Overview
At the heart of Robert F. Jones's galloping new novel is the near decimation of America's vast buffalo herd, which triggered the last and bloodiest Indian War in history. Left homeless by the panic of 1873, thousands of Americans like Jenny Dousmann headed West to recoup their fortunes in buffalo hides and bones. After joining her older brother, Otto, on the Buffalo Range, along with McKay, a Confederate veteran who blames himself for the death of Stonewall Jackson, Jenny is brutally raped, and her brother is crippled during a blizzard. A half-breed Cheyenne, Two Shields, leads them north into the Big Horn Mountains to salvage their lives among his People. Now known as Yellow-Haired Woman and the Wolf Chief, Jenny and Otto join Two Shields on a quest for vengeance. A riveting adventure story, at once savage and lyrical, Tie My Bones to Her Back is a searing indictment of ecological folly and historical revisionism, and a disturbing foray into the nature of violence.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
It would be hard to find a more brutal and unsentimental portrait of the American West than the one offered in this bleak yet beautifully written novel, Jones's sixth (after Blood Tide, 1990). In 1873, after the suicides of her parents, German immigrants in Wisconsin whose farm was about to go into foreclosure, gutsy, sharp-shooting Jenny Dousmann takes to the Great Plains with her buffalo-hunting brother, Otto. He follows the herds with his partner, Raleigh McKay (a Confederate Civil War veteran whose bullet killed Stonewall Jackson), and two assistants, one a Cheyenne half-breed named Tom Shields. Jenny's experiences on the Plains include rape, after one of the men brings back a false report of Otto's death; an escape into a blizzard in which she's reunited with Otto and saved by a bloody buffalo carcass; and a growing respect and love for Tom, whose people she and Otto will eventually join. A climactic confrontation pits Raleigh, now a guide for foppish English game hunters, against a group of Cheyenne, accompanied by Tom, Otto and Jenny. Savagery rules the narrative: there are graphic depictions of scalpings and other mutilations, and Jones's chapters on the buffalo hunters deliver a powerful vision of greedy and wasteful government-sanctioned destruction of the natural world as white hunters litter the landscape with skinned, rotting bodies. This is elemental storytelling, populated by richly drawn characters and propelled by language that has the force and accuracy of a Cheyenne warrior's arrowhead. (July)Wes Lukowsky
A victim of the panic of 1873, Jenny Dousmann travels west to live with her brother, Otto, and earn a living in the buffalo trade. But the herds are dwindling, and Jenny and Otto can barely survive. Then Jenny is raped by two U.S. soldiers, and Otto is crippled badly in a blizzard. Only when the pair are befriended by a Cheyenne brave does a ray of hope emerge. But even survival has its price: Jenny and Otto must leave their lives behind and become members of the tribe. They learn to hunt the Indian way, to live the Indians' simple life, and to understand and accept the tribal culture. Jenny also crosses paths with one of the men who raped her, but this time the encounter is of a very different sort. This is a tough, uncompromising look at pioneer lives and the often soul-searing cost of survival. Jenny Dousmann is one of the more memorable protagonists in recent western fiction. Her ever-increasing courage and self-reliance are the key elements in a beautifully rendered metamorphosis.Edward Neuert
Write an historical novel and you start out with what seems to be, to your average ink-stained wretch, a decent creative bonus: you get to do research. (Chair time in libraries, and querying experts, can beat staring at the blinking cursor waiting for inspiration to strike.) But, as fun as fact-collection can be, it exacts a price; when the words finally hit the page you have to be careful that the information knows its place, and doesn't battle to overcome the author's imagination. That's a fight you can feel raging as an undercurrent to Robert F. Jones's Tie My Bones to Her Back, and the outcome decides the fate of this novel.There's no doubt Jones can write a taut scene, and the opening of this book -- when Jenny Dousmann, a Wisconsin farmgirl, wakes one morning in 1873 to encounter in quick succession the suicide of both her parents -- has a riveting, laconic tone; a kind of horrible quietness lays over it. That event leads Jenny to join her brother Otto, a Union soldier turned buffalo hunter, on a trek through the great West, "a vast reach of country nibbled at only feebly by the main-chancers and the desperate." There she becomes a part of the awesome annihilation of the American bison (an anything but feeble nibbling), suffers greatly at the hands of some despicable hunters and, along with Otto, is nearly done in by a mammoth winter storm. Surviving it, she and her brother seek refuge with a tribe of Indians and become stalkers of buffalo hunters, barbed-wire salesmen, and anyone else who destroys the wide-open spirit of the plains.
You learn a lot about the American West here. Great gobs of fact come hurtling at you like charging quadrupeds. No gun is fired whose caliber, ammunition, and decoration is not lovingly described, and many other Facts of the Great West are examined in detail. But amid all this veracity, fiction suffers, and the book's characters are given short shrift. Jones seems to hold back from asking Jenny and Otto why they become killers of their own people, and a stance that started out laconic plays out as plain emptiness. You finish this novel feeling like you've encountered the dry, sun-bleached skeleton of one of the slaughtered buffalo: hints of greatness abound, but the magnificent beast is elsewhere. --Salon
Kirkus Reviews
Jones favors vividly observed wilderness settings for his fiction (Blood Tide, 1990, etc.), and this latest novel is no exception. It's set in the American West during the last days of the old frontier—when the slaughter of buffalo is ending one way of life to make room for another.In Wisconsin in 1873, Jenny Dousmann awakens one morning to a life radically altered by the nation's financial panic, as her mother follows her father in suicide at the threat of losing their farm. Her buffalo-hunting brother Otto comes home to settle family affairs, and Jenny decides to return west with him, unmoved by warnings of danger and deprivation. Joining him, his partner Raleigh, and their two skinners—the half-breed Tom and the southern cracker Milo—as the camp cook, she's content with her new lot until fate intervenes. Milo and Otto are attacked by Indians, but the southerner runs, returning to camp with a tale of Otto's death. Then Jenny saves Tom's life when the white men turn on him, only to be raped by them when he escapes. She rides off to search for Otto, finding him alive just before a howling blizzard descends; afterward, he's saved from death only when Tom persuades his Indian friends to take severely frostbitten Otto to an Army fort for care. He loses an arm, and his will to live, but Jenny takes him with her to stay with Tom's people, the Cheyenne, with whom she and Otto find respect and a new life. On a mission to sacred Buffalo Butte to save the buffalo, they encounter Raleigh and Milo, now serving as guides to a foppish English nobleman and his entourage, and old scores are settled with bloody finality.
No major variations here on the noble savage theme, and no significant depth of character, but substantial research and sharp detail give this an arresting authenticity.