Scarlet Plume, Second Edition Read Online Free PDF Page B

that Scarlet Plume —and Conquering Horse —“get at universal truths and move people’s hearts toward reconciliation” and therefore should be “cherished as instruments of peace.” 2 Certainly the continuing sale of the Buckskin Man Tales and other of Manfred’s novels is an encouraging sign. That he has gained wide acceptance among Sioux Indians as a sympathetic storyteller continues to be demonstrated. In 1980, for example, he was invited to Pine Ridge to talk about Conquering Horse . When he had finished, an old Indian who had read the book arose and announced to the assembly: “We thank Wakantanka [God] for bringing Frederick Manfred to our country to tell us how we used to live.”
    Even more hopeful, perhaps, is Manfred’s current work. Siouxland Saga will cover a century of history in Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota, from the Sioux Uprising of 1862 until the present, stretching over four generations. Some of the characters in the new work have been talking to Manfred for forty years, waiting for him to tell their story. If Frederick Feikema Manfred listens closely enough, perhaps Siouxland Saga will be the bridge that ties the Buckskin Man Tales to the farm novels— The Golden Bowl and This Is the Year —that unites Manfred’s own twentieth-century experiences, growing to maturity in Siouxland, with those of the buckskin men of the preceding two centuries. That, as a matter of fact, was what he was aiming for all along, to find the spiritual roots of the land that had nourished him to intellectual ripeness, to know the other men and women of Siouxland so that he could come to know himself.
    Notes
    1. Conversations with Frederick Manfred , moderated by John R. Milton, with a foreword by Wallace Stegner (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1974), p. 68.
    2. Robert C. Wright, Frederick Manfred , Twayne’s United States Authors Series, no. 336 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), p. 76.

D EAR D AVID M C D OWELL —
    The import of this book may seem shocking to some people—still it is a book written in love, since it has always been my belief that if one wishes to speak with truth in the brain one must speak with love in the heart.
    My friend, if I have achieved this, I offer it all to you.
    F REDERICK

O NE rather handsome woman among them had become so infatuated with the redskin who had taken her for a wife that, although her white husband was still living at some point below and had been in search of her, she declared that were it not for her children, she would not leave her red lover. . . .
    The woman I wrote you of yesterday threatens that if her Indian, who is among those who have been seized, should be hung, she will shoot those of us who have been instrumental in bringing him to the scaffold, and then go back among the Indians. A pretty specimen of a white woman she is, truly. . . .
    I learn that Mrs.——, of whom I wrote you, is displeased because I did not call to see her more frequently and will not interpose my authority in behalf of her Indian friend, who stands a fair chance of swinging. . . .
    —G ENERAL H ENRY R. S IBLEY , Letters to His Wife

PART ONE
    Skywater
    A family of wild swans skimmed across Skywater. Something had disturbed them. Father swan was swimming a zigzag course in the rear and trumpeting hoarse warnings, mother swan was breasting the water up front and dipping her long neck from side to side, and four baby swans, two to each side, were holding up the edges of a swiftly cutting arrowhead. Father and mother were pure white, with a wash of rust over the raised high head; the little ones were an ashen gray, also with rusty heads. Except for the spreading wakes of the hurrying swans, the glistening lake was as smooth as the pupil of an eye. The trumpeter swans headed straight for an island; after a moment vanished behind it.
    Presently, after the wakes had also vanished, natural sounds returned. A woodpecker worked in the scrub oaks along the shore. Redwing