The Medicine Calf by Bill Hotchkiss (review)

Reviews 327 The Medicine Calf. By Bill Hotchkiss. (New York: Norton, 1981. 408 pages, $13.95.) The Medicine Calf is an historical novel about one of the most colorful of the mountain men, James P. (Jim) Beckwourth. Born in 1798, Beckwourth was the son of a Virginia aristocrat and the slave girl he married and for whom he gave up his heritage and moved to St. Louis. The novel occupies nine years of Beckwourth’s life, from 1824 to 1833. We first meet him as a comparative greenhorn trapper, who must learn the strategies of survival — to endure cold, hunger, and the starving times, to know the ways of wildlife, to memorize the unmapped terrain of what are now several states but which were then wilderness charted only by rivers and mountain ranges, to learn the language and culture of several Indian tribes. Kidnapped and adopted by the Crows because of a tall tale that he was the lost son of Chief Big Bowl, Beckwourth accepts the role, becomes their greatest fighter, and eventually becomes their head chief. The novel is not introspective; it is written more like an epic, an heroic saga; we rarely get into Beckwourth’s mind but instead hear him speak, see him in action, and learn the chronicle of his deeds that earn him progres­ sively the names the Antelope, Bull’s Robe, Enemy of Horses, the Bobtail Horse, the Bloody Arm, and the Medicine Calf. “So damned many names that he had trouble keeping track of who he was.” For two-thirds of the book Beckwourth lives as a Crow, and the novel gives us a sympathetic, understanding picture of Crow culture. Beckwourth finds “the wildness, the utter barbarian simplicity of the Indian way — appealing to him, habituating. . . . Brutal violence was the essential way of things and was not to be wondered at. Then he became a part of that violence, accepted it, joyed in it. . . . Only in retrospect was he horrified, unbelieving of the things he knew he had done.” So is the reader, for if there is one fault with the novel, it is its account of too many raids and battles, until the reader loses track of the details and becomes satiated with the gore. Bernard de Voto, who edited one edition of The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, says it is “one of the gaudiest books in our literature and may well be the goriest; at least more Indians are killed in it than in any other book known to this student.” The same is true of Hotchkiss’s novel. The mountain men kill casually enough, and not only in self-defense; many of the killings — ambushing Indians, massacring hunting parties — seem murder to the modern reader but were taken for granted then. On the positive side, the book is a testament to freedom, to life when the world was still young, “in the mountains, in the wilderness, in the clear, clean beauty of things, of places and animals, of the great birds of the sky, of the infinity of rivers rushing down from the high places, of the canyons and the peaks and the forests where no Whitemen had ever before set foot.” Hotch­ kiss, a poet, vividly evokes the world of the shining mountains. Yet his novel 328 Western American Literature is not a pastoral, for he is quite realistic about the harshness of winter, cold, starvation, and killing. Still The Medicine Calf is an elegy for a vanished world, a lost way of life. Even in the 1820’s, when there were no towns except Santa Fe and El Paso between Missouri and California, the mountain men could sense their world ending and lament the impending passage of their fierce, savage freedom and of the unspoiled, unsettled wilderness. “Ain’t no other place in the world a child would ever want to be, if he was thinking right,” Beckwourth said. “Not too many years and the settlers come. Just like always before. Once there were no Whitemen in all of America — no cities, no roads, just the animals and the Indian people. But we come and we move always to the west.” The novel ends...