Song of the Pedernales: A Novel of Reconstruction in Texas by John L. Mortimer (review)

170 Western American Literature views conducted by journalists and previously published in newspapers, include statements about the battle from chiefs such as Sitting Bull and Gall, from spectators like Kate Bighead, and also from a number of Custer’s own Indian scouts. The story which these various accounts relate, not unlike the trial testimony in Jones’s novel, is indeed a tragic one: the Indians, in pursuit of buffalo and pursued by the army on their own land, are forced to fight at the Little Big Horn to defend their families. That the Indians won this battle with the army is tragically ironic in light of future events. Within a decade or so, many of their chiefs were hunted down and murdered, and most of the other Indians who survived such army pacifica­ tion procedures as those at the Little Big Horn and a little later at Wounded Knee Creek found themselves on reservations, stripped of their lands and freedoms. Using the Indians’ own pictographs and their own words, Tillett has given back to the Sioux what is rightfully theirs: their beautiful and tragic history, their ancient ways of life on the Plains, their glorious victory at the Little Big Horn, and their eventual sad defeat. In effect, he has fulfilled with this book the old Sioux adage, from which he took his title, that “a people without history is like the wind on the buffalo grass.” JAMES V. HOLLERAN, University of Missouri Song of the Pedernales: A Novel of Reconstruction in Texas. By John L. Mortimer. (Austin: Madrona Press, Inc., 1976. 393 pages, $8.95.) Song of the Pedernales, as the title indicates, is set in the Texas Hill Country, immediately after the Civil War. It is a historical novel which details, fairly accurately, some of the many problems of Reconstruction Texas. A picture is given of Houston, Austin, and of course, L. B. J.’s Pedernales River valley, west of Austin. While the political history is good, the novel has many faults, including a hackneyed plot. Brevet Lieutenant Colonel John Levit MacAshen, wounded in battle in Tennessee, rides (still wounded) back to Texas to recuperate. He makes it to Houston before he passes out and is nursed back to health by beautiful, red-haired Karryl Newcomb, fugitive from Mississippi, where she has blown up the family mansion while some Yankee soldiers were in residence. MacAshen, recovered, travels to Austin, where he helps the Texas government during the last days of the war. Karryl is seeking to escape from Devers, the part-Comanche villain, double-agent spy cum carpet­ bagger, who knows her past history and whose intentions toward her are evil. She goes to Austin, becomes a school teacher, and is eventually taken out to the Pedernales by MacAshen, whose intentions are honest. Reviews 171 She is kidnapped by a band of Comanches, friends of Devers, and held for an indeterminate time. In a wild battle scene in which Devers and the other villains are killed, MacAshen rescues the still-chaste Karryl, and they get married and begin replenishing the earth. There are several subplots, all fully as cliche-ridden and equally unreal. Song of the Pedernales is just another variant of a James Fenimore Cooper Leather-stocking tale. There is even a Natty Bumppo, an old trapper and guide named Fall, friend of the beautiful couple. The villain is part Indian, the hero and heroine are the best Southern American types, and the chase and rescue scenes are right out of Cooper. And Cooper in The Prairie describes better a setting which he has not seen than Mortimer does a setting which he has seen. In the 1920’s and and 1930’s I traveled every road in the Pedernales and Blanco River valleys many times, in a slow Model-T Ford. Mortimer’s place names are accurate, but the topography he describes resembles only slightly the Hill Country I know. And there are some more important points to consider. The characters speak casually of meeting on “the Uvalde” or “the Brady.” I cannot find mention of any Texas streams with these names. Mortimer writes of “the Pedernales’ particular variety of cacti, the tall w’hite blooms...