The Adventures of Moccasin Joe: The True Life Story of Sgt. George S. Howard by Susan C. Reneau (review)

Reviews 303 The book helps us to understand that the west coast was pioneered by peoples from the Pacific andAsia. Hawaiians, also known as “Sandwich Islanders” and “Kanakas,” were there from earliest days.The firstKanakato visitthe northwestcoast came in 1787 on board a British ship in the China trade almost twenty years before Lewis and Clark came down “the mighty Oregon.”John Jacob Astor brought a contingent of Kanakas to his post on the mouth of the Columbia in 1811. The Northwest Company and later the Hudson Bay Company continued the practice. In 1820 three Kanakas were killed by Snake Indians and became the eponymous heroes ofthe Owyhee River ofsouthwestern Idaho. Kanakas from Oregonjoined in the California gold rush. As the Hudson Bay Company expanded its activities into agriculture, lumbering, and fishing to supply the Pacific trade, Kanakas became farmers, sawyers, coopers, fishers, and barge and ship men, sometimes for the Company, sometimes on their own, thus becoming economic pioneers on the northwest coast. Koppel provides agood analysisofthe ethnic social patterns thatdeveloped and still persistin the Northwest. Kanakasranked between Whitesand Indians, and intermarriage followed “rules”that accorded with rank. In coming as contract laborers, the Hawaiians were escaping from the oppression of the tabusystem. Later, those who had settled in the Oregon territoryfound themselves facing discrimination bysettlers from the States, and migrated to the colony of British Columbia where they could homestead (“pre-empt”) land and vote. There is a good deal of information about the inter-ethnic relationships that changing circumstances dictated. Forinstance, Kanakaswere valued in the fur trade because they could intimidate Northwest Indians, but by the 1960s the Kanakas and Indianswereworking together in the Native Brotherhood ofBritish Columbiaandjointly celebrating cultural heritages. Koppel makesgood use ofarchival photographs and prints; the index and bibliogra­ phyareveryuseful; and the numerous sketches ofindividuals and enterprises enliven the pioneering account. ROSCOE L. BUCKLAND Western Washington University The Adventures ofMoccasinJoe: The True Life Story of Sgt. George S. Howard. By Susan C. Reneau. (Missoula, Montana: Blue Mountain Publishing, 1994. 208 pages, $19.95.) This isessentially the presentation in print ofa 120-year-old diaryofaCavalrysoldier from the time and place of Custer’s last fight—but one who missed that particular battle while being in three others nearby. Susan Reneau is diligent and thorough in researching and telling all that is known about George Howard’s short, lonely life and showing us dozens ofphotos, sketches and maps ofpeople and places involved in his fiveyears on the plains (1872-1877). The book is not literature, but aworthyfragment of the history of the period andwhatlife waslike foran enlistedman in those hardmilitarycampaigns to crush the Indians ofthe Plains once and forall.We also notice the ineptitude ofGeneral Crook in this campaign; he reduces his men to living on horsemeat as they fruitlesslypursue the Sioux on a two-week-old trail. Yet we keep noticing that George Howard not only kept a diary, but he had dozens oflady friends, collected poems in the back ofhis diary, and wrote fifty-two poems ofhis 304 Western American Literature own. We keep expecting to discover a male Emily Dickinson—or at least a Robert Service—scribbling in his notebook around the campfire after the chores of a thirtythree -mile march across the Wyoming or Montana or Dakota plains are done. Let it be said that there are a few creditable poems (especially the dramatic monologues) in his collection; and we do notice him improving as he continues to write. And many of the errors in his verse may be attributed to the difficulty of transcribing accurately the old, first-draft handwriting. But unfortunately as we read the poems, we find that George is not much of a poet in spite of his valiant efforts to use poems to express his pain and loneliness and cultivate a civilized consciousness and intellectual life even on the daily grind of frontier soldiering in the 1870s. The book then becomes most valuable as the chronicle of the struggle of a lonely, wounded individual to live “an honest upright life before God and man”—or rather before God and the women of his time, including his mother. This is a more worthy aim than even the production...