Hundred in the Hand - Joseph Marshall's Lakota Westerns
Most of us have grown up watching western movies where the brave cowboys went out and were attacked by the wild indians in the hostile western badlands. It is refreshing to have a story told about the natives from their point of view. The wild west is NOT wild - it is a content, happy place where nature is in balance. It is the cowboys who are the invaders, roaming where they do not belong, harming the balance and causing trouble.This story is told as a flashback, as an elderly Cloud in his 80s thinks back to the days of his youth, when he had a new wife in 1866. He is a Lakota, and the Lakota think of themselves as "human beings". They do not know what these incoming whites are, if they really have brains or not. They do know that the whites are prone to lying, have little respect for the environment, slaughter without thought and seem infinite. The Lakotas have tried a policy of tolerance, but as the influx of whites keeps growing and destroying their paradise, they feel they have to defend their borders and their way of life.
There are several threads interwoven here. Cloud's wife is white, but she was found as an abandoned 2 year old and raised in the Lakota way. Her skin color makes some of the nearby whites think she is a captive who must be rescued. The whites by and large simply want to wipe out the pesky Indians. The natives are torn between wanting to work with the threat to mitigate it and attempting to drive it out completely.
The story provides a great sense of how peaceful and content the natives were before these incursions by aliens began. It also explains the great disparity of strength involved - there are few natives, and thousands of incoming whites. The whites are extremely well stocked with multiple guns each and plenty of bullets. The Indians are lucky to have even one firearm, and they count the number of bullets individually. A native might have 11 bullets but only enough powder to fire 7 of them.
There are several reasons I could not give the book a full five stars, as much as I enjoyed the topic of the story. Many descriptions of characters or places are brief or missing. There were many spots that seemed less than well phrased, that a quality editor would have cleaned up. There was an incongruity or two and a few misspellings. Again, no author is perfect, but a good editor should have easily spotted all of these things and cleaned them up before the book went to press. There are enough of these things that they jar you out of a smooth read. Hopefully a second printing of the book will clean these items up and bring the book up to a full five stars.
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