"I was an Indian, but no more. Now I'm something different altogether."
Joe Little, along with hundreds of other Native American children, was ta"I was an Indian, but no more. Now I'm something different altogether."
Joe Little, along with hundreds of other Native American children, was taken from his family and placed in a “school” with the intent of transforming him into a young man capable of navigating the white world. These “educators” did not strive to make these children equals but merely people who were politely subservient. They were made into hybrid blends of their birth culture and the white culture they were taught to emulate. These Native children did not give up their heritage easily, and brutal means were used to force them to conform. They emerged from these schools as people who could never be completely comfortable in either world.
A Native woman occasionally came by Publishers Book Outlet in the Thomas Mall where I worked in the late 1980s. One evening she told me a story about her mother attending a school in Northern Phoenix…on…yes of course… Indian School Road. She told me her mother would walk into the city from her home in the desert. On the way, there were white people's clothes hanging on a line where the Native American students would change from their native clothing into clothes suitable for attending school. Still to this day, I’m haunted by the image of those clothes flapping in the wind, surrounded by cacti and sand, waiting for the children to assume their costumes as they journey from one world into another.
With this book, McLellan is giving us a peek into that world, and he frames his story against the greater backdrop of the American West. As he has accomplished with all the books in this series, he tries to tell the true story of the American West. For every nasty piece of shit that existed in the West (and there were plenty), I’d like to believe there existed a person with integrity and compassion. McLellan’s cast of characters reflect the complete spectrum of those human beings, from the despicable ones who took advantage of every weakness, the broken ones who tried their best, and the kind ones who held out a helping hand when all hope was lost.
I came across McLellan chopping wood on his homestead in the mountains of Northern California.The air was redolent with the scent of pine trees, chainsaw oil, and sawdust. I cleared off the snow from a stump and drank some coffee from his thermos while I badgered him with questions as he continued to split wood.
Jeffrey D. Keeten: Your westerns have focused around the fate of Native Americans. Through your plots, you have revealed the real history of the numerous and systematic ways that genocide was perpetrated against Native Americans. I noticed with this latest book, Joe Little and the Indian School, that you have grouped them under the series title The Americans. You could almost call it The True Americans. Do you intend to keep adding books to this series or are you intending for it to be a trilogy? And can you tell us a little about what you are working on now?
Michael A. McLellan: There will certainly be five, and possibly a sixth book in The Americans series. All three will be centered around characters who were introduced in previous works. I do my best to avoid spoilers, but I think I'm safe saying that the next installment, titled, The Diary of Molly Good (set for release in late March or early April) will reveal much of what transpired during the ten missing years in Everett Ward's memoir, and characters from The Scout of Wounded Knee, and Joe Little and the Indian School will be returning. It might bear noting here that all three of the previously published titles can be read in any order.
JDK:You created this loathsome character Reverend Samuel Alton Reeves. I think it is appropriate that you used all three of his names, just like we do with all modern serial killers. He's one of those odious people who, if I had a Time Machine, I might just set a course for SW Kansas in the late 19th century to deliver Reeves some frontier justice. Was he based on a specific person or was he a composite of several different people? There seemed to be no shortage of models in real life.
MAM:I suppose I see Reverend Reeves as a type. It seems that sadistic people, pedophiles, etc... are oft times very good at positioning themselves in places where they have power over those they wish to prey upon. Sadly, the world is full of them.
JDK:I wanted to share a quote from your book that sums up the more "compassionate" view of how to deal with the red savages, a view that leads to Indian Schools. This is a scene where Reverend Reeves is recruiting an enforcer to his cause. "You kill Indians, Mister Phillips. To avenge your family. God understands vengeance. He can be vengeful Himself. But is killing a handful--or even a hundred--Indians going to slake your need for it? What if I told you that by helping me, we will in essence be eliminating the savages entirely. Every last one of them. Elimination by assimilation, Mister Phillips. If we accomplish that, there will be no more Indians, only another race of lesser men, much like the negros." We see this happening on a wide scale today in the way people are being demonized and diminished by people who may disagree with them politically. It makes it easier to initiate acts of violence against a group of people if you make your enemies into some form of subhumans. Once white men landed on the shores of North America the fate of Native Americans was sealed, but were there any sensible, more truly compassionate solutions that were not implemented?
MAM: Colonialism is always ugly. I think I'm going to fall back on Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake (Sitting Bull) for this one, because ultimately his words sum it up in one sentence. “If America had been twice the size it is, there still would not have been enough." Once it was too late, I think there were plenty of well-meaning whites—some very powerful—who made attempts to mitigate the damage, but the great greed machine was already in motion and there was no stopping it.
JDK: I was pleasantly surprised that you set this book in Kansas, more precisely SW Kansas where the law was slow to take hold. There were Indian Schools all over the US, was there is something particularly compelling about setting the bulk of your action in that region, otherwise known as the home of Jeffrey D. Keeten? :-)
MAM: Kansas was central to the Indian territories, so was a logical choice. And I think you of all people would agree, if any place personified the wild west, it was Kansas.
JDK: As a funny side note to this question, Kansans believe they live in the Midwest because Kansas is in the middle of the US, but as I often explain, Kansas is actually part of The West. The Midwest ends with Iowa. I frankly prefer to be part of the West, though I would sometimes appreciate the added rainfall of the Midwest for my gardening endeavors.
JDK: You had a guest star who shows up late in the book. The legendary Bass Reeves, who I've been so pleased to see is getting more recognition these days with books, movies, and a TV series on Paramount. I read that he had over three thousand arrests which boggles the mind. He certainly should be as famous as Wyatt Earp or Wild Bill Hickock. I had the distinct impression from the ending that we will be seeing more of Reeves in future McLellan books. Any truth to my idle speculation?
MAM: There were so many intriguing people in the nineteenth century who weren't white and are finally being recognized, written about, and portrayed in film. Jim Beckwourth, who makes a brief appearance in The Scout of Wounded Knee was a fascinating man, and Bass Reeves is indeed returning in the forthcoming book....more
”It had been set up almost like a scene in a play. A circular clearing had been made in the heart of the cornfield, the broken stalks carefully stacke”It had been set up almost like a scene in a play. A circular clearing had been made in the heart of the cornfield, the broken stalks carefully stacked to one side, leaving an area of dirt clods and stubble perhaps forty feet in diameter. Even in the terrible unreality of the moment, Haven found himself marveling at the geometrical precision with which the circle had been formed. At one end of the clearing stood a miniature forest of sharpened sticks, two to three feet high, pushed into the earth, their cruel-looking ends pointing upward. At the precise middle of the clearing stood a circle of dead crows spitted on stakes. Only they weren’t stakes but Indian arrows, each topped by a flaked point. There were at least a couple dozen of the birds, maybe more, their vacant eyes staring, yellow beaks pointing inward.
And in the center of the circle of crows lay the corpse of a woman. At least Sheriff Hazen thought it was a woman: her lips, nose and ears were missing.”
Sheriff Hazen of Medicine Creek, Kansas, catches this case by a matter of twelve feet. Twelve and a half feet another direction and this case would have belonged to the Staties. This is the type of case that will either put him on the front page of every newspaper in Kansas and possibly beyond, or it will be the type of case that makes him out to be the small town, chaw chewing, white trash moron that everyone expects him to be.
This is not only Kansas but Southwest Kansas, the navel lint in a great expanse of nothing. I should know: I live here. Well, not in Medicine Creek, which is a fictional small town, but it is a town that relies on Dodge City and Garden City for most everything they need. I could have practically driven out there and solved this case myself, but I’m really glad I decided to leave it to Special Agent Aloysius X.L. Pendergast because blood spray, eviscerations, and carved body parts make me queasy.
Medicine Creek is in competition with a town called Deeper for the KSU contract for a test field of a newfangled corn. Most of the corn grown around Medicine Creek is used for gasohol, which we usually refer to as ethanol. Our corn isn’t feeding the world as much as it is feeding our gas tanks. Personally, I think we should leave the growing of corn to the upper Midwest and grow more drought resistant crops, like wheat and hemp, but the boys in the laboratories have created a more drought resistant corn that has allowed it to grow with much less rainfall than when I was a kid. As one character put it in this novel, ”It wasn’t natural, to be surrounded by so much goddamn corn. It made people strange.” I don’t know about strange, but I can tell you there are few things that will play with your imagination more than being out in the middle of a corn field on a moonless night, especially one that has dry leaves and parched husks surrounding the ripened ears. A gentle breeze shuddering through the stalks will have your mind hearing the giggles of children of the corn, the rattle of a scarecrow scythe, and the rustling of terrifying creatures. And of course, your flashlight will first dim then wink out all together. To lend wings to your feet, you’ll start hearing...muuuuuhhhhh from something behind you, or is it in front of you?
Yeah, I’m glad Pendergast is in town to handle this one.
Like most small town people, the first thought that Sheriff Hazen has is that this can’t be a local killing people. It has to be someone from out of town. Pendergast is sure it has to be someone local. Pendergast irritates Hazen from the moment he steps off the bus in downtown, three whole blocks, Medicine Creek. He wears black, which unless you’re heading to a funeral, no one ever wears black in Southwest Kansas. I heard the same tired jokes every time I wore a black shirt to work...Johnny Cash just walked in folks. He is pale with disturbing eyes, but his ”voice redolent of mint julips, pralines, and cypress trees” betrays his New Orleans upbringing.
Pendergast further confounds the sheriff when he hires the resident troublemaker and black wearing goth, Corrie Swanson, to be his driver and confidant. Who knows what is actually going on in town better than teenagers?
With bodies continuing to show up, it soon becomes apparent that Medicine Creek is being terrorized by a serial killer...it's got to be some guy passing through, right? The MO of the killer is nonexistent. The profile is not of an organized or unorganized killer, but of something totally outside the realm of categorization. ”’The evil I’m talking about, most of the time it’s got an explanation. But some of the time’--he spat more tobacco juice, then leaned forward as if to impart a secret—‘some of the time, it just don’t.’”
So what the hell are they chasing?
This is one of the more gruesome entries in the series, but also the most compelling since the first one, Relic. I also find it interesting to read about the perceptions of writers who may have never set foot in Southwest Kansas writing about this area. Small towns are pretty much the same all over the United States with the same narrow-minded prejudices against anyone who doesn’t conform. Corrie Swanson is the perfect example of the type of kids who are driven out of small communities. The wall of loneliness and harassment that's imposed upon them by their peers is inescapable. Like Corrie, kids are trapped in a place where they are not only deemed different but undesirable. Pendergast knows better than anyone the perils of being seen as a nonconformist. As an adult, he has made an art form out of being different. Just his mere existence makes people uncomfortable. He is far from the buttoned-down FBI agent we are used to seeing in movies, and though he has made his share of enemies within the organisation, his closure rate on difficult cases keeps him from being booted from the Bureau. I really enjoy the relationship that is formed between Corrie and Pendergast. He represents a lifeline of the expanded opportunities that await her once she shakes off the dust of Medicine Creek.
This series is so fun, and there are so many more of them for me to read. Truly a plethora of riches.
"That is, it is not so bad a place in the eyes of people who do not sanction outlawry and lewdness. A few years ago at early candle-light neDODGE CITY
"That is, it is not so bad a place in the eyes of people who do not sanction outlawry and lewdness. A few years ago at early candle-light nearly every saloon was turned into a public gambling or dance house. The 'girls' came out from almost every nook and corner and solicited customers with as much effrontery as the waiter girls do for their counters at a church festival. It was trying on a man’s virtue in those days. The cow boys with revolvers strapped upon each hip, swung these wicked beauties all night and made the sleeping hideous with their profanity and vulgarity. This has been stopped. No cow boy is allowed to carry weapons, few dance halls are allowed to run and gambling is only carried on in private quarters. The saloons are yet running in defiance of law, but prosecutions are pending against all of them."
Wm. B. Shillingberg has done an admirable job of researching and piecing together the history of Dodge City between the years 1872-1886. The principle characters that you expect to be discussed are present. Charlie Bassett, Luke Short, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp and his brothers, Doc Holliday, but he also writes about Henry Sitler, Robert M. Wright, Charlie Rath, A. J Peacock, George M. Hoover, James H. Kelly, Charles S. Hungerford, Frederick Zimmerman, Nicholas B. Klaine, Michael W. Sutton, Harry E. Gryden, and Larry Deger. You probably don’t recognize any of names of the latter group; but that’s ok, they aren’t famous in the same way as the Hollywoodesque first group. Both groups did have one thing in common they came to Dodge City...to make money.
There are also people passing through town named Slippery Jack, Hurricane Bill, Apache Sam, Dirty Faced Ed, Blue Billy, Prairie Dog Dave, Texas Dick, George Hoodoo Brown, Skunk Curley, Cock-Eyed Frank, Cyclone Mike, and one of my favorites Sawed-Off Floria.
Our story really begins with the establishment of Fort Dodge. ”Despite claims that the place was named in honor of Col. Henry Dodge, one-time commander of the First Dragoons and later governor of Wisconsin, it was actually named for General Grenville Mellen Dodge, who later joked: The Colonel of the regiment was very much incensed at my sending them out there without proper preparations and he said the place was so unpleasant and uninviting that they named it Camp Dodge. The Government afterwards established it as Ft. Dodge.”
The soldiers were brought there to protect travelers heading west, and also to protect the buffalo hunters who were quickly depleting the plains of those majestic animals.
”William T. Hornaday, writing for the National Museum two decades after the event, attributed the primary cause of the buffalo’s demise to ‘the descent of civilization, with all its elements of destructiveness, upon the whole of the country inhabited by that animal.’ Hornaday listed five secondary causes: man’s reckless greed, the absence of governmental protection, the preference of both white and Indian hunters to slaughter cows instead of bulls, the stupidity of the animals themselves, and the development of breech-loading firearms.’ To all this Hornaday added. ‘Had any one of these conditions been eliminated the result would have been reached far less quickly. Had the buffalo, for example, possessed one-half the fighting qualities of the grizzly bear he would have fared very differently, but his inoffensiveness and lack of courage, almost leads one to doubt the wisdom of the economy of nature so far as it relates to him.’”
It was simply a blood bath, but the buffalo were in the way of “progress”. The land needed to be cleared and parceled out for cultivation. Not to mention the recent trend among Easterners for wearing buffalo coats. The main means of food for Native Americans also had be cleared so that their dependency on the encroaching Americans was complete.
There were periods of uneasy peace with the local Native Americans, but even when they had treaties with the Americans they still considered Texans to not be covered by any treaty. They killed them whenever opportunity presented itself. Those Texans are always telling us how they are Texans first--Americans second and in this case it was hazardous to their health.
Now given the desolation of the area and hardships presented by extreme weather combined with the constant specter of death that at any moment could punch your ticket from smallpox, bullet, or misadventure what would soldiers and buffalo hunters want to do for entertainment?
Finding temporary oblivion with a bottle of hooch would be the cheapest and easiest form of amusement.
Queue the town of Dodge City. It was established five miles from the Fort to give the military commanders some control over when and how often their soldiers visited this burgeoning den of inequity.
The railroad came through establishing a railhead at Dodge City. With the country still open, with plenty of grass and water to spare, the Texas cattlemen started bringing their cows to Dodge City. Easterners had a taste for beef, providing a ready market for all those rangy Texas longhorns.
[image]
The Longhorn is the only species of cattle tough enough to survive the long trip North.
Things move along rather quickly. Stores selling a sundry supply of necessities were established. Real saloons with wood structures replaced the sod buildings. Hotels and restaurants were built. Gambling brought professional gamblers to town to try and relieve those Texas cowboys and trail bosses of their recently acquired wealth. The merchants and the whores tried to get their share of that money before it was all gone to booze and card sharps.
The town was established along true capitalist lines with a “give them what they want” mentality, and in the process started to acquire a much deserved reputation for vice and murder. Ed Masterson, the town marshal and brother to Bat, is shot and killed. Shootouts are common. The various law enforcement men are instructed to keep the peace but are also instructed not to lay too heavy a hand on those Texans who were steadily making everyone, at least the ones that count, wealthy.
Even the whores added to the violence. There was a news item:
”Scarlet Sluggers”, describing a public brawl between two prostitutes: ‘A disjointed nose, two or three internal bruises, a chawed ear and a missing eye were the only scars we could see.’”
Slowly, like all places, those that wanted to bring a bit of civilization to Dodge City started to gain control. Boot Hill Cemetery is moved and a school built on the original location for those unfortunate souls who died in Dodge City without the means for proper burial. In the 1970s, unfortunately, in an urban renewal attempt most of old Dodge City was torn down. One of those moves that was regretted almost before the rubble was cleared. Most of what is here is a facsimile of the original Dodge City. We have gunfights for the tourists and high school girls are hired to sing and dance in period costume. There was a practicality in trying to move forward, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if all that architectural history was still here?
Recently on a trip through New Mexico we stopped for the night in Las Vegas, New Mexico. When the night clerk checking us in he discovered I was from Dodge City. He went into this pitch, as if I were someone who could change the world view of history, that Las Vegas was a much more vile and rougher town than DC. He even crowed that Doc Holliday and the Earps left Las Vegas because it was too tough a town for them. I tried to explain to him that the Earps and Doc left because they couldn’t make enough money. I was not able to convince him of anything contrary to his own closely held opinions. It was a humorous encounter, but I didn't mind. It is good to see someone passionate about history.
When I travel anywhere in the world it is always amazing to me how the reputation of Dodge City is not only well known, but venerated. A bartender in the airport of Munich, Germany excitedly asked me questions about Dodge City. He had watched every episode of Gunsmoke and even reminded me that Superman was from Kansas as well. In Italy I was asked for my opinion and for clarification about certain scenes in spaghetti westerns which strained my distant memories of those movies. Dennis Hopper is from Dodge City and seemed to spend most of his life trying to live up to the reputation of wildness that comes from being associated with this nefarious city.
Now we have packing plants, cattle are still king here, and on any given day if the wind is in the right direction the residents of Dodge City can “smell the money”. Gambling, after more than a century of being unlawful, has returned to the city. A Las Vegas based casino opened just a few years ago. The city, because of the agricultural roots and the industry here, have proven to be reasonably recession proof. In the recent real estate debacle that rocked the nation it was only a ripple here. As friends of mine lost jobs and houses in other states I bobbed along in a bubble above the roiling waters that most people were having to swim in. The dens of inequity are long gone and the city has actually acquired a very conservative reputation.
This book is very detailed. The colorful stories are buried under a preponderance of local election results and the moving of this person and that person. For me it was a great reading choice, because I needing to learn more about the very city I live in. I’m more prepared for the inevitable, sometimes remarkably astute questions I will be asked about the King of the Cow Towns.
The climate in Kansas is not for the meek. The wind blows a gazillion miles an hour most of the time. The sun bleaches the color out of everything turThe climate in Kansas is not for the meek. The wind blows a gazillion miles an hour most of the time. The sun bleaches the color out of everything turning the landscape a light shade of gray or dusty brown. The high temperatures in the summer evaporates water leaving ponds a muddy muck. High pressure systems and low pressure systems collide dropping golf ball size hail, pelting us with wind driven rain, and spawning monstrous, howling, black twisters. In the winter time that same wind burns our cheeks worse than sun burns. Ice storms drop power lines and freeze our roads into chicken shit slick icy disasters. (Worse spill of my life was on frozen chicken shit.)
The people here reflect their environment. They are used to disappointment. They are used to having the weather intrude on their finances and their health. They are stubborn, quiet, tough of as nails, capable, and practical to a fault. Vampires? Well to these people that is just another predator that needs to be eradicated. Munch down on their cows and you'll find yourself hunted down and blasted into Vampire paste.
When I saw this book I was excited because I was hoping that finally somebody had written a book about vampire cows.
Well unfortunately I was wrong about that. Cows are fed on by vampires, but do not resurrect themselves into vampires. Dang it. Despite that disappointment I was taken in by Alan Ryker's sparse writing style. There might be purple sage, but no purple prose. His words reflect the people and add to the landscape of the book.
Keith Harris, our anti-hero hero is a hard drinking, rednecked, asshole who finds himself in the unlikely role of trying to save his cattle and his neighbors (secondary thought) from an invasion of pale skinned, night scavenging predators. The loss of his wife has left him unmoored, anti-social, and nursing a hair trigger temper. When something starts gnawing on his cattle he takes matters into his own hands, capturing a vampire, and using him as protection for his herd. Lets just say things spin out of control from there and the reader is put on a galloping horse pursued by shrieking, blood thirsty vampires. You will swallow this book in one gulp simply because you will have no choice, at a sparse 130 pages you will find yourself sucking the marrow from the bones of this tale and your coffee will be cold by the time you remember to drink it.
Loading...
