Scarlet Plume, Second Edition Read Online Free PDF

most brutal atrocities.
    The two characters whom Manfred chose to place at the center of the action of his novel about the Sioux Uprising could well be thought of as a summation of the story of centuries of relations between white people and Indians in America: the Indian, the reluctant but fated victim of the white’s hunger for land; the white man coming to a slow and grudging realization that there is value to be found in a way of life that is now destroyed beyond possible recovery. Judith Raveling is Manfred’s most fully realized woman character, and the story is told from her point of view. She is intellectual by inclination and quick enough with languages to learn Dakota. She is a frontier bloomer girl, a fervent supporter of women’s rights, so strong-willed that she dares to speak defiantly to her Indian husband, Whitebone, against the murder of her brother-in-law, the Reverend Claude Codman, even after the three white women with her have been killed for disobedience. And she shows a sort of ultimate strength of will when she steadfastly defends Scarlet Plume’s innocence from the moment of his arrival to his execution, defying the military and the traumatized whites by continuing to wear her Indian clothing.
    Judith is able to realize her complete womanhood, however, only when she meets a man whose moral strength and self-respect elicit her admiration. Scarlet Plume is such a man, one of the last pure Dakota Indians, untainted by white ways and beliefs, but doomed himself just as his people are. As he tells Judith on their trip back to Minnesota, “Yet the power of the whites will prevail. We will be annihilated. This is a terrible thing for a Yankton to think about. Not even Whitebone will survive. It is a fated thing. Just as this mother deer is feeding us, so too the Yankton will be killed up and fed to the white man.” The love between these two, besides its value to the narrative, is Manfred’s way of illustrating the bonds that join and the barriers that separate the two races.
    For most readers Scarlet Plume is an exciting experience, a fast-paced adventure that moves from one memorable scene to another: the atrocities at Skywater and on the trail, the beautifully detailed buffalo hunt, Judith’s escape and flight from Sioux Falls toward New Ulm, the sweet love along the way between Judith and Scarlet Plume, and the climactic events at Camp Release, New Ulm, and Mankato. For other readers, however, the story is too painful to bear. Rape and mutilation, of children as well as women, brutal and wanton killing, the scalping of the body of a buried child, and a frontier missionary killed and his heart eaten slice by slice by the Sioux who had shot him to death. Scarlet Plume is the sort of book one has to put down from time to time in order to pick it up again. The shocks in the first half and at the end come too close together, the horror is too intense, too prolonged to be borne.
    My own first reading of Scarlet Plume shortly after it appeared was a mixture of delight and pain, made more poignant by the fact that many years before, I had lived for a time on the shore of Lake Shetek without ever knowing the story of the 1862 Uprising. I had swum in its waters every day for seven summers and had passed the strange, weed-concealed monument at its east end without knowing whom it commemorated. No one at the camp where I worked knew the story—or cared. It was simply a distant rumor. Once, late at night, I tried to create an atrocity story, but it had no more substance that the last flicker of the nearly dead campfire, and the little scouts huddled about it were nearly asleep and clearly bored. With the publication of Scarlet Plume those hints of stories hiding behind that monument took on a vivid new life. Too late for campfire tales by twenty years, too powerful, too, even for boy scouts, around a campfire, late at night along the shore of Lake Shetek, Skywater.
    It may be, as Robert C. Wright believes,