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The Confederate War Bonnet: A Novel of the Civil War in Indian Territory
written by Jack Shakely
Studio : iUniverse, Inc.
by iUniverse, Inc.
Release Date : 2008-02-12
Publisher : iUniverse, Inc.
Released : 2008-02-12
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780595461400
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 10 reviews)
List Price : $17.95
Our Price : $8.78
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Product Description |
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It’s 1863, and the United States is in the midst of the Civil War when mixed-blood Jack Gaston is called back from Harvard University to his beloved Creek Nation. He is surprised to find that not only has he been elected to be a chief in the House of Warriors, he has also been conscripted as an officer in the Confederate Army. Gaston soon learns that the Civil War in Indian Territory is more than Confederate against Federal—it is tribe against tribe and family against family. Gaston takes part in most of the major battles of the brutal and bloody conflict, fighting alongside such great Indian army leaders as Stand Watie, Chilly McIntosh, and George Grayson. In trying to reunite his strife-torn people, Gaston discovers an Indian inside himself he didn't know existed. And among the burnt-out stubble of war, he finds love with the Mexican-Apache nurse Bonita Ochoa. This little-known corner of the Civil War was played out in the fields of the Creek Nation in what is now eastern Oklahoma. In a rich portrayal of period and place, The Confederate War Bonnet is an evocative historical novel that helps to answer how Indians became involved in the Civil War, why they joined Confederate forces, and how the experience shaped their future in America. |
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Nicely Rendered |
This tale of the Civil War, as it was fought in the Oklahoma Indian Territory, where it drew in and divided the native peoples who had been exiled there from the eastern parts of the U.S. as a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 (pushed through Congress by then President Andrew Jackson), is well crafted and professional in the telling. It's also especially rich with detail of the era and peoples of the region, though it's not entirely compelling nor as fully realized in its characters as one might hope.
The story meanders at times, covering a series of episodic events without apparent organic unity, while spending a great deal of its time on the trivia of daily life. This hurts the narrative engine though it presumably reflects the author's aim of recreating actual events rather than producing a tauter, and less real, piece of fiction that is merely set in an historic period. Given the book's apparent purpose, the looser, more episodic approach does its job.
The narrative style, though, sometimes drifts out of its time to give us events and personalities as viewed from our present era, thereby sapping some of the immediacy of the events portrayed and, while the details of the lives of these people mostly ring true, the characters don't fully engage us, often seeming too good (or too bad) and overly stereotypical by turns. I was a little surprised, as well, to note the apparent absence of slavery in the Territory since the Creek, before the Civil War, were well known to have adopted the white system of chattel slavery. This probably contributed as much to the alliance of some of them with the South as any other factor. Given that slavery was a proximate cause of the Civil War and that it played a major role in the conflicts among the tribes in Indian Terrirory in the pre-Civil War years (e.g., between the Creek and the Seminole), it seems a glaring, and perhaps overly politically correct, omission.
The book's hero, half-Creek Harvard man Jack Gaston, is conveniently opposed to slavery and there is no evidence of that institution in the Territory when he returns, despite the Creek participation in that "peculiar institution." Nevertheless, the story of Gaston's return to his home and country, and his efforts on behalf of the Confederacy and those of his people who have aligned themselves with the Rebels, is well told. I especially liked the way Shakely does his dialogue and handles his chapters, always knowing just where to cut for the shift to the next phase of the narrative. The end did seem a bit rushed and I was disappointed Shakely didn't make more of the crooked Indian agent and the corrupt officials in Washington, when the war finally winds down, but I was delighted to see how the five "civilized tribes" may have actually lived in a hybrid culture that was as much "white" as Indian by the time of the War between the States, roughly 30 years after the exile of these tribes to lands beyond the Mississippi.
I only wished there was a bit more dimension to some of the intrinsically interesting characters including the Pawnee chief and the harsh and unredeemed leader of the "pin Indians", among others. But the book's message that war inevitably destroys those it touches, while enobling little, though itself something of a post-modern perspective (very much a moral of our own time and experience), came through loud and clear. The Confederate War Bonnet proved to be a very credible and intriguing addition to the Western fiction we have about some forgotten Americans who once lived and roamed freely throughout this land.
SWM |
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I Beg to Differ |
I do not understand how anyone can assert that The Confederate War Bonnet
adds anything to our historical understanding of the Civil War in Indian Territory.
In Chapter 2, p. 15, the fictional protagonist Jack Gaston explains to a Harvard dean that his father left a good life in St. Louis and returned to Indian Territory because his leadership skills were needed by the Creek nation. Then the author contrasts such imaginary selfless devotion to duty to the alleged less noble self-interest of the actual Cherokee principal chief, John Ross. The author has Gaston say that, "a few years after my father made his decision, Ross made the opposite one, removing himself to Virginia while his people were herded like cattle to journey and die along that pitiful thousand-mile walk. Ross and his family were vilified for that, two of his brothers were murdered, and it splits the Cherokee apart to this day."
This is completely false and tantamount to slander. While an author of historical fiction is expected to take some liberties with the dialogue or interior monologue of historical characters (e.g., Allan Eckert's acclaimed Winning of America series), Mr. Shakely engages in defamation. Any author of historical fiction has a professional and ethical obligation to portray historical characters as accurately as possible. Mr. Shakely has failed to do that for John Ross and the Cherokee.
Without recounting Ross's brilliant and selfless career (please read
Gary E Moulton's first-rate biography, "John Ross, Cherokee Chief" - University of Georgia Press, 1978), suffice it to quote Moulton's
assessment of why John Ross became a great leader supported by the majority of Cherokee people from 1826-1866. "He was selected for leadership because he displayed the requisite qualities ... of change: an unfailing devotion to the sacred homelands and a facility for articulating the Cherokee cause." (p. 197)
Other factual errors by Mr. Shakely in the two sentences above should also be noted. First, to insinuate that Ross did not share the suffering of fellow Cherokees along the "trails where they cried" is an insult to his wife Quatie, who died along the way (although the circumstances of giving away her blanket to warm a freezing child may be apocryphal).
How did a man who had to bury his wife "remove himself" from anything?
Second, Ross's brothers (Andrew and Lewis) were not murdered, although all three Rosses were threatened with murder and accused of instigating murder as a result of the deep and deadly factional divide within the Cherokee nation between the pro-removal "treaty party" minority led by Major Ridge and the anti-removal majority led by Ross. Perhaps the author is confused with the Ridge-Boudinot murders?
Third, the "removing himself to Virginia" reference must be alluding to Ross's forced exile to Washington D.C. after Confederate forces (non-Cherokee and Cherokee) overran Cherokee territory during the American Civil War (Ross's cottage and its contents were burned to the ground by Cherokee Confederates). As Moulton noted, a pervasive theme of Cherokee national unity dominated Ross's entire career (p. 172) But at this point in Shakely's novel, the Civil War has not even begun!
One last point should be made. On p. 12 the Mr. Shakely perpetuates the myth that Harvard University was founded to educate Indians. While there is some small truth to that assertion, the larger and less sanguine truth is that the 17th century New England clergy promoted "Indian education" as a shameless fund-raising gimmick to induce gullible fellow worshippers in England to fund New England's "errand in the wilderness."
So, only ten pages into The Confederate War Bonnet (it starts on p. 5), all of the reckless errors and defamations noted above forced me to cast it aside and write this review. What a shame, because the concept is great and should have generated more interest and knowledge about the often overlooked Civil War in Indian Territory. But if an author gets such basic and easily verifiable facts wrong at the outset, what else is amiss?
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Great story + great history |
The Prologue of Jack Shakely's The Confederate War Bonnet poses an intriguing question about an elaborate Pawnee war bonnet donated by the Ford Foundation to the University of Oklahoma. Why, in its intricate beadwork, should there be the repeated motif of the Confederate flag? Was it a hoax, or a joke, or a political statement?
Why indeed? That war bonnet, now in the Smithsonian Institution, was not a hoax. It is real, and mentioning it at the outset of the book brilliantly and concisely illuminated to me how I, despite being a reasonably educated person and not unfamiliar with the Civil War, knew nothing at all about the war's effects on American Indians.
The author, a fourth-generation Oklahoman of Creek descent, is a former journalist whose family owned newspapers in four small Oklahoman towns. His novel is an expertly fictionalized account of the plight, and the fate, of a number of Indian tribes during the unpleasantess between the states. The average person might expect that the Indians would not come to the defense of the Union, which after all had forced most of them off their ancestral lands and relegated them to strange lands, breaking treaty after treaty and dealing with them shabbily at best. And that would be true, for many Indians. But others did indeed cleave to the Union, and this difference often divided individual tribes. Unfortunately, many of those tribes were at odds with other tribes in the first place. The Civil War only served to subdivide them even further.
It was a very complex situation, and beyond the scope of this review to explain. Suffice it to say that the general reader will gain an appreciation of the complexity, sadness, and eventual glimmers of hope that emerged from this national disaster. The student of history will find a good deal more.
All readers will enjoy the highly readable narrative the author has laid over the historical record--the book is worth reading simply as a tale of the American west. Long term, however, it adds to our understanding of who we are as Americans, and what we have done and failed to do as a nation. To that end, readers will appreciate the author's note at the end: all but a couple of the characters in the story are real. The battles and so forth are described as accurately as can be known.
That war bonnet figures into the story, beginning, middle, and end. I hope I visit the Smithsonian some day and see it, or stumble across a photograph. It will inevitably recall a flood of impressions made by The Confederate War Bonnet. How many books can you say that about?
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A Bit of History that should be Required Reading |
The Confederate War Bonnet, A Novel of the Civil War in Indian Territory, by Jack Shakely should be required reading in America's public schools. Not only is War Bonnet entertaining; it is educational as well. The reader gets a peek into the dark side of greed and corruption with American Indians as the not-so-helpless victims.
I've always been interested in history (including the Civil War), not the dry kind that puts you to sleep in the classroom, but the kind that keeps you riveted because the characters ride off the page shooting and shouting..
Jack Gaston, the main, real-life character of War Bonnet is in his third year at Harvard University when the Civil War starts. His closest friend and blood brother arrives with bad news. Jack's father has been murdered, and the Creek Tribal Council has elected Jack as a chief in the House of Warriors. Half of the Creek nation has decided to join the Confederacy in the War Between the States, and Jack is to become a Captain in the Southern Army.
Not only does Jack go to war but he falls in love with a half Apache nurse tending to the Creek people and warriors wounded in battles. War Bonnet helps reveal a little-known part of the Civil War where American Indians sided with the Confederacy because of the way the tribes had been treated by corrupt Union politicians and bureaucrats full of false promises. The Indian leaders are tired of being lied to and cheated. The Confederacy has promised to treat them as equals and with respect.
The Creek nation divides between the South and the North. Near the end of the Civil War, Jack is called before the Principal Chief of the tribes that sided with the North.
"All of our destinies may be in the dust, unless we do something now," Micco Hutke said in the same soothing voice he had used earlier. "To heal our wounds and bring us together as one people is something we must strive to achieve, and we give you our thanks for offering your hand in peace. But are we to become a Nation without a nation, like the poor Sac and Fox? The (northern) government tells us that even though we remained loyal, we are now `renegades' and all of our treaties must be rewritten."
I spent thirty years as a teacher in the public schools teaching English literature, and if we are to continue to be a great nation, at least the kind of nation many of us will be proud of, we have to know about the darker chapters in our history. The Confederate War Bonnet is more than a story about the trials and tribulations of war and love. War Bonnet delves into the war between the forces of evil and good.
To find out if good prevails, I recommend that you buy and read The Confederate War Bonnet. If you are a student of the Civil war and the American west, this is a novel that will not disappoint.. Jack Shakely is a fourth-generation Oklahoman of Creek descent. In The Confederate War Bonnet, Shakely has done a service to two nations.
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An excellent study of Native American culture during the Civil War |
Any time I read a book written by a first-time author, I worry that no matter how interesting the subject matter may be, the writing style will be so amateurish that it will turn me off immediately. I must say, right out of the box Jack Shakely has an excellent writing style--his words flow smoothly and he provides a wealth of detail, from clothing to scenery, from historical information to cultural events.
One word of warning to the prospective reader--although this is a book about the Civil War, it is not a war story. Shakely focuses on the people behind the scenes, not on the battles. I'm an action junkie, so I was a little disappointed that the book didn't have more battle scenes, but it was otherwise extremely entertaining.
The main character, Jack Gaston, is a half-breed Creek Indian who was educated at Harvard. As the War Between the States heats up, Gaston decides to go back home to fight with his tribe. Even though he has acclimated himself to a Northern school, and even though he does not believe in slavery, he becomes a Confederate soldier. The Federal government had committed so many horrible wrongs to the various Indian tribes that there was no way they could fight for the Union. Unable to stay neutral, and following the old adage "The enemy of my enemy is my friend", the Creeks wound up as part of the Confederacy.
When Jack Gaston travels west to return home, we are treated to an aspect of the Civil war that has received relatively little attention: the role of Indian tribes (some of whom served with the Union forces, by the way), and the toll the War took on the "civilians" who wanted nothing more than to be left alone by both sides.
I've been interested in Native American culture ever since I first heard the song "Trail of Tears" by Eric Johnson, and I'm a huge fan of stories from the Wild West era, so this book was right up my alley. The Confederate War Bonnet is a novel that is interesting and entertaining, a work of historical fiction with much basis in fact. Jack Shakely does an excellent job of transporting the reader back in time and placing him or her smack dab in the middle of life during the Civil War.
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