Culture Clash 19th century style

A Woman of the People
by Benjamin Capps

A story of a girl whose family was massacred by the Comanche in Texas; she and her little sister were taken as slaves and ended up living as Comanches for the rest of their lives. For most of the book the girl's thoughts are consumed with plans for escape--she works hard to be trusted, learns to live from the land, practices running fast the better to run away...but the People treat her as one of her own, until at the end, maybe she is.

This is a work of fiction and while it seems to parallel the sad story of Cynthia Ann Parker, the author deliberately did not read a history of her capture until after he wrote this. He did his research and he clearly knows the lands and the times--he's known as "one of our country's most respected writers of Western Americana"--and in this tale he attempts to put himself in the mind of a 10-year-old girl growing into a woman.

He got it. It's an awesome story. The writing is flat, unemotional as newspaper prose, and sometimes it's easy to put down--until he does this:

The sounds of locusts in the late sumemr nights were a thing one did not hear without listening for them. They were there for a lonely person: high and keen, low and buzzy, many of them. Some of them came in broken chirps, even and patient and never-ending. Others were a constant, steady background from all directions. Behind the clear sounds were others, more distant. Behind those, still others so far away and faint that they seemed not so much insect sounds as a sigh of the living earth itself. Sounding of locusts was like standing of grass, or spreading of sunlight, or moving of leaves, or blowing of wind, a thing that went everywhere far out across the boundless land and lay ready before the People for them to feel wherever they went; or before such a one who was lonely, for her to feel whenever a quiet time came. It was a help, a familiar thing, a source of wonder. For her thoughts could not follow them to their end; they spread on forever, to strange people, as far as the endless earth herself.

The ending, when Tehanita and Burning Hand have a long talk about white people and their mysterious ways, is shocking. Just a snippet,

Listen, a long time ago the Indian saw the white man coming with wagons, and he said there's a fool, because a wagon is too wide to follow a buffalo trail. But what does the white man do? He makes the trail wider and smooths the rough places; then he carries as much with six horses as we carry with thirty.

Will we ever learn to live in harmony with the land? Is it even possible?