Title: The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War
Author: William T. Vollmann
Publisher: Viking
ISBN: 978-0670015986
Pages: 1376
Genre: Historical Fiction
Reviewed by: John L. Murphy, Pacific Book Review
Book Review
At about a page a mile, this epic slowly charts the forced retreat of the Nez Perce during the “Indian Service” over more than 1300 miles in 1877. Under General Otis Oliver (or as his weary “Bluecoats” call him, “Uh-Oh”) Howard, the U.S. Army pursued those members of the tribe who refused pacification and Christianization on the reservation. In the fifth installment of his Seven Dreams series dramatizing the encounters between native and settler peoples in North America, William T. Vollmann captures not only the narrative voice of his own witness. “William the Blind,” but better yet, dozens of characters from the Bluecoats, the People as they call themselves, and the Bostons, their name for the whites who come to settle, eliminating one nation for a larger, rapacious one
Vollmann in previous volumes in this series (see my reviews of most of his many books) has explored first contacts between the Norse and natives in today’s Maritime Provinces, between the nations of Virginia and John Smith’s Jamestown colonists, between the French Jesuits and the warring nations of Canada, and between the First Nations of the Arctic and those traders past and present, who exploit the resources of the Far North.
In each novel, he blends his own stance as “William the Blind” with diligent attention to the historical record. In The Dying Grass, he follows this archival fidelity deftly. Much of the dialogue and many of the thoughts attributed to his characters are integrated from a wide array of sources, and Vollmann therefore makes our history as Americans come alive. You never feel when reading this Seven Dreams series that figures are propped up as talking mannequins. Vollmann masters the process: he makes his characters sound like us (if properly bound to their time, place, limitations, and idioms).
The manner this verisimilitude emerges in this latest volume deserves acclaim. Vollmann innovates. He pushes the space on the page. The deeper we get into a character’s mind, the farther right we shift. Dialogue, free of quotation marks or any dashes, begins on the left. Interruptions external or internal drift, and then interior monologues or asides embed themselves further as the reader wanders towards the center of the book, the right margin. That margin is always unpredictable, for it falls down, near the gutter of the spine, until it stops and the reader returns to the left again, and more dialogue begins.
These conversations take us into the petty details on each side of the conflict. Soldiers bicker, boast, and bitch. Native women mock those who pursue them, and defend their men, for as Dreamers they unite around their tradition, and they defy those among them and beyond them who brandish the Bible, the “Book of Light” as the authority who replaces their “Wyakin” for guidance. Vollmann draws us in to these conflicts, as well as masterfully drawn battle re-creations that show his talent for action scenes, a subject he has not been able to expand upon in many of his novels as he can here.
Homeric may be an overused adjective, but in the catalogs of warriors, soldiers, and their women, over much more than a thousand pages, this term serves as a worthy comparison for this chronicle. Similarly, even if shorter than Tolstoy’s own massive novel on war, The Dying Grass depicts also how everyday people must get swept up into tragedy, forced to choose sides as the enemy comes.
Although the fate of the Nez Perce under the man we know as Chief Joseph is a foregone conclusion, what is lesser known, and therefore animates tension, is the evasion some of the Nez Perce manage. They flee across the Medicine Line as they call it into the Old Woman’s Country of Canada. But their enemy Sitting Bull has established his own redoubt there already, and soon the Nez Perce must return across the border, where they are rounded up and sent off to the Hot Land of Kansas to sell themselves as chattel to the clutches of a white man, or their trinkets and photos to souvenir seekers.
Never romanticizing either side, Vollmann remains alert to the nuances of violence. The Bannocks who follow the Bluecoats, and later the Crows, also revenge themselves on the Nez Perce. They in turn, while innocent of the charges cast on them by the U.S. Government, may murder innocent Bostons. Their pleas, no less than those of the People whose women and children may be roasted alive in the heat of battle or the coldness of calculation by Bluecoats, may find only cruel listeners. Mercies are shown to some enemies, but as in any war, these may be outnumbered by vengeance.
These gaps between a relentless force who must have the natives’ land, who must violate the terms of the treaty that gave that remnant to the Nez Perce, and who will not let their beleaguered people cross into Canada widen. On the other side, the Dreamers dwindle, and no home for them remains at all. They try to talk to the Bluecoats and the Bostons, but among both contenders, those out for profit and for land-grabbing take charge. The Nez Perce, outnumbered and facing their own Indian enemies now allied with the Government, can neither find rescue in the Montana wilderness nor Canadian camps. The mechanized nature of the Government, after the debacles of the Civil War, now rolls over any opposition within the ranks. Howard and his men must serve a master back East, not their own will.
Vollmann fairly, as with Howard, shows the complexity of these negotiations. The General, who lost an arm in the Civil War, had run the Freedmen’s Bureau for former slaves after the conflict. His generosity founded the university that bears his surname, but his reputation as one too sympathetic to the blacks and then the Indians, in the eyes of many back in Washington D.C., follows Howard. By the end, as the Nez Perce are shipped to the Northwest after their Indian Territory exile, they look in calico, drab colors, and shawls as colorless and bland as the freed slaves had to General Howard.
Depravity haunts many of those in Federal uniform, those in the garb of the newcomer, and some of those who must don that garb, accept the Book of Light, or be cast off to an even more dilapidated reservation with Chief Joseph, lest they contaminate their Americanized brethren. Their children are taught the ways of their conquerors at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Vollmann notes as of twenty years ago how fewer than thirty-five Nez Perce had kept any fluency in their old language.
Throughout, the interpreters such as Umatilla Jim and Ad Chapman are called on to intervene.; the surrender speech attributed to Chief Joseph barely registers here, within the cross-chatter and interference between the victors and their vanquished. Lieutenant Wood, an intriguingly sympathetic listener to the plight of those whom he pursues, polishes up Joseph’s words for pomp and posterity.
Out of faded tintypes, military memoirs, charts and news clippings, historical surveys and museum artifacts, Vollmann tells one of the most famous, and infamous, struggles between the invading and the indigenous peoples of the Old West. The Dying Grass resists satisfactory replication in this format, with our margins that corral and tame its inventive prose on a open-ended page. Like the unfenced West, his novel roams freely, evading control of the mechanical hand and conforming style.
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