A Generous Voice

The distinguished reign of a poet laureate

By Stephen E. Smith

I have seen the ones I love leave this world as shadows without wings.

The purple martins that come up every year from Somewhere

Leave as easily as they jetted into their gourds in March.

And I have held my father’s hand as he was dying

And my mother’s, lying in her lap like dried peas . . .

From Paul’s Hill

Shelby Stephenson

North Carolina Poet Laureate

With the death of Poet Laureate Sam Ragan in 1996, the office of state laureate ceased being a lifetime appointment, and sitting governors began selecting poets laureate (with recommendations from the state’s writing communities) who would promote an appreciation for an often misapprehended genre. Recent laureates have been chosen for the excellence of their work, their influence on other writers, and “an appreciation for literature in its diversity throughout the state.” The revised guidelines grant tenures ranging from a standard two-year term to five years, depending upon the governor’s readiness to select a new laureate and the willingness of the poet to serve. With the exception of a disquieting hiccup during the McCrory administration, governors have chosen poets laureate who exhibit exceptional talent and generosity — and the process has been, thank God, more or less devoid of politics.

But the job of poet laureate, the physical act of getting behind the wheel of a car and driving to every corner of the state to give readings and workshops, has turned out to be anything but cushy. In fact, it’s full-time work, offering little in the way of compensation and requiring immense dedication. Beginning with Greensboro’s Fred Chappell, who was the first of the new poets laureate and whose Midquest is the finest book (poem) written by a poet of his generation, and continuing with Kathryn Stripling Byer, Cathy Smith Bowers, Joseph Bathanti and Shelby Stephenson, our poets laureate have been barnstorming nonstop for more than 20 years.

From December 2014 to January 2018, Stephenson has given 315 readings, lectures and workshops, traveling from Hatteras to the Tennessee border, twice, and driving more than 25,000 miles within the state. Stephenson, who officially leaves office when a new laureate is appointed later this month, has gently touched the lives of thousands of North Carolinians, and he leaves us with an ambitious 52-part poem, Paul’s Hill: Homage to Whitman (Sir Walter Press), which is the logical and artistic culmination of his past work framed within the hard edges of the perplexing new world in which we find ourselves.

Raised in a large family that farmed in Johnston County, Stephenson is deeply rooted in a rural environment and possessed of a strong sense of longing for a particular time and place that’s never failed to offer the purest vision. His primary subjects, the foundation upon which he’s shaped most of his poems, are family, the natural world, the cycle of life, even the plank house where he was born, and despite a reliance on memory and the intensely personal nature of his poetry, there’s a restrained use of nostalgia in his work. When reading his leapfrogging lyrical lines, the reader is left with an overwhelming appreciation for the life the poet has lived and his eagerness to share his most personal moments.

The light plays shadows where once cordwood readied the woodbox.

My mother’s lost in the steam of her kettle.

I rub my face, as if parting curtains,

Wonder if I see myself in the rose-blue feathers smeared on the picture-window.

Bliss fades into pattern I’ll ride later, dross and all.

White moon, hold me in your arms.

Bathe my thoughts so wild onions may climb the cold

Sister Night to say to morning, “Hello, again.”

A mix of spoken language and the rhymes and rhythms, the literary tongue is interspersed with hymns, dogs, goldfinches, tulip poplars, cornstalks, collards and  country music resonating in song titles and country lyrics, even in the irony of a long-forgotten radio advertisement sung by Arthur Smith and the Crackerjacks:

If your snuff’s too strong it’s wrong

Get Tuberose get Tuberose

To make your life one happy song

Get Tuberose get Tuberose.

Stephenson’s early poems took their inspiration from the land, but in the last 25 years he’s dealt critically with the guilt posed by slavery, the destruction of the natural environment, the dangers of romanticism, the relationship of the past to the present, and the twitches and ticks of contemporary life all infused into Paul’s Hill, anchored steadfastly in the present by the inclusion of the mundane elements of daily life and a use of language that dissolves the distinction between precincts of poetry and prose. His is the voice of a man viewing the present with skepticism, occasional distaste and a trace of anxiety.

The flag of the Oklahoma-bombing holds one tiny baby, fire-scarred

And that September, towering out of words, humble beyond relief,

Some hint of lushness — and you among the moon’s heaving night —

listening to whispers . . .

Judged by productivity, Shelby Stephenson has, for 50 years, created poetry of high quality. Beginning with Middle Creek Poems and moving forward through his 10 books to Paul’s Hill, he’s demonstrated continued growth and has perfected a distinctly individual voice cultivated with a single-minded devotion to his vision of a North Carolina in transition. As he’s matured as a writer, he’s stepped out of the tobacco rows, assuming the role of critic, teacher, reviewer, social commentator — and, most importantly, a distinguished and generous poet laureate.

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

Wrestling Prose

An iconic insider on the art of writing well

By Stephen E. Smith

In his latest book, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, John McPhee deconstructs the process he’s spent a lifetime perfecting: writing on obscure subjects and delighting a discerning readership with technical explanations, entertaining narratives, and meticulous description, all of it couched in impeccable prose.

He begins by analyzing the most complex component of the writing process: structure. Using as an example his New Yorker article on the Pine Barrens, McPhee admits to spending two weeks lying on a picnic table in his backyard staring up into the branches and leaves and “fighting fear and panic” because he couldn’t visualize a structure for the material he’d assembled. Years of extensive research — interviews, articles, books, personal observations, etc., all of it cataloged on coded note cards — had gone into the project, but he couldn’t overcome the dread of banging out that first sentence and arranging the material in a readable form. Eventually, he overcame his writer’s block and produced an article that morphed into the bestselling book, but the experience was painful — and instructive. In an attempt to convey the intricacies of the process, McPhee employs a series of drawings and diagrams that, unfortunately, do little to untangle the complexities of problems he’d confronted. But readers shouldn’t be deterred. As with many of McPhee’s books, there’s a preliminary learning curve to overcome before landing on the safe side of abstraction.

In “Editors and Publishers,” McPhee delves into the internal workings of The New Yorker and the publishing house of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. His insider anecdotes are informative and humorous and include character sketches of the editors and editorial staff, affectionately detailing their eccentricities. “Mr. Shawn [editor of The New Yorker] actually seemed philosophical about its [an obscenity] presence in the language, but not in his periodical. My young daughters, evidently, were in no sense burdened as he was.” He also contributes an anecdote concerning Shawn’s objection to writers turning in copy about locations that were cold, such as Alaska or Newfoundland: “If he had an aversion to cold places it was as nothing beside his squeamishness in the virtual or actual presence of uncommon food” — although Shawn approved a McPhee proposal to write about eating road kill in rural Georgia. 

In “Elicitation,” he dispenses useful advice on the art of interviewing, citing as an example his experience with comedian Jackie Gleason. His description of “The Great One,” bits and pieces of relevant detail — Gleason called everyone “pal” — creates a living and breathing facsimile of the comedian, and older readers will find themselves transported back to The Honeymooners and the loveable peccadilloes of the irascible Ralph Kramden. In a Time cover story on Sophia Loren, irony functions as description, succinctly capturing Loren’s appeal: “Her feet are too big. Her nose is too long. Her teeth are uneven. She has the neck, as one of her rivals has put it, of ‘a Neapolitan giraffe.’ Her waist seems to begin in the middle of her thighs, and she has big, half-bushel hips. She runs like a fullback. Her hands are huge. Her forehead is low. Her  mouth too large. And, mamma mia, she is absolutely gorgeous.”

Gleason and Loren notwithstanding, McPhee devotes an entire chapter to a discussion of “frame of reference,” pieces of common knowledge that a writer employs to enhance a subject’s comprehensibility. He cautions against using allusions that don’t possess durability, warning that writers should never assume that anyone has seen a movie that might be used as an allusion. “In the archives of ersatz reference,” he writes, “that one [movies] is among the fattest folders.” He notes that popular culture changes with such rapidity that it’s dangerous for a writer to conclude that any allusion carries the weight of meaning necessary to elucidate a subject. To prove his point, McPhee polled his Princeton students using references such as Paul Newman, Fort Knox, Cassius Clay, Rupert Murdoch and discovered that the majority of his undergrads registered a low degree of recognition — and when it came to identifying Peckham Rye, Churchill Downs, Jack Dempsey, George Plimpton, and Mort Sahl, his students were blissfully ignorant.

In his final chapter, McPhee again confronts writer’s block. In a note written to a frustrated student, he suggests a remedy: “Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something — anything — as a first draft. With that you’ve achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with eye and ear.”

If there’s a fault with McPhee’s writing, and it’s difficult to find even the smallest gaffe, it’s an occasional touch of the dictionary disease: demonym, multiguously, bibulation, horripilation, etc. — words that will force the reader to touch his index finger to the Kindle screen, or God forbid, crack open a dictionary.

McPhee is straightforward, practical, and illustrative, detailing the struggles serious writers endure on a daily basis and pointing out, finally, that creativity is the product of what the writer chooses to write about, how he approaches the subject and arranges the material, the skill he demonstrates in describing characters, the kinetic energy of the prose, and the extent to which the reader can visualize the characters and story. As always, he writes with grace and charm, and Draft No. 4 earns a niche on the bookshelf next to Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, the Harbrace College Handbook, Writing Down the Bones, Roget’s International Thesaurus, and the OED.   PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

A Carolina Classic

Revisiting Cold Mountain

By D.G. Martin

Charles Frazier’s classic novel, Cold Mountain, was published 20 years ago and more than three million copies have been sold. The book inspired a popular epic film and an opera staged in Chapel Hill in September. As North Carolina’s most admired work of literary fiction since, perhaps, Look Homeward Angel, it should be on the bookshelf of every home in our state.

The book’s great success has made its story and its characters familiar and memorable. When the name of Inman is mentioned, we think of a tired, war-worn, wounded Civil War soldier walking across the Piedmont and foothills determined to make his way back home to Cold Mountain and to Ada, the lovely Charleston-reared Ada, whom he hardly knows, but deeply loves. She is out of place, struggling, and starving on a mountain farm. Ruby, an uneducated mountain girl, full of energy and grit, rescues and restores Ada and the farm, where the two women await Inman’s poignant return and the accompanying tragedy.

As in Homer’s Odyssey, the returning soldier’s travel toward home provides the framework for a series of adventures and contacts with a variety of compelling characters. The book opens with the battle-wounded Inman recovering in a Confederate hospital in Raleigh. Outside the hospital a blind man is selling boiled peanuts. When Inman asks what he would give for just a few minutes of sight, the peanut man replies, “Not an Indian head penny.” He explains there are things he would never want to see. Inman understands, because he remembers vividly the horrors of war and the battles he experienced and wishes he had never seen them.

As Inman’s condition improves, he resolves to desert, leave the hospital, and begin his walk toward Cold Mountain. Not long after his trek begins, in the woods near a river, he sees a fallen preacher bent on killing a woman he has impregnated. Inman rescues the woman and brutally punishes the preacher.

Soon afterwards, he encounters and angers some armed and dangerous locals. They follow him to a river crossing. As he canoes across the swollen river they fire a barrage of bullets that destroy the canoe and almost kill him.

After Inman’s escape, he meets a deceitful redneck named Junior, a farmer and bawdyhouse keeper, who drugs Inman and sells him out to the Home Guard. After marching its prisoners in chains for several days, the Home Guard loses patience and executes its captives. Inman survives miraculously and goes on the road again, but only after returning to extract vicious revenge on Junior, whom he finds salting ham in his smokehouse.

Frazier describes the brutal details. “Junior raised up his face and looked at him but seemed not to recognize him. Inman stepped to Junior and struck him across the ear with the barrel of the LeMat’s and then clubbed at him with the butt until he lay flat on his back. There was no movement out of him but for the bright flow of blood which ran from his nose and cuts to his head and the corners of his eyes. It gathered and pooled on the black earth of the smokehouse floor.”

The fight with Junior is only the beginning. Along the way to Cold Mountain are encounters at every stop, many of them bloody. Inman’s travel home, like the Civil War battlefields, is marked by violence and death.

Frazier writes, “He could not even make a start at reckoning up how many deaths he had witnessed of late. It would number, no doubt, in the thousands. Accomplished in every custom you could imagine, and some you couldn’t come up with if you thought at it for days. He had grown so used to seeing death, walking among the dead, sleeping among them, numbering himself calmly as among the near-dead, that it seemed no longer dark and mysterious.”

But Inman has another, softer side. He loves nature and carries with him Bartram’s Travels, William Bartram’s description of his travels in the American South in the 1770s. In Inman’s view, “the book stood nigh to holiness and was of such richness that one might dip into it at random and read only one sentence and yet be sure of finding instruction and delight.”

Bartram’s description of a mountain scene that reminded Inman of Cold Mountain was his favorite selection. “Having gained its summit, we enjoyed a most enchanting view; a vast expanse of green meadows and strawberry fields . . . companies of young, innocent Cherokee virgins, some busy gathering the rich fragrant fruit, others having already filled their baskets, lay reclined under the shade of floriferous and fragrant native bowers of Magnolia, Azalea, Philadelphus, perfumed Calycanthus, sweet Yellow Jessamine and cerulean Glycine frutescens, disclosing their beauties to the fluttering breeze, and bathing their limbs in the cool fleeting streams; whilst other parties, more gay and libertine, were yet collecting strawberries, or wantonly chasing their companions, tantalising them, staining their lips and cheeks with the rich fruit.”

When Inman read this passage aloud to Ada at their reunion, “he could not wait to reach its period for all it seemed to be about was sex, and it caused his voice to crack and threatened to flush his face.”

Alternating with the chapters describing Inman’s travels are reports of Ada’s and Ruby’s growing friendship and success in managing the farm together.

The superstitious Ruby gives us a picture of farm life 150 years ago. Frazier writes, “The crops were growing well, largely, Ruby claimed, because they had been planted, at her insistence, in strict accordance with the signs. In Ruby’s mind, everything — setting fence posts, making sauerkraut, killing hogs — fell under the rule of the heavens . . . November, will kill a hog in the growing of the moon, for if we don’t the meat will lack grease and pork chops will cup up in the pan.”

Inman finally makes his way back to Cold Mountain. His homecoming and reunion with Ada are joyful, but short lived, as Inman dies in a firefight with the Home Guard.

Giving away the closing is not a spoiler. After 20 years in print, the book’s ending is no secret. But people still ask Frazier, why didn’t you let Inman live and make a happy ending?

Frazier explained to me that the real Pinkney Inman died in a gunfight with the Home Guard. Therefore, he said, “having that knowledge in my mind, I wrote the character to go with that ending without really fully accepting it. But at that point, where I had to decide, then I realized, it’s going to feel fake if I come up with a way for him to survive this.”

Frazier continued, “I got to the point toward the end of the book where I had to decide. And I drove all the way from Raleigh up to Haywood County. There’s a cemetery there, in a little town called Clyde, where Pinkney Inman is buried, but there’s not a marker. And I just walked around, looked at the view, and I just thought, you know, there’s only one way to end this, that I knew what happened from the first page of writing this book, to the real character, and it’s built in.”

Frazier’s decision resulted in the classic that has stood the test of time. Reading it cover to cover is still a moving experience.

But also, like Bartram’s Travels for Inman, we can pick up Cold Mountain and “read only one sentence and yet be sure of finding instruction and delight.”  PS

Charles Frazier tells much more about Cold Mountain and his experiences writing the book in his interview on UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch at: https://video.unctv.org/video/3004954333/

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at noon and Thursdays at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

Words to Ponder

David McCullough’s speeches deliver gentle sermons on the American character

By Stephen E. Smith

“If we are beset by problems,” David McCullough wrote in a 1994 commencement address, “we have always been beset by problems. There never was a golden time past of smooth sailing only.”

McCullough’s The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For has arrived in bookstores at an opportune moment. Whatever your political persuasion, there’s little doubt that we’re in need of inspiring words that suggest where we go from here — and David McCullough is superbly qualified to point us in the right direction. He’s the recipient of Pulitzer Prizes for Truman and John Adams, National Book Awards for The Path Between the Seas and Mornings on Horseback, and he’s the author of 12 bestselling popular histories. Moreover, McCullough doesn’t shrink from his responsibility as a forward-looking historian, reminding us in his introduction that we live in a time of uncertainty and contention and that we need to recall who we are and what we stand for and “. . .the importance of history as an aid to navigation in such troubled, uncertain times.”

To that end, The American Spirit is a collection of 15 chronologically arranged speeches delivered by McCullough over a 25-year period, most of them college commencement addresses or remarks offered at the anniversaries and the rededications of monuments and historic structures such as the White House, the Capitol, and Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia. Using these ceremonies as a platform, McCullough focuses on the contributions of the famous and near famous — John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Simon Willard, James Sumner, John Quincy Adams, Margaret Chase Smith and JFK — whose spirit and commitment to the nation helped shape our moral core.

McCullough is a believer in the Great Man theory, a biographical approach to history that offers access to a wealth of the inspiring words spoken by the founding fathers and their intellectual descendants. Quotes, memorable and repeatable as they are, are the stuff of thought-provoking commencement speeches — Stephen Hopkins, who suffered from palsy, scrawled his signature to the Declaration, saying, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not”; Margaret Chase Smith stood up to Joseph McCarthy by announcing that she didn’t want to see the Republican Party achieve political victory through “fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear”; physician and patriot Benjamin Rush reminded his fellow citizens that they were in need of “candor, gentleness, and a disposition to speak with civility and to listen with attention to everybody”; and John Adams offered a simple, timely truth: “. . . facts are stubborn things.”

Predictable themes emerge from the collection — the importance of education, the significance of history, the impact of language, and the value of selective reading — and McCullough brings up the oft repeated assertion that we’re raising a generation of ill-informed Americans who are historically illiterate and that it’s imperative that we redouble our efforts to teach our citizens to value their forebears.

But the strength of these essays is also their weakness. Commencement addresses and most dedication speeches are essentially mildly annoying sermons, timely reminders of the better citizens we ought to be. Americans, unfortunately, have a long tradition of ignoring good advice (jurist Clarence Darrow claimed that no American is absolutely sure he’s correct unless the vast majority is against him). On the other hand, McCullough’s faithful readers will find reinforcement and encouragement in his lofty words. He’s most persuasive, and insofar as preaching to the choir is productive, these speeches succeed admirably.

Not all the essays are straightforwardly instructive. In a 2007 address at Lafayette College, McCullough emphasizes the bonds that have long existed between Americans and the French, connections that are often overlooked in a world where the French chart an impartial course. (We may have changed “French fries” to “freedom fries” when the French claimed Iraq had no WMDs, but events proved them correct.) He reminds readers that the Marquis de Lafayette and the French military were instrumental in winning our struggle for independence and that 80,000 Americans died in France during World War I and 57,000 during World War II. “Time and again,” McCullough writes, “Paris changed their [young Americans’] lives and thus hugely influenced American art, American literature, music, dance, and yes, American science, technology and medicine.”

In a 1994 commencement address at the University of Pittsburgh, McCullough proposed that the university take responsibility for rehabilitating the inner-city, working to eliminate drug addiction, violent crime, racial tensions, illiteracy, homelessness, and the cycle of poverty — the selfsame problems that trouble the country still. “And why not let it begin here in Pittsburgh,” McCullough said, “this city of firsts, with the University of Pittsburgh leading the way?”

Taking a purely cynical view, it will no doubt occur to readers that The American Spirit will make a thoughtful birthday, holiday or graduation gift, and that McCullough and/or the publisher are in it for the money. After all, the book’s contents were written long before we found ourselves in our present dilemma. But it’s more likely that readers who carefully consider McCullough’s words will take the book in the generous spirit in which it’s offered. As McCullough writes: “Yes, we have much to be seriously concerned about, much that needs to be corrected, improved, or dispensed with. But the vitality and creative energy, the fundamental decency, the tolerance and insistence on truth, and the good-heartedness of the American people are there still plainly.”  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

The Omnivorous Reader

Revolutionary Scars

A revealing look at the cost of civil strife

By Stephen E. Smith

They’re called “uncle books,” popular histories you gift to your Uncle Leo so he can kick back in his easy chair and read about political and military luminaries such as Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton. These lengthy narrative histories, which are generally revisionist in intent and convey idealized portraits of their subjects, have done much to shape our beliefs about the founding of the Republic. What they haven’t done is examine the plight of ordinary Patriots, Loyalists, British and Continental soldiers, African-Americans, Native Americans and German auxiliaries, the brave, long-suffering souls who did most of the fighting and dying during the Revolutionary War.

In Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth, Holger Hoock attempts to set the record straight by revealing the brutality of our first civil war, and describing in graphic detail the torments endured by ordinary soldiers and innocent noncombatants on both sides of the Revolution. Hoock writes: “For two centuries this topic has been subject to whitewashing and selective remembering and forgetting. While contemporaries experienced the Revolution as frightening, messy, and divisive, its pervasive violence and terror have since yielded to romanticized notions of the nation’s birth.”

Hoock supports this thesis with statistics that suggest there was suffering aplenty. Per capita, 10 times as many Americans died in the Revolutionary War as in World War I and five times as many as died in World War II. Among prisoners of war, the death rate was the highest in American history. Between 16,000 to 19,000 Continentals died while confined by the British. And Hoock argues convincingly that Loyalist noncombatants routinely suffered imprisonment and torture at the hands of Patriots.

Hoock offers as an example the experience of Edward Huntington, who was convicted of being a traitor to the Patriot cause and was sentenced to spend “the rest of his life sixty to eighty feet underground in a dark, damp, claustrophobic tomb.” Huntington was transported to an infamous copper mine in Simsbury, Connecticut, and was lowered deep into a dismal cavern where he could not stand upright. He shared his incarceration with “violent criminals serving sentences from one year to life for horse thievery, aggravated burglary, highway robbery, sexual assault, and accessory to murder.” The subterranean chambers had no natural light, limited air circulation, constant dampness and employed a communal tub as a toilet, a breeding ground for “fevers, influenza, respiratory problems, dysentery and typhoid.”

Patriots employed arson, rape, confiscation and public shaming against their Loyalist neighbors, but tarring and feathering was the preferred punishment. The case of John Malcom, a Boston customs official, is cited as typical. After having hot tar and feathers applied to his naked body, Malcom spent two months in bedridden agony before fleeing to England, where he petitioned Parliament for monetary redress by sending pieces of his skin as proof of his loyalty. When such punishments failed to satisfy Patriot vengeance, many Loyalists were “killed by mobs or at the hands of marauding bands, hanged by order of councils of safety or assemblies of various states, or executed following court-martial.”

Hoock gives British atrocities, including Banastre Tarleton’s dishonorable conduct at Waxhaw, passing mention, but his primary focus is on lesser known campaigns, such as Washington’s genocidal response to Iroquois raids in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. Washington’s objective in punishing the Six Nations was “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible.” To that end, the Continental Army destroyed 45 towns and all of the Native Americans’ crops and food stores, plunging the tribes into starvation. Iroquois retaliated by torturing and mutilating Continental soldiers. Patriot  Lt. Thomas Hubley recorded the barbarity in his diary that “their heads Cut off, and the flesh of Lt. Boyds head was intirely taken of and his eyes punched out. . . his fingers and Toe nails was bruised of, and the Dog had eat part of the Shoulders away likewise a knife Sticking in Lt. Boyds body.”

The fate of African-American combatants is, as one might expect, particularly disturbing. In most cases, slaves were promised their freedom by the government for which they fought, but their treatment was at best exploitive and their well-being of little concern to those who tendered assurances. Many slaves who served the Revolutionary cause found that promises weren’t kept, and the British treated African-American soldiers as disposable laborers, abandoning thousands to die of disease, before transporting the survivors to Nova Scotia, or Jamaica and other West Indian islands.

The bitterness occasioned by the Revolution lingered long after Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, and acts of vengeance and retaliation took the form of physical violence and executions. Hoock recounts the 1782 hanging of Joshua Huddy, commander of a New Jersey Patriot militia, and the Patriots’ retaliation — known as the “The Asgill Affair” — in which Gen. Washington ordered that a British officer, Capt.Charles Asgill, be executed. Eventually, Asgill was released, but a generation of brutal warfare had habituated Americans to a thirst for revenge that no treaty could assuage.

Although Scars of Independence isn’t a pleasant read, it makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of the Revolution, and it’s another reminder that brutality is the norm in war, especially in civil wars. The question for readers is this: Are we obligated to acknowledge the abominations committed by our forefathers? As Maxim Gorky, a man who knew something of the horrors occasioned by civil strife, wrote: “I have no desire to make anyone miserable, but one must not be sentimental, nor hide the grim truth with the motley words of beautiful lies. Let us face life as it is. All that is good and human in our hearts needs renewing.”

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

The Wickedest Town in the West

An OK place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there

By Stephen E. Smith

In the mid-1980s, actor Robert Mitchum appeared on a late-night talk show to promote his latest film. The host asked if the movie was worth the price of admission and Mitchum replied: “If it’s a hot afternoon, the theater is air conditioned, and you’ve got nothing else to do, what the hell, buy a ticket.”

Readers should adopt a similar attitude toward Tom Clavin’s Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West. If you’re not doing anything on one of these hot summer afternoons, what the heck, give it a read.

Dodge City is a 20-year history of the Kansas military post turned cow town that has come down in popular culture as the Sodom of the make-believe Wild West. No doubt Dodge had its share of infamous gunfighters, brothels and saloons, including the Long Branch Saloon of Gunsmoke fame, and there were myriad minor dustups, but nix the Hollywood hyperbole, and Dodge City’s official history is straightforward: Following the Civil War, the Great Western Cattle Trail branched off from the Chisholm Trail and ran smack into Dodge, creating a transitory economic boom. The town grew rapidly in 1883 and 1884 and was a convergence for buffalo hunters and cowboys, and a distribution center for buffalo hides and cattle. But the buffalo were soon gone, and Dodge City had a competitor in the cattle business, the border town of Caldwell. Later cattle drives converged on the railheads at Abilene and Wichita, and by 1890, the cattle business had moved on, and Dodge City’s glory days were over.

Clavin focuses on the city’s rough-and-tumble years from 1870 through the 1880s, explicating pivotal events through the lives and times of the usual suspects — Bat Masterson, the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday et al. He fleshes out his narrative by including notorious personages not directly linked to Dodge City — Billy the Kid, John Wesley Hardin, Wild Bill Hickok, “Big Nose” Kate, Buffalo Bill Cody, Sitting Bull, the Younger brothers, and a slew of lesser characters such as “Dirty Sock” Jack, “Cold Chuck” Johnny and “Dynamite” Sam, all of whom cross paths much in the manner characters interact in Doctorow’s Ragtime. Also included are abbreviated histories of Tombstone — will we ever lose our fascination with the 30-second shootout at the O.K. Corral? — and Deadwood.

If all of this sounds annoyingly familiar, it is. There’s no telling how many Wild West biographies, histories, novels, feature films, TV series, documentaries, etc., have been cranked out in the last 140 years, transforming us all into cowboy junkies. Our brief Western epoch has so permeated world ethea that blue jean-clad dudes in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, might be heard to say, “I’m getting the hell out of Dodge,” in Uzbek, of course.

Clavin offers what amounts to a caveat in his Author’s Note: “. . . Dodge City is an attempt to spin a yarn as entertaining as tales that have been told before but one that is based on the most reliable research. I attempted to follow the example of the Western Writers of America, whose members over the years have found the unique formula of combining strong scholarship with entertaining writing.”

So what we have is a hybrid, a quasi-history not quite up to the standards of popular history, integrated into a series of underdeveloped episodic adventure tales that ultimately fail to entertain. If Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough are your historians of choice, you’ll find that Dodge City falls with a predictable thud. It’s simply more of the same Western hokum. The writing isn’t exceptional, the research is perfunctory, most of the pivotal events are common knowledge, and the characters are so familiar as to breed contempt.

If you have a liking for yarns by writers such as Louis L’Amour, Luke Short and Larry McMurtry, Dodge City isn’t going to make your list of favorite Westerns. Without embellishment, the narrative loses its oomph, and the episodic structure diminishes any possibility of a thematic continuity, which is, of course, that the lawlessness that marked Dodge City’s formative years is a metaphor for the country as a whole, that violence and corruption are a fundamental component of American life.

On a positive note, readers of every persuasion will likely find the book’s final chapter intriguing. Clavin follows his principal characters to the grave. Wyatt, the last surviving Earp brother, ended his days in Los Angeles at the age of 80. Doc Holliday died in Colorado of tuberculosis at 36, his boots off. “Big Nose” Kate, Doc’s paramour, lived until 1940 at the Arizona Pioneers’ Home, dying at the age of 89.

Of particular interest is Bartholomew William Barclay “Bat” Masterson, Wyatt Earp’s dapper buddy in the “lawing” business. Whereas Earp’s claim to fame ended with his exploits as a Western peace officer and cow town ruffian, Masterson went on to a life of greater achievement. He became an authority on prizefighting and was in attendance at almost every important match fought during his later years. He was friends with John L. Sullivan, Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey. In 1902, he moved to New York City and worked as a columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph. His columns covered boxing and other sporting events, and he produced op-ed pieces on crime, war, politics, and often wrote of his personal life. He became a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt and remained a celebrity until his death in 1921.

It promises to be a long, hot, unsettling summer. If you’ve got nothing better to do, turn off cable news, slap down $29.99 and give Dodge City a read. It’s little enough to pay for a few hours of blessed escapism.  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

Back to Bulgaria

A compelling and mysterious journey

By D.G. Martin

Asheville author Elizabeth Kostova will always be remembered for her 2005 novel,
The Historian, that became the fastest-selling hardback debut novel in U.S. history and the first ever to become No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list in its first week on sale. Her achievement was especially noteworthy because her book was literary fiction, a genre that does not often produce massive sales results.

The plot of The Historian followed a search by scholars for the origins of Vlad the Impaler, better known as Count Dracula. After research in libraries and archives in Amsterdam and Istanbul, the book’s main characters travel throughout Eastern Europe in search of Dracula’s tomb. When they find it in a Bulgarian monastery, it’s empty. Is Dracula still alive? Will they find him? Are there other vampires? On these questions, Kostova built her compelling and successful mystery.

Kostova’s second book, The Swan Thieves, was set in the world of art and made the Times bestseller list for 20 weeks in 2010.

In her third and most-recent book, The Shadow Land, she takes her readers back to Bulgaria, but this time there are no vampires. The villains are modern and very realistic.

Its main character is a young North Carolina mountain woman, Alexandra Boyd. On her first day in the country she meets a small Bulgarian family group — an older woman and two men, one in a wheelchair and the other a tall man of particular note.

Showing off her lyrical prowess, Kostova writes, “She saw that the tall man was dressed in a black vest and an immaculate white shirt, too warm and formal for the day. His trousers were also too shiny, his black shoes too highly polished. His thick dark hair, with its sheen of silver, was brushed firmly back from his forehead. A strong profile. Up close he looked younger than she’d first thought him. He was frowning, his face flushed, glance sharp. It was hard for her to tell whether he was nearer to thirty-eight or fifty-five. She realized through her fatigue that he might be one of the handsomest men she’d ever observed, broad-shouldered and dignified under his somehow out-of-date clothes, his nose long and elegant, the cheekbones flowing up toward narrow bright eyes when he turned slightly in her direction. Fine grooves radiated from the edges of his mouth, as if he had a different face that he reserved for smiling. She saw that he was too old for her after all. His hand hung at his side, only a few feet from one of hers. She felt an actual twinge of desire, and took a step away.”

He tells her his group is on its way to a beautiful monastery and suggests she consider visiting it, too. After they leave, notwithstanding Alexandra’s obvious fascination with him, it will be several hundred pages before she sees the man again, and we understand why he was described so completely. When his group departs in a taxi, Alexandra discovers she has a satchel that belongs to the Bulgarians.

A young taxi driver called Bobby befriends her as she seeks to find the satchel’s owners. In it is a wooden urn, containing ashes and inscribed with the name Stoyan Lazarov. She and Bobby report the incident to the local police, who seem suspiciously interested, but who don’t take possession of the urn. Instead, they give Alexandra an address where Lazarov lived.

Bobby suggests they rush to the monastery and return the urn to the Bulgarians, but when they get there the group is gone. Ready to continue their search, they find themselves locked in a room. Alexandra thinks, “nothing in her previous experience had prepared her for the feeling of being suddenly locked in a monastic room with a stranger five thousand miles from the Blue Ridge Mountains, holding an urn containing the ashes of another stranger. In addition to being tired and afraid, she was suddenly a thief, a vagrant and a prisoner.”

Though Alexandra and Bobby escape from the monastery, they cannot escape a growing awareness that they are being followed and their possession of the urn has put them in danger. The next day they go to the address the police provided. The house is empty, but photos and papers inside confirm the owners of the urn had, indeed, lived there. A neighbor sends them to another address in a different part of Bulgaria but, before going, they adopt a stray dog that would come to play a major role in one of the concluding scenes.

Kostova introduces other people, including an older, wealthy businessman-turned-politician named Kurilkov, known as “The Bear” who, running on a promise of “non-corruption,” is seeking to win the nation’s next election. There are growing and inexplicable dangers: vandalized cars, threats, murder and kidnapping. The urn’s secret and its dangerous value become the spine on which Kostova builds the book’s surprising and violent resolution.

On that same spine she attaches another story, that of the man whose ashes are in the urn. Stoyan Lazarov, a talented violinist, lover of Vivaldi, devoted husband and father, ran afoul of Bulgaria’s brutal Communist dictatorship following World War II. He was confined for many years in a torturous labor camp where work conditions and weather almost killed him, destroying his health and his prospects for a fulfilling musical career.

At the work camp, Lazarov met two men, one a friend and fellow inmate, and the other a guard who becomes a heated enemy. Both characters play a major part in the book’s dramatic conclusion. Kostova confesses that The Shadow Land is “very much a book about political repression — and suppression — and I’m glad to be bringing it out at this exact political moment.”

Her unforgiving description of the oppression Lazarov suffered is based on factual events. It is a disturbing reminder of the horrors of the Soviet methods of dealing with any failure to toe the Communist line.

Why has Kostova set another book in Bulgaria? Explaining her fascination, she writes about her first visit to “this mysterious country, hidden for so long behind the Iron Curtain,” and that she felt, “I had somehow come home.”

Kostova’s poetic portrayal of Bulgaria’s cities and villages, landscapes and people will make readers want to see for themselves the place she loves and describes so well. Another beloved North Carolina mountain author, Ron Rash, affirms the book’s importance. “In this brilliant work, what appears at first a minor mystery quickly becomes emblematic of a whole country’s hidden history. Lyrical and compelling, The Shadow Land proves a profound meditation on how evil is inflicted, endured, and through courage and compassion, defeated. Elizabeth Kostova’s third novel clearly establishes her as one of America’s finest writers.”  PS

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at noon and Thursdays at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

True Masterpiece

The joy of rediscovering True Grit

By Stephen E. Smith

In the late 196s, a friend who’s an avid reader of popular fiction plowed through the novel True Grit and saw the John Wayne/Kim Darby movie on the same day, immersing himself in Charles Portis’ yarn set in Indian Territory in the late 1800s and acquiring what must have been a disconcerting insight into
Hollywood’s inherent ability to mangle art (at the very least, the movie moguls could have spared us the sorry acting of Glen Campbell). About the same time, I read True Grit and concluded that the novel was chockfull of memorable characters and the quirkiest dialogue ever uttered by fictional beings who aren’t working overtime at being funny. 

My friend and I have been quoting lines from the novel for almost 50 years — not constantly, of course, but when our conversation happens onto a subject that might be illuminated or made humorous by a sentence or two attributable to Rooster Cogburn or Mattie Ross, we’ve never hesitated to employ Portis’ superbly crafted dialogue. I’m particularly fond of quoting from the exchange between the horse trader Stonehill (played in the original film by the inimitable Strother Martin) and Mattie as she attempts to wrangle a refund for the ponies her late father had purchased. Stonehill threatens to go to a lawyer and Mattie responds, “And I will take it up with mine . . . He will make money and I will make money and your lawyer will make money and you, Mr. Licensed Auctioneer, will foot the bill.” Who hasn’t wanted to utter that sentence when dealing with a litigious tormentor?

My friend is fond of quoting passages from Rooster’s hilarious, self-serving explication of his checkered past, as when he alludes to the wife and the son he abandoned: “She said, ‘Goodbye, Reuben, a love of decency does not abide in you.’ There is your divorced woman talking about decency . . . She took my boy with her too . . . You would not want to see a clumsier child than Horace. I bet he broke forty cups.”

But enough. You can quote almost any passage from the novel, including sections of Mattie’s deadpan first-person narration, and you’ll likely set the table on a roar.

I’m not in the habit of rereading novels, but that’s exactly what I did after seeing the Coen brothers’ adaptation of True Grit. I decided to give Portis’ novel a thorough reassessment almost a half century after my first encounter with Mattie Ross. After all, America was a very different place in 1968: the women’s movement, the war in Vietnam, the counterculture. Would the novel hold up to changes in mores and tastes? Is it as well-written as I remembered?

I completed the reread, taking my time and occasionally re-evaluating scenes I judged particularly memorable, and here’s what I concluded: True Grit is great American fiction — not a great American Western — but great American fiction period, worthy of study as a literary masterwork and occupying a station commensurate with
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Unfortunately, True Grit has never attracted the academic attention that Twain’s masterpiece and Harper Lee’s sentimental story of the South have garnered. It is a genre Western, and what self-respecting academic would publish a monograph titled “Repression, Revision, and Psychoanalysis in the Soliloquies of Rooster Cogburn”? But from the novel’s opening sentence — “People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day” — Mattie Ross establishes herself as the archetypal American hero, an individual so self-possessed that she’s capable of rejecting collective wisdom. In that one sentence, Portis establishes a form and voice that embodies an entire sensibility, a collection of manners, mores, thoughts and feelings, faithful to the spectrum of American experience and emblematic of a rich inner and outer life. As Clarence Darrow wrote: “. . . he (an American) is never sure that he is right unless the great majority is against him.” That’s Mattie Ross, and the reader is instantly smitten.

And it’s Mattie’s steady voice and an unwavering determination — as profoundly established as that of Scout Finch and Huck Finn — that propel the reader through the multiplicity of experience that confronts her. Rooster Cogburn is Mattie’s antithesis — alcoholic, vulgar, pragmatic, possessed of almost every human weakness but redeemed by fortitude and a strained, awkward sense of loyalty and a disarming honesty. “I found myself one pretty spring day in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in need of a road stake and I robbed one of them little high-interest banks there. Thought I was doing a good service. You can’t rob a thief, can you? I never robbed no citizens. I never taken a man’s watch.”

When it comes to the major themes around which literature teachers construct their lessons, True Grit touches subtlety on each and every one — the frontier, the American dream, East vs. West/North vs. South, the journey from innocence into knowledge, sense of community, sophistication vs. a lack thereof, etc. — and it does so without a trace of burdensome preachiness. But mostly, the novel is a story that suspends time, freezes the reader in a moment in our history that evolves finally into the present, giving us a sure knowledge of who we are and how we came to be here. What more can we ask of an American novel?

The John Wayne and Coen brothers’ cinematic interpretations of True Grit are entertaining and reasonably faithful to the original work, but it’s Portis’ novel that’s the real deal, a solid piece of Americana that deserves to be read and studied for generations.

It occurs to me, finally, that I should have said all of this 50 years ago — True Grit was as deserving of praise then as now — but as Mattie Ross articulates succinctly in the novel’s conclusion: “Time just gets away from us.”  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

Life on the Edge of a Small Southern Town

Crook’s Corner Bar & Café honors a terrific debut novel

By D.G. Martin

More than a thousand books connected to North Carolina are published each year. There is no way to read them all or even find and give recognition to the best and most important of them.

But we can try. One of the best things we can do is to establish awards and prizes to give shout-outs to the best books in particular areas of fiction, poetry, history, biography and so on.

One of the newest, and one of the best, of these recognition programs is the Crook’s Corner Book Prize. Each year it honors the best debut novel set in the American South. The prize, inspired by the prestigious book awards long given by certain cafés in Paris, is a collaboration between Chapel Hill’s iconic restaurant Crook’s Corner Bar & Café and a sponsoring foundation.

Each year’s winner gets $5,000 from the foundation and a free glass of wine at Crook’s Corner every night for a year.

This year’s winner, Matthew Griffin, grew up in Greensboro and graduated from Wake Forest. He teaches writing, most recently at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Griffin’s novel, Hide, is the story of two older men who have lived together for many years at the edge of a small North Carolina town. Frank is a World War II veteran, tough-talking and covered with tattoos. Wendell is a taxidermist who serves the hunting community. These two hardly fit the caricature images of being gay. But they are gay, and they have paid a heavy price for it. For years there was isolation from family, and unrelenting and constant fear that, somehow, someone would blow the whistle to law enforcement about their illegal relationship and activities.

The greatest power of the novel is not, however, in any testimonial argument or inside look at the gay lifestyle. Quite the contrary, the story’s power comes from the tortured and tender way in which Wendell and Frank adapt to Frank’s rapidly deteriorating physical and mental condition.

When Frank suffers a stroke while tending the tomato plants in his beloved garden, the ambulance rushes him to the hospital, and Wendell follows. But because only family members are allowed to accompany Frank, Wendell tells the attendant that he is Frank’s brother. When he is asked to show identification, he fumbles and then tells the attendant he left his wallet at home. He is worried that if she saw his last name was different from Wendell’s, his lie about being a brother would cause more trouble.

As Frank’s condition declines, there is a growing emptiness in the lives of both men. No children or nieces and nephews or other family members show up to care for them or to claim little items that the men have treasured.

Frank’s loneliness is tempered by a little dog named Daisy that Wendell found at the pound and gave to Frank.

Frank is shattered when the dog is torn to pieces in an accident in his garden. Wendell, crushed by Frank’s loss, begins a project to use his taxidermy skills to re-create Daisy from the parts remaining from the accident.

One of the novel’s most poignant moments comes when Frank discovers the incomplete project and, though failing steadily, he falls in love again with the half-stuffed dog.

As the novel closes, this reader was moved not so much by the problems Frank and Wendell had as gay people, but the challenge of finding meaning at the end of life.

Wendell, who always fixed the meals, has trouble adjusting to cooking for just himself when the bedridden Frank eats only nutrient shakes.  He has too much time to fill and finds “the biggest danger of all is an empty space in the day. It’s easy, then, for the whole thing to break through and rush in and join the emptiness inside.”

“You just go on living,” Wendell says. “You don’t have to have a reason.”

The novel’s poignant story should not lead readers to overlook Griffin’s lovely writing. His description of a Southern funeral gathering, the process of breaking down an animal’s body and rebuilding it as a trophy, the joy and disappointments of gardening, sex, love and much more turns Frank and Wendell’s lives into poetry.

The major problem with Griffin’s first novel is that it will be difficult for him to write a better one.  PS

D.G. Martin’s UNC-TV North Carolina Bookwatch interview with Matthew Griffin will air Sunday at noon on April 30 and Thursday at 5 p.m. on May 4. Bookwatch also airs on the North Carolina channel Fridays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 10 a.m. Martin’s wife, Harriet Martin, serves on the board of the Crook’s Corner Book Prize Foundation.

Trail of Tears

The sorrowful history of Western expansion

By Stephen E. Smith

During the early-to mid-19th century, an unknown Native American warrior documented his life in pictographs on a buffalo hide. His early years were happy. He owned horses, took two wives, fathered children. Then white-faced figures appear pointing sticks that spit fire. Later, he painted his family dying of smallpox. His last pictograph illustrates the arrival of Jesuits in their black cassocks. There the narrative ends, suggesting, perhaps, that Jesuits are deadlier than smallpox.

Whatever the cause of the warrior’s demise, there’s no denying that the 19th-century collision between Native Americans and westward migrating peoples of European descent was one of the most shameful and tragic chapters in the history of the continent. Peter Cozzens’ meticulously written and thoroughly documented The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West is the latest offering in a spate of recent books that graphically detail how shameful and tragic the winning of the West truly was. (An American Genocide by Benjamin Madley and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, both published in the last year, are also well worth reading.)

Most of these recent Indian histories owe their perspective, at least in part, to Dee Brown’s 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a best-seller that transformed the attitude with which Americans regard indigenous people. Published three years after the founding of the American Indian Movement, Brown portrays the government’s dealings with Native Americans as an ongoing effort to eradicate their culture and religion. Cozzens adopts a slightly more balanced and analytical view of the Indian wars, taking into account the misjudgments and barbarism prevalent on both sides of the conflict.

From the opening chapter, it’s obvious the story Cozzens has chosen to tell is ghastly beyond the power of words. Government policy dictated that indigenous people be concentrated on reservations of ever decreasing size until their will to fight was broken and their cultural cohesion destroyed. The wholesale slaughter of the buffalo was intended to deny food and livelihood to the tribes, and with the arrival of the railroads, the hunting grounds native people had occupied for millennia were opened to white settlement. What resulted was a fight to the death in which the tribes had no chance of prevailing. For white politicians, soldiers and settlers, the primary motivations were greed and racism. Native Americans stood in the way of wealth and progress, and they were perceived as a subhuman species to be dealt with as quickly and as expediently as possible. Even generally peaceable tribes such as the Modoc and Nez Perce were treated ruthlessly.

“The whites were coming now, in numbers incomprehensible to Indians,” Cozzens writes. “They assaulted the Indian lands from every direction. Settlers rolled in from the east, while miners poked at the periphery of the Indian country from the west, north and south and simply overran it when new mineral strikes were made. In Westerners’ parlance, Indians who resisted the onslaught were to be ‘rounded up’ and rendered harmless on reservation land too miserable to interest the whites.” But Cozzens also notes that whites were not solely to blame for the dissolute loss of life and property. “. . . tribes had long battled one another over hunting grounds or horses. Indeed, fighting was a cultural imperative, and men owed their place in society to their prowess as warriors.”

The subjugation of Western indigenous people took place during the 30 years from 1861 to 1891, as the U.S. Army, acting under orders from Eastern politicians, pursued the policy of “mollification and eradication.” Beginning with the Dakota uprising in Minnesota and ending with the tragedy at Wounded Knee and the 1891 surrender of the Oglala Lakotas at Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota, the story is one of unremitting atrocity, suffering and death.

Former Civil War generals found themselves incapable of adapting to erratic and uncoordinated tribal uprisings. No less a national figure than William Tecumseh Sherman was inept at managing Indian affairs, and Winfield Scott Hancock, the hero of Gettysburg, found himself unable to negotiate with the Cheyenne and burned their villages in central Kansas. Phil Sheridan, who had swept the Shenandoah Valley clear of Confederate troops, found himself incapable of placating the tribes and conducted the Red River War, the Ute War, and the Great Sioux War of 1876-77, which resulted in the death of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and a sizable portion of his command. (For all his faithful service during the Civil War, Sheridan is best remembered for having said: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”) President Ulysses S. Grant, whom biographers portray as a friend to Indian people, convened a secret White House meeting to plan strategy for provoking a war with the Lakotas. In the late 19th century, the government, in an effort to eliminate further uprisings, outlawed Native American religious ceremonies, and altruistic white civilians established boarding schools where Indian children were required to speak English, study math and religion, and where they were punished for use of their native language and the exercise of their tribal beliefs.

Insofar as it’s possible to condense a 30-year period of national misadventure into 460 pages of carefully crafted text, Cozzens has produced an exemplary history that’s commendably objective, a reference book for the Indian wars. Beyond the intrinsic value of acquiring historical knowledge for its own sake, thoughtful readers may well gain a perspective on contemporary Native American issues — public health, education, gambling, discrimination and racism, the use of sports mascots, and the desecration of tribal lands. More than 100 years after the surrender of the last Indian tribe, suicide, alcoholism and crime remain serious problems on reservations.

Positive edifications notwithstanding, The Land Is Weeping, for all its detachment, allows for only one conclusion: The 19th-century sweep of “civilization” across the territories west of the Mississippi created for the Native American tribes who inhabited the region the cultural wasteland we now call peace.  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.