Robert F. Jones
Tie My Bones to Her Back (1996)
Author: Robert F. Jones
Genre: Western/Literary
Plot Summary:
Jenny Dousmann convinces her brother Otto to bring her with him to the buffalo hunting grounds. She serves as cook for his partner McKay, Tom Two Shields (half Cheyenne/German) and Milo. Otto and Tom improve her shooting and survival skills, but when Otto leaves for Fort Dodge, McKay and Sykes rape Jenny. Jenny flees into a blizzard, where Otto warms her in the belly of a buffalo cow. Otto loses his right arm, toes, and fingers from his left hand, so Tom takes them to his people in the Bighorn mountains. The siblings were always frugal and respectful of buffalo, but their loyalty shifts to preserving the resources of the plains. Now called Wolf Chief and Yellow Haired Woman, they join an raid on a wasteful white hunter to avenge Jenny’s rape. Otto dies in the raid and Jenny offers his body to the shrine of the mythical Yellow Haired Woman, who first brought buffalo to the plains Indians.
Geographical Setting: The Buffalo range from Western Kansas to the Texas Panhandle; Bighorn Mountains/Wyoming.
Time Period: 1873-4
Appeal Characteristics:
Intended for readers who seek an historically accurate depiction of white buffalo hunters and westward expansion and the conflicts involved. Includes bibliography. Details of guns and shooting techniques. Detailed geographically and historically. The blurb says it’s “a searing indictment of ecological folly and historical revisionism.” The narrator is third person omniscient and alternates from Jenny’s, Otto’s, Tom’s, and McKay’s points of view. The reader is comfortably loyal to Otto, Jenny, Tom, and a few other characters; they act strongly and at times demonstrate 19th century values with swashbuckling enthusiasm, but they are complex and flawed characters. Very frank discussions of tribal values and points of view explain some gruesome acts typical of the 1870’s. It begins with long, lyrical descriptive passages, but action picks up later; there is never very much dialog and the writing style is literary. The inconclusive ending is highly symbolic, which is slightly out of sync with the rest of the book. This is not a typical western, but I place it on the “typical-western” end of "Novel of the West" because it addresses the historical correctness of typical Western novels about the buffalo range.
Red Flags: Violence, graphic description of wounds, etc. Rape. Indian-white marriage. The author clearly has a bone to pick with whitewashed history of western expansion and doesn’t stop even after he’s made his point – it gets in the way of the story.
|top|
|
