to watch the flickering light of the fire shifting on the tipi walls and the liner, a hypnotic and incessant dashing of light and shadow, the noise of the tipi cover and liner belling in and out accompanied by the unpredictable stanzas of the wind. The fire smoke shot upward, carried by the chimney of air that rose between the liner and the walls. It blossomed up into the smoke flaps and out. Whirling eddies of snow sifted down between the flaps and flashed in the light of the fire, and vanished. The fire threw shadows of moccasins hung up to dry so that they seemed to walk against the tipi walls, the fire threw shadows of a fishnet and a gourd dipper snaring the evaporating snowflakes.

I’ve never spent a snowy night in a teepee, until now.

This is Britt’s story, but it is more than that, of course. Jiles is an even-handed historian; she takes no sides and gives no quarter. And, in doing so, she makes us understand, in a way we might not have done before, how impossible this situation was for both the settlers and the Indians. This is a clash of cultures. What is murder to outsiders is ritual and courage to the Indians; what seems like an offering of a better way for the Quaker agent is the destruction of freedom and life itself for the Indian. There can be no simple resolution. The more powerful group will win, and in doing so, annihilate the other.

Much of what Jiles tells us about Britt and his family, friends and life, is conjecture. This is, after all, fiction. However, it mattered very much to me that Britt Johnson was a real man and that the larger fabric of this story is based on true events and real courage. In her afterward, Jiles states that Britt’s story “returned to me repeatedly as I read through north Texas histories over the years, and I often wondered why no one had taken it up. And so I did.” I’m so glad she did.
( )

Besides the fact that there is just a tad bit too much description of the Texas landscape, this is an interesting look at life following the Civil War. Britt Johnson is a freed slave who with this wife, Mary, and their three children leave Kentucky and head to Texas where he plans a new life. The Kiowa and Comanche Indians are being pushed into smaller and smaller regions by the settlements and Indian raids are not uncommon in spite of the efforts of the Office of Indian Affairs.

After Britt's oldest son is killed and his wife and two children are captured by the Indians along with another white woman and her granddaughter, Britt is determined to rescue them. The story of his travels to the Indian territory and the experiences of Mary and the children alternate.

In the midst of all this, Samuel Hammond is a young committed Quaker sent to bring order to the area by the Office of Indian Affairs. Highly naive and principled, Samuel is sure he can bring the Indians into submission if he could teach them to read and write and see the benefits of farming. His good intentions soon meet up with the reality of the complicated situation.

Britt is able to retrieve his family and goes on to become a teamster hauling freight through the dangerous Indian territory to the various outposts and small communities.

The story is readable, believable, horrific at times, humorous at other times. Good read. ( )

This historical novel was fleshed out from what little is known about Britt Johnson, a freed slave who moved with his family from Kentucky to Texas in 1863. Jiles, who is a poet as well as an author of novels, paints the new alien landscape of these immigrants with an artistic eye:

“They had come to live on the very edge of the great Rolling Plains, with the forested country behind them and the empty lands in front. Long, attentive lines of timber ran like lost regiments along the rivers and creeks. Everything was strange to them: the cactus in all its hooked varieties, the elusive antelope in white bibs and black antlers, the red sandstone dug up in plates to build chimneys and fireplaces big enough to get into in case there was a shooting situation.”

And indeed, a shooting situation came soon enough. The Johnsons built a house in Elm Creek in Texas, just south of territory occupied by the warlike Comanche and Kiowa tribes. The two bands often raided together since many of the Comanche had been decimated by cholera and smallpox transmitted by whites when the gold rush wagons passed through the plains. Jiles integrates these and other facts about the tribes and their history into the story, and also presents the point of the view of the white settlers, who felt terrorized by the Natives. The U.S., however, had control of the land, superior weapons, and a racist disregard for the Native Americans, and it was never going to end well for the Natives.

In the meantime, however, the depredation of the Comanche and Kiowa continued, and as this story begins, Britt’s family and other homesteads in the area were attacked by the tribes when the men were off on a journey. Britt’s oldest son was killed, and Britt's wife Mary and their two younger children, Jube and Cherry, were taken captive by the Kiowa. A white neighbor, the widow Elizabeth, and some of her grandchildren, were taken by the Comanche. Eventually, Britt set out to get them all back.

A parallel story describes the metamorphosis of Samuel Hammond, a Quaker from Philadelphia who comes to nearby Fort Sill to serve as the Indian agent to the Comanche and Kiowa. Samuel is full of ideals and optimism. He wants to conquer the Indians with kindness rather than force, and convince them of what he considers to be the superior ways of whites. While Samuel initially believed the U.S. should honor its treaties and give the Natives the supplies promised to them, he soon decided that it was more important to get white captives back. He withheld food and other goods until the captives were brought in, although some of the captives had lived among the tribes for many years, and could not even remember their original families.

To his despair, however, Samuel discovered that the captives did not seem happy to be back. In one case, he tried to reassure a 15-year-old girl, taken when she was five, that she wouldn't go hungry anymore. But as Jiles writes (based on written reports of attempts to “rehabilitate” captives at the time):

“. . . she was not afraid of going hungry, or of starvation. She was afraid of the slow death of confinement. Of being trapped inside immovable houses and stiff clothing. Of the sky shuttered away from her sight, herself hidden from the operatic excitement of the constant wind and the high spirits that came when they struck out like cheerful vagabonds across the wide earth with all of life in front of them and unfolding and perpetually new. And now herself in a wooden cave. She could not go out at dawn alone and sing, she would not be seen and known by the rising sun.”

Samuel could not understand any of it. He only knew the world of hours and regimens, constricted clothing, regulated behavior, and houses with roofs overhead. He understood accumulation of possessions rather than spartan lives punctuated by the delight of finding gifts in nature. All of this, Samuel thought, he must bring to an end: “That was his job. That was why he was here.”

Conflict and tragedy are the inevitable result of the clash of civilizations and the fight for distribution of resources. Jiles presents both the good and bad on both sides, and although both employ plenty of violence, it never seems like a fair fight.

Britt’s story is heroic and full of interesting details about how people survived in that threatening desert landscape. As a black man, Britt faced additional hurdles, and Jiles also juxtaposes the attitudes of Native Americans and whites toward blacks.

Samuel's ignorance and arrogance was not, and still is not, atypical, but Jiles was careful to highlight his good intentions. She also portrayed the army sympathetically, although their record of massacres of Native Americans was far from salutary.

Evaluation: As is true of her other books, the extensive research Jiles has done on this period of history is evident throughout the narrative, which manages to be poetic rather than a dry recitation. It is no mean feat to describe violence and destruction in terms of eloquence and beauty. Courage and character are also recurring themes in Jiles’ books. Those interested in what this lawless time and place were like will be rewarded by working through her oeuvre. ( )