The Son by Philipp Meyer (review)

“No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth” (164), says Peter McCullough, the conscience of this epic novel and the son of Colonel Eli McCullough, legendary Indian captive turned Indian fighter, Texas Ranger, and eventual patriarch of a 250,000-acre “proper acreocracy” (501) in southeastern Texas along the Nueces River. Dispossession and the legacies of conquest are the main themes here, in a family history (genealogical chart included) spanning the years 1836 to 2012. The author chronicles the displacement and near extermination of the Comanches by the first waves of pioneer settlers, the removal of the Mexicans by the Texans, then the gradual takeover of ranchers and cattlemen by the petroleum industry.

The narrative is constructed from three different points of view: that of Eli McCullough, recounted through a wpa recording from the 1930s; that of his son Peter, chronicled through journal entries dating from the 1916–17 period, the time of the modern Mexican Revolution; and that of Eli’s great-great-granddaughter Jeanne Anne, a stalwart Republican feminist matron whose recollections take us up to the present. We see how the lives of these three individuals intersect and are affected by a grand sweep of historical events and forces: the conflicts with the Comanches, the US-Mexican War, the Civil War, the Mexican Revolution, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, the oil boom and subsequent embargo of the post–World War II era, and the two Iraq wars. Some figures, like the Colonel, seem to make and transcend history; others, like his son Peter, the Comanches, and the Mexican Americans who live along the border in the early twentieth century, are victimized by it. Jeanne Anne, with more than a bit of the Colonel in her blood, comes into her own after the premature death of her oil-catter husband and learns to profit from the boom-and-bust cycles of the industry, eventually becoming a legend in her own right and twice gracing the cover of Time magazine.

I found most riveting those early portions of the novel representing Eli’s captivity narrative. Part ethnographic study of the Comanches, part potboiler narrative and coming-of-age story of a thirteen-year-old white boy slowly inducted into the culture of the most powerful tribe on the Southern Plains, this aspect of the tale represents a revision of the revisionist school of western American history. To some degree the long-dominant myth of rugged individualism is challenged in the novel: “The strong white man comes to an unpopulated wilderness and proves himself. Except there has never been any such thing” (311), says Maria, whose once-aristocratic family has been ousted from its rancheria along the border. However, the Comanches, through young Eli’s interactions with chiefs and medicine men and “squaws,” are depicted not as politically correct Dances with Wolves–type Noble Red Men but simply as people, human beings who love their land, families, and tribe and who will do anything, no matter how seemingly brutal, to save their homeland. Reflecting back on his life, Eli extols his time with the tribe as “the greatest summer I ever had” (207), and when he is forced to return to white society because of the tribe’s decimation by smallpox, he laments that the forty acres of his host’s property felt “like a postage stamp. I was used to having twenty million or so at my disposal” (333). But in the end even as powerful and legendary a figure as the Colonel is a victim of historical forces, in this case manifest destiny and progress. “There are many things I have wanted to save,” he says to Peter late in life: “the Indians, the buff alo, a prairie where you could look twenty miles and not see a fence post. But time has passed those things by” (352). As well as a historical novel, this work is also an environmental history describing one of the greatest transformations of a bioregion...