Noble Savage
Cheyenne Autumn. By Mari Sandoz. (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 50s.) Tim American Indian was one man to himself; to the European Americans, he was two men. Either he was the Hobbesian savage, living a poor, nasty, brutish, solitary and short existence in the backwoods and prairies, or else he was Rousseau's Noble Savage, living in courage and honour far from the taints of civilisation. The European's version of the American savages de- pended largely upon his distance from them. The farther the settler was from the Western frontier and the memory of the Indian fighting, the more he spoke of the virtuous redskin. The nearer he was to the Indian as neighbour, the more he feared him as devil. There were few white men, indeed, who treated the Indians in the nineteenth century neither as childish Lancelots nor as per- verse Lucifers, but merely as other men.
Of course, the stealing of North America from the Indians and their massacre by the European immigrants is a bloody and horrible story. Tocqueville, perhaps, judged the matter best, when he wrote that the Indians were doomed only to be the tenants of the continent, waiting for dispossession. But they thought they were the owners by heritage rather than legal deed. And they were penned into smaller and smaller reservations, then forcibly moved thousands of miles to the more arid and bleak parts of the West, until starvation and disease and despair provoked an attempt to break away, which provided an excuse for their mass ex- termination by the US army.
Mari Sandoz's Cheyenne Autumn is the re- creation of one of the more famous of these break-outs. The Northern Cheyennes, after co- operating with the US army and then fighting it, were removed from their home on the Yellow- stone River to Oklahoma, 1,500 miles to the south. There they were starved and beggared and reduced by illness. All pledges and treaties with them were broken; Indian agents looted and provoked them. At last, in 1878, their chief, Little Wolf, led a break-out with some hundred warriors and two hundred women and children, the remnants of the tribe. He took his small band with few firearms and no supplies through 10,000 troops and the blizzards of winter to the Yellowstone. Often fighting daily running battles, harried and hunted, about a third of the Cheyennes reached the Yellowstone River and were allowed to remain there in a small reservation. Press publicity, which had always exaggerated the atrocities committed by the Indians in the lurid colours of Grand Guignol, now helped their cause, impressed by the in- credible courage and daring of so few against so many.
Mari Sandoz has tried to present this odyssey of return not as a history, but as a re-creation of the journey from the Indian point of view. As she says, there is 'much that is slifficult to say in white-man words.' And so she adopts a style that owes something to Hemingway in its studied simplicity and more to Cheyenne meta- phors and philosophy as taught to her in her childhood. The Cheyennes believe in a form of naturalism and deism in which man and god and things, the past and the present and the future, all occur at the same time and place.
The result is a noble attempt to write from the mind of the Noble Savage. The book is moving and exciting; the reader pads along with the hero as Indian. But there is also an element of artificiality and bias in the presentation. Mari Sandoz does not have the curious alchemy of a Thomas Berger, whose Little Big Man is to my mind the most successful evocation of the Indian mind by a white writer. I find the Cheyenne's way of thinking a little too good to be true, his occasional atrocities explained away beyond understanding to the point of complaisance. The wronged have every reason to retaliate, but not every right. And the style of the book seems to have the limpid beauty of a mirage of river in the Arizona desert rather than of the Yellowstone itself. I always seem to detect Mari Sandoz as interpreter between me and the Cheyennes.
Yet this book depicts a heroic journey, and it has been written with attention and am- bition. It is time to correct the bias against the warrior Cheyennes by speaking up for them. The real savages of the book are not the Indians nor even the US army, but the white pioneers, the buffalo hunters, the cowboys, the townsmen, and even the settlers. Perhaps the American savage was less the redskin than the Western farmer— theoretically the special friend of God. Without doubt, the Indian brought out the devil in the American, which he then put back into the Indian. ANDREW SINCLAIR
Previous page
