Chief Loco: Apache Peacemaker

In The Native Ground, Kathleen DuVal argues that it was Indians rather than European would-be colonizers who were more often able to determine the form and content of the relations between the two groups. Along the banks of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, far from Paris, Madrid, and London, European colonialism met neither accommodation nor resistance but incorporation. Rather than being colonized, Indians drew European empires into local patterns of land and resource allocation, sustenance, goods exchange, gender relations, diplomacy, and warfare. Placing Indians at the center of the story, DuVal shows both their diversity and our contemporary tendency to exaggerate the influence of Europeans in places far from their centers of power. Europeans were often more dependent on Indians than Indians were on them.

Now the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, this native ground was originally populated by indigenous peoples, became part of the French and Spanish empires, and in 1803 was bought by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. Drawing on archaeology and oral history, as well as documents in English, French, and Spanish, DuVal chronicles the successive migrations of Indians and Europeans to the area from precolonial times through the 1820s. These myriad native groups—Mississippians, Quapaws, Osages, Chickasaws, Caddos, and Cherokees—and the waves of Europeans all competed with one another for control of the region.

Only in the nineteenth century did outsiders initiate a future in which one people would claim exclusive ownership of the mid-continent. After the War of 1812, these settlers came in numbers large enough to overwhelm the region's inhabitants and reject the early patterns of cross-cultural interdependence. As citizens of the United States, they persuaded the federal government to muster its resources on behalf of their dreams of landholding and citizenship.

With keen insight and broad vision, Kathleen DuVal retells the story of Indian and European contact in a more complex and, ultimately, more satisfactory way.

Massai walked back to New Mexico without being detected, stole a Mescalero woman, who bore him five children. Massai and his family roamed, raided and killed as free Indians in New Mexico and Arizona Territories as well as Mexico. In 1906, cowboys finally killed him and cremated his body.

Sin Killer

It is 1830, the dawn of a new era in America's growth, when Lord and Lady Berrybender embark on a journey up the Missouri River to explore the frontier and to broaden the horizons of their children: Tasmin, a budding young woman of grit, beauty, and determination, her vivacious and difficult sister, and her brother. As they journey by rough stages up the Missouri, they meet with all the dangers, difficulties, beauties, and temptations of the untamed West. For Tasmin, these temptations include Jim Snow, a frontiersman, ferocious Indian fighter, and part-time preacher known up and down the Missouri as "the Sin Killer."

The Wandering Hill

Abandoning their luxurious steamer, which is stuck in the ice near the Knife River, the Berrybenders make their way overland to the confluence of the Missouri and the Yellowstone rivers to spend the winter in conditions of siege at the trading post of Pierre Boisdeffre. By now, Tasmin is a married woman, or as good as, living with the elusive young mountain man Jim Snow, pregnant with his child and about to discover that he has secrets he hasn't told her. For his part, Jim is about to discover that in taking the outspoken, tough-minded, stubbornly practical young aristocratic woman into his teepee he has bitten off more than he can chew...

By Sorrow's River

The Berrybender party once again takes to the trail, across the endless Great Plains of the West towards Santa Fe, where they intend—those who are lucky enough to survive the journey—to spend the winter. Along the way, they meet up with a varied cast of characters from the history of the West—Kit Carson, the famous scout; Le Partezon, the fearsome Sioux war chief; two aristocratic Frenchmen whose eccentric aim is to cross the Great Plains by hot air balloon; a band of raiding Pawnee; and many other astonishing characters who prove once again that the rolling, grassy plains are not, in fact, nearly as empty of life as they look.

Folly and Glory