Yellow Sun, Bright Sky: The Indian Country Stories of Oliver La Farge ed. by David L. Caffey (review)

178 Western American Literature But white land speculators considered the Cherokees an obstacle that must be removed. Ehle chronicles in painstaking detail the decades of attack and defense, the viciousness of politicians and land grabbers. He dramatizes the divisiveness that sprang up as the Ridge faction was finally persuaded that further resistance was hopeless and that it would be better to make a fresh start in the West, while the followers of principal chief John Ross refused to give way. Finally the Ridges and Boudinot were persuaded to sign the treaty ofNew Echota, selling the Cherokee lands and property for $5 million plus comparable acreage in Indian territory, though they considered that they might be signing their death warrant, since a Cherokee law proclaimed death for anyone who sold their land without the full consent of the nation. In 1838, an army was sent to collect the Cherokees and move them west. Ehle recreates the actual Trail of Tears with some of the dramatic impact of the migration to California in The Grapes of Wrath, even using some of Steinbeck’s effects—composite characters, anonymous scraps of dialogue by representative individuals or a chorus, quick vignettes along the route. After the removal, the prophetic deaths of the Ridges and Boudinot were fulfilled, as vigilantes of the Ross faction murdered them. Ehle chronicles this epic in rich detail, with copious quotations from the principal characters. Sometimes he uses a novelist’s license to imagine what his protagonists may be speaking and to invent bits of dialogue by representative figures. A combination of exhaustive research and literary skillmakesThe Trail of Tears the most vivid and readable account of the Cherokee tragedy. ROBERT E. MORSBERGER California State Polytechnic Univ., Pomona Yellow Sun, Bright Sky: The Indian Country Stories of Oliver La Farge. Edited with an introduction by David L. Caffey. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. 212 pages, $22.50/$12.95.) Few western writers have captured the American imagination as success­ fully as did Oliver La Farge, the nineteen-year-old Harvard anthropology student sent west in 1921 to learn about Navajo country. Though he began by observing rather dejectedly that “The damn country was a howling ash-heap,” within eight years La Farge would win a Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, Laughing Boy (1929), and would be on his way to becoming an “Indian expert” for American readers. The twelve stories collected in Yellow Sun, Bright Sky, all written and published between 1927 and 1963, show La Farge at his uneven best, strongest when he writes from the point of view with which he was most familiar and comfortable, that of the knowledgeable white outsider, weakest when he Reviews 179 attempts an Indian persona. One of the finest pieces here is “Higher Educa­ tion,” a 1934 story demonstrating the deadly effects of enforced boardingschool education for young Indians, told from the point of view of a young anthropologist on the Navajo reservation. Similarly, “The Little Stone Man” is an effective first-person account by a young white man of his accidental betrayal of Indian friends and his immediate rejection by the tribe about which he had felt himself becoming an “expert.” Permeating these stories is La Farge’s admiration for and identification with the educated and sensitive Easterner who has come west and gained inside knowledge—precisely La Farge’sown situation. A disturbing note in the stories is the subtle but inescapable sense of the Indian as colorful and quaint —something one can become an expert on—a sense that comes across even when the author is attempting to debunk that very posture in his white char­ acters. Ahead of his time in his knowledge of and sensitivity to southwestern Indian cultures, La Farge nonetheless exploits those cultures for quaintness and color even while pretending to do otherwise. The result is an attractive volume of great interest to students of La Farge and of the period but one that—in spite of a good, succinct introduction by David L. Caffey—will do little to elevate the author’s reputation among Native American readers or seekers after first-quality western fiction. LOUIS OWENS University of New Mexico Rough and Rowdy...