![]() Along the way, he scouts for George Custer, irritates Wyatt Earp, and cheats Wild Bill Hickok at cards. This is a shaggy dog, with Jack Crabb a 19th century Forrest Gump who somehow finds himself witnessing the most famous events of the American West: the Battle of the Solomon Fork the Washita Massacre and the Battle of the Little Big Horn. But Berger has no interest in a simple three-act story. Its conceit is that it is the first-person reminisces of 111 year-old Jack Crabb, who at a young age, became a ward of the Cheyenne. To be sure, Little Big Man is a fictional take on the Captivity Narrative. ![]() When you read the reminisces of – for instance – Hannah Duston, who was captured by the Abenaki, saw her small child killed before her eyes, and later picked up a tomahawk for payback, you see not only a grim tale of survival, but an obvious pretense for the actions of Europeans.īerger eschews this completely. They arrived in print with a clean storytelling arc, and explored themes that haunted the settlers who arrived uninvited on these shores. The thing about Captivity Narratives is that despite being sold as a raw experience, they were often premeditatively formed into a lesson (especially in the hands of the Mathers). It refuses to be any one thing, which can be both maddening and appealing, all at once. Thomas Berger’s take on the Captivity Narrative, Little Big Man, certainly beats all. There are coming-of-age stories (think The Son), vengeance stories (think Hannah Duston or The Searchers), and the occasional white man who finds his true self among the Indians stories ( Dances With Wolves). Other times they’ve been used for propaganda. Sometimes they have a theological message. Over time, Captivity Narratives have taken many different forms. Increase and Cotton Mather often took time off from spreading their particular form of hyper-violent, sexually repressed Puritanism to package these kinds of tales into religious tracts. Stories about white men, women, and children taken by the Indians have been told on these shores since long before the United States came into existence. There’s nothing quite like it, anywhere else. For what it’s worth – not much, I allow – I happen to agree. Smarter people than I have noted that the Captivity Narrative is America’s first indigenous literary genre. Every so often, however, a person taken would be returned, either through escape or ransom, and from this experience which – leaving everything else aside – would have been traumatic, sprang a new kind of book: the Captivity Narrative. Often, the captives taken by Indians would disappear forever, adopted into the tribe that took them. While an extension of their traditional modes of warfare – partially to offset high infant mortality and low birthrates – this tactic was unique to the European invaders, and made a commensurately powerful impact on their psyches. In the warfare that attended this displacement, the indigenous peoples – inaptly described as “Indians,” a name that has stuck – often took captives from the white interlopers. Wars followed, and broken treaties, and shifting alliances, and a steady retreat by the indigenous peoples toward the west, away from the newcomers with the guns and the buckled hats and the insatiable need for more land. The resulting clash has been defined by many terms, but it was first and foremost a tragedy of clashing cultures, with one culture – the visitors – being quite insistent on domination. For years beyond counting, they lived on this continent, spreading out over its vastness, forming into communities, fighting wars, marking out territories, and generally living their lives.Īt some point after 1492, they had to contend with new visitors arriving in boats, with guns and buckled hats. Once upon a time, many, many years ago, people crossed over a land bridge from Asia and populated the North American continent. The ammunition rested in that pouch under Digging Bear’s body, some fifty yards of galloping cavalry from where I lay…” Around the lodge I kept it unloaded in case them children got to tinkering. At such a time you see no like betwixt yourself and enemy, be he your brother by blood or usage. No, I would have dropped them troopers without mercy had I the wherewithal to do it: they was ravaging my home, had killed two of my women, and because of them my dearest wife and newborn boy lay in uttermost jeopardy. ![]() I had not yet fired my piece, but not because of delicacy. “The cavalry pounded in among the lodges now, the band still playing out in the open valley where they rested.
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