Blue Ravens: Historical Novel Read Online Free PDF

current on the reservation. The sense of time was created by native stories, not in the urgent political reports of newspapers. Later, the Tomahawk published on the first page regular editorial and news stories and by Carlos Montezuma, or Wassaja, one of the first native medical doctors.
    We learned much later that natives on the reservation were more literate than the general population of new immigrants, and natives read more newspapers because the federal government established schools on reservations. Federal assimilation policies forced most native children to learn how to read and write long before national compulsory education. We were required to attend the government school on the reservation, and too many native students were sent away to boarding schools.
    Augustus subscribed to preprinted or patent inside newspaper pages, the actual pages were printed somewhere else and delivered to the reservation for publication. Theodore Beaulieu, once the actual printer and editor of the Progress , was superseded by the patent inside pages of the Tomahawk. Many newspapers were published around the country with the same patent stories of national and international news reports and advertisements. The pages of the patent inside were selected editorial tours of world news, not local native issues or reservation rumors, but a parcel of disaster reports and other stories from obscure and marvelous places.
    â€œEveryone knows the strange old stories of the reservation,” our uncle declared. “The Tomahawk needs new strange stories, and the newer and stranger the outside stories the better for reservation readers.”
    Augustus was right, but in time we became better at creating our own strange native stories of the reservation than hawking the content of some faraway story by a writer who constructed the news of the world for hundreds of weekly newspapers. The patent inside pages displayed national advertisements. Mostly the advertisements were for fast medicine cures. Some blank sections of the newspaper were reserved for local promotions.
    â€œPaxtine Toilet Antiseptic for Women” was a regular patent advertisement in the Tomahawk , but the use of a douche remained a mystery. We were callow about the need and the actual usage, so we never hawked the douche promotion to women at the Ogema Station. We were not hesitant, however, to declare the news, wave our newspapers, and shout out about other advertisements.
    â€œLadies can wear shoes one size smaller after using Allen’s Footease, a certain cure for swollen, sweating, hot, aching feet.” We never sold one paper with that announcement, so we learned to hawk discreet news and to avoid any laughable promotions of patent medicine cures.
    The Hotel Leecy, the largest and “most commodious hotel” on the reservation, was advertised on a side column in almost every issue of the Tomahawk . The hotel served daily communal meals with seasonal fish, game, and vegetables, and provided a livery stable. John Leecy, the proprietor, allowed us to ride free on the horse carriage between the hotel and the train station because we always promoted the hotel to arriving passengers. Leecy admired our ambition and hired us a few months later to feed and groom horses in the hotel livery stable.
    Aloysius painted two blue ravens perched on the back of a roan stallion owned by John Spratt. Two years later he invited us to work in his harness shop. That was a very good job at the time, one of the best, because we continued to care for horses and at the same time learned about the harness business. We learned how to forge and fashion metal, but later we returned to work in the livery stable at the Hotel Leecy. Daily we encountered travelers and government bureaucrats who stayed at the hotel, and every visitor talked with us about horses and the future. No one ever talked to us about the forged parts of a harness. The blue ravens my brother painted and mytricky stories