Indian horse culture stands out in Western story

Page 10

Sun on the Mountains, Book 1

The Story of Blue Eye

Tyler Trafford

Thistledown Press Ltd., 2004

$18.95; 349 pp. (sc)

Not since I devoured saga after saga by that great chronicler of the American West, Zane Grey, 45 years ago have I enjoyed a story of the wide open spaces so much.

Canadian author Tyler Trafford's first Sun on the Mountains series novel set in our own unique 19th century Prairie landscape fills two voids that Grey, as wonderful a writer as he was, could not. Back then, I wondered why we didn't have any stories about the Canadian West as good as the ones Grey wrote. Now, with publication of The Story of Blue Eye, we do, and I hope Trafford follows with another absorbing and meticulously researched Western adventure novel soon.

I also used to wonder why Indians never got to be the main characters in Grey's books, blissfully unaware as I was back then of social mores spilling over into the publishing trade. Who could have known I'd eventually see a writer as good as Trafford step up to the plate and fill that void too.

Trafford has produced a first-rate and historically accurate depiction of Plains Indian horse culture that, while it spans the 49th parallel, is unabashedly centred on the Bow River area of Alberta. When the story begins, Blue Eye is 16. He is the grandson of a white Quaker fur trader and a Nahathaway woman who establish the Sun On The Mountains trading post on the bank of the Bow River facing the Rocky Mountains. Blue Eye's mother, Hannah, and a Piikani man named Grey Horse raise extremely fast horses they call runners that are eagerly sought after by buffalo hunters.

The story is about Blue Eye's epic journey against a backdrop of violent and changing times to try to preserve that way of life.

Grey, who died in 1939, was considered to be respectful, for the times in which he wrote, of Indigenous people who were characters in his stories. He wrote about them sympathetically, casting them as oppressed by whites. But the thrust of his work was cowboy culture and the oft-glorified Code of the West. Ranchers, Mormon settlers and gunslingers got top billing.

He stretched the boundaries of what was acceptable to publish in the 1920s when he wrote The Vanishing American. That novel exposed U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs corruption and it created a Navajo athletic hero who was supposed to marry the white heroine in the end. Under pressure from his publisher, however, Grey rewrote the ending to have his hero die of influenza rather than marry outside his race.

Trafford's modern tale, on the other hand, acknowledges both prejudice and co-operation on all sides of the multi-race equation. It reflects Indigenous heroism and Quaker gentleness in tandem, as he writes entirely free of the constraints Grey faced.

The Story of Blue Eye fits a coming-of-age designation for Canadian fiction. The Piikani Nation steeped in horse trading and racing enters centre stage on page one. Throughout, we see Blackfoot, Cree, Assiniboin, and Metis in conflict with the newcomers and with each other, but they dominate rather than play bit parts in the rugged and still-wild terrain of Trafford's novel. Encroachment by the Hudson's Bay Company, the railroad and the Dominion of Canada creates the necessary shadows on the landscape that make this dramatic fictionalized history a success. In addition, places such as Fort Edmonton, the Saskatchewan River and Cypress Hills did not have to be disguised as American locales for the book to be published, as would have happened if Trafford had been a contemporary of Grey's.

Trafford doesn't trade reality for a happy ending, though, such as might have happened in a Zane Grey novel. In 1877, the Blackfoot tribe signed a treaty committing the tribes to a life on reserves:

"The Canadian Pacific Railway's steel tracks and steam engines reached Sun On The Mountains in 1883. Surveyors measured the prairie, hammering in pegs to mark townships, sections and a ton. Railway agents in offices sold squares of land marked neatly on a map.

"Nobody needed a fast buffalo runner."