The Heart of Horses, by Molly Gloss, $24. | With “The Heart of Horses,” Molly Gloss, author of the acclaimed “The Jump-Off Creek,” again has created a superlative story of tough, smart independent women.
The year is 1917. The place: farm and ranch country in eastern Oregon where, with the young men off fighting in World War I, help is scarce. On a cold winter day, Martha Lessen, 19 and a horse whisperer, rides up to the Bliss place looking for work as a bronco buster.
George Bliss sizes her up: tall, solid build, wearing old-fashioned cowboy trappings and a “showy platter of a hat.” When he asks her business and she tells him she breaks horses to saddle and not to harness, he likes her answer.
As they inspect his horses, he watches her with them, listens to her theories. And that night, after supper, Bliss and his wife, Louise, persuade her to stay the night in their barn.
Day by day, almost against her will, Martha settles in. She attends church with the Blisses. She rescues a family whose wagon has tumbled into a ravine. She comes to know and admire two aging sisters whose only hired hand is Henry Frazier, Martha’s age and someone she may some day dare to love.
But she is truly tested when she agrees to gentle a horse for Tom Kandel, who is dying of cancer and wants to give the animal to his 13-year-old son as a last gift. Tom has approached the diagnosis calmly. For a time, before he becomes too weak, he is able to go about the ordinary affairs of life and oversee the horse’s training. But, despite her vow to never grow close enough to anyone to be hurt, Martha comes to share the agony of the family’s plight.
Gradually, Martha learns how to be a girl when she must and to allow people as well as horses into her life as she slowly becomes part of the remote valley, already feeling the effects of the far-off war and the changing times.
Written with a deep understanding of place and rich with the details and lore of gentling horses, “The Hearts of Horses” is not only a finely rendered story of the lives touched by the horse whisperer but also of the young woman herself as she makes a place for herself in the world.
Hundred in the Hand, by Joseph Marshall, $16.95. | The first of two novels in his Lakota Western series, Joseph Marshall’s “Hundred in the Hand” is an insightful telling of events leading up to the fateful and tragic battle of the same name, also known as the Fetterman Battle of 1866. Tragic because the battle was to preface the eventual end of a way of life; fateful because the event proved inevitable.
Initially, the Lakota only watch as the steady stream of gold seekers invade their land and the Long Knives build a fort. The wise men among the tribe believe that though they are the finer horse warriors, the white men have come only to kill. If the Lakota don’t resist, they will have defeated themselves. Putting aside the differences among tribes, they decide to fight the common enemy.
As plans for a showdown begin, the story is seen through the eyes of Cloud, who fights with Crazy Horse. But standing behind them is the intrepid Rabbit, an eager young Lakota who overcomes the loss of a hand, and Sweetwater, Cloud’s wife, a red-haired white woman, abandoned as a baby and now part of the tribe.
The turning point comes with the arrival at the fort of a new officer, Capt. William Fetterman. Ambitious and hungry for glory, he is eager to go on the offensive against “the savages.” Then the winter cold and snow move in. And, with their plans now in place, the Lakota and their allies – the Cheyenne and Arapaho – watch and wait as they draw the Long Knives into their deadly trap.
Backed by a glossary of Lakota and Euro-American place names, the Lakota calendar as well as excellent maps, the author tells a suspenseful story that brings readers not only an inside look at the Lakota way of life but also an important perspective to a defining event in the history of the American West.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who writes a regular column on new regional fiction.
