Arrest Sitting Bull by Douglas C. Jones (review)

Reviews 275 Arrest Sitting Bull. By Douglas C. Jones. (New York: Scribner’s, 1977. 253 pages, $8.95.) With his latest historical novel, Arrest Sitting Bull, Douglas C. Jones returns to the scene of the fictional triumph he won two years ago with the publication of his highly acclaimed The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer. Taking up the action a decade or so after Custer, Arrest Sitting Bull rushes through the final phases of America’s shameless and inept treatment of the Indians. And, as before, Jones’ profound sympathy for the tragic plight of the Indians is aimed at arousing a similar feeling in his guilt-ridden readers. Though Jones reworks many of the most successful features of Custer (noble Indians defending their land and vanishing heritage from invading whites; political intrigue and bungling military interference leading to a climactic battle; characters fascinatingly drawn against a background of life on the Dakota Plains), Sitting Bull represents an inevitable decline in both scope and pace as we follow the sadly mismanaged events and ironic circumstances which bring about the defeat and death of the last great Sioux chief. The old glory days of reckless cavalry charges and ferocious Indian bravery culminating in the Battle at the Little Big Horn have long since passed for the Army and the Indians alike. In their place, white social workers minister to deprived Indians as one culture is absorbed by another while troopers do little more than fire ceremonial blanks at a funeral service. The Indians and Sitting Bull himself have grown physically old and spiritually sceptical. Hot-blooded braves now serve as reservation policemen, and the once feared Gall has become an obedient Episcopalian. Overseeing all these changes is the fair-minded, peace-loving Indian Agent, James McLaughlin, who orchestrates the pathetic action with a kindly hand. To this somber requiem for the death of a once proud and mighty Sioux Nation, Jones weaves in a fittingly bitter-sweet love story about a straight-backed, white, school mistress and a noble reservation Indian policeman which underscores the novel’s thematic dilemma. Both recognize that to survive the Indians must accept the new ways of the whites; yet both feel deeply the tragic loss of ancient Indian customs. Caught between the conflict of these opposing cultures, they become its victims. In short, placed next to Custer, Sitting Bull is a kind of fictional hangover which allows the characters, as well as the readers, only the comfort of their sad memories of the glorious past. Such a comparison with Custer, however, is unfair to Sitting Bull because the two novels deal with quite different slices of life; and the author, more than anyone, is well aware that the aftermath of a great struggle is rarely pretty or heroic. Thus, Sitting Bull is a melancholy novel because the demise of a culture is necessarily so. Both Indians and whites are at best mediocre, the former pathetically and desperately hoping for a miracle, the latter frantically attempting to make the best of an entirely sordid 276 Western American Literature situation — both recognize the ultimate tragedy that the Indians no longer qualify as worthy opponents. The novel ends appropriately with the description of a small band of Indians trudging through the snow toward Wounded Knee. JAMES V. HOLLERAN, University of Missouri Railroadin, Etc. By J. J. Greenbrier. (Bend, Ore.: Burnt River House, 1977. 199pages, $7.95.) Railroadin, Etc. is told by the 15-year-old son of John MacGreggor, a jack-of-all who hits the rails to find work in south central Oklahoma in the 1930’s. In and out of boxcars, towns, and scrapes, the early episodes reach a necessary dramatic intensity when Pa MacGreggor cuts down a bee tree. He loads the narrator with the captured hive, loads his other son, Henry, with all their bundles, and loads himself with three lardbuckets full of honey. This sideshow parades through small Oklahoma towns; Pa raves about the beetree and the honey to the crowds while the narrator and his brother sweat and starve because Pa won’t sell any of the honey for food. The boys bear with their heroic Pa, however, since he has a...