Blue Ravens: Historical Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

decided to hawk the newspaper to strangers on the train at the Ogema Station. The trains arrived twice a day and we earned about ten cents in a day.
    Hawking the Tomahawk was easy because there were no other newspapers published in the area, and because we were directly related to the publisher. I tried to read every issue of the newspaper and to memorize a few paragraphs of the main stories, enough weekly content to shout out the significance of the news stories.
    I actually learned how to write by reading the newspapers we sold, by memory of selected descriptive scenes, and by imitation of the standard style of journalism at the time. I learned how to create scenes in words, and to imagine the colors of words, and my brother painted abstract scenes of blue ravens. Most students at our school had learned how to mimic teachers, to recount government scenes, federal agents, and native police, but we were the only students who hawked newspapers with national stories and learned how to write at the same time.
    The Progress was the first newspaper published on the White Earth Reservation, and the news was mostly local, including a special personal section on the recent travels, experiences, and events of reservation families. The newspaper reported that our grandmother, for instance, traveled by horse and wagon to visit relatives in the town of Beaulieu. The Progress published reservation news and critical editorials about the ineptitude of federal agents and policies of the federal government.
    Major Timothy Sheehan, the federal agent, and native police confiscated the very first edition of the Progress, the newsprint and the actual press, and ordered my relatives to leave the reservation. Agent Sheehan must have thought he was the deputy of a colonial monarchy. Augustus was publisher of the Progress and Theodore Hudon Beaulieu was the editor and printer at the time. The first edition of the Progress , critical of the federal agent and the policies of reservation land allotment, was published on March 25, 1886.
    Our relatives refused to leave their homes and newspaper business by the order of a corrupt political agent, and instead sought sanctuary at Saint Benedict’s Mission. Father Aloysius Hermanutz, the mission priest, provided a secure refuge for some of our relatives, and protection from the arbitrary authority of the federal agent. The Episcopal Church had been active in the selection of the agent and dominant in the administration of federal reservation policies. The native police had refused to arrest or remove our relatives from the reservation.
    The obvious constitutional issue of freedom of the press was decided a year later by a federal court. The court ruled in favor of my relatives, who had a right to publish a newspaper on the reservation, or anywhere in the country, without the consent of a federal agent. The native and constitutional rights of my relatives and other citizens were restored on the WhiteEarth Reservation. The second edition of the Progress was published on October 8, 1887.
    Augustus Beaulieu changed the name of the weekly newspaper to the Tomahawk in the early nineteen hundreds, and the content of the newspaper changed, along with the name, from local reservation stories and editorials to national and international news reports. The readers must have wondered what happened to the local stories, and at the same time marveled at the publication of national news stories. Straightaway the reservation became a new cosmopolitan culture of national and international news.
    White Earth became a cosmopolitan community.
    The readers of the Tomahawk could not understand how the publisher was able to gather so much news from around the world every week. The national news was seldom timely, never daily, but the readers were not concerned because most stories on the reservation were seasonal. Sometimes national stories were read a month or two later as current events, and in this way national news was always