A Blending of Two Cultures : JENNY OF THE TETONS <i> by Kristiana Gregory (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $13.95; 119 pp.) </i>

Kristiana Gregory’s first novel, “Jenny of the Tetons,” fictionalizes the accounts left behind by a semi-literate Englishman, Richard “Beaver Dick” Leigh. Leigh was a guide and trapper who late in life led parties of prominent Easterners, such as Theodore Roosevelt, through Teton Valley and Jackson Hole country.

The novel portrays his family life in the 1870s with his Shoshone wife, Jenny, and their six children, and the arrival of 15-year-old Carrie Hill, whom they believe to be the sole survivor of an Indian attack upon a wagon train. Given a home by the trapper, Carrie is predictably appalled to find that his wife is of the enemy: “My parents would be kicking the dirt from their graves if they knew I was living with a native and a mountain man, no school or church in sight.” Also predictably, Carrie is won over by Jenny, whose perfection diminishes her portrayal. Carrie’s own history is inserted in an italicized flashback. Jenny’s is more forcefully told in her shared memory of the massacre that has robbed her of her family too.

In a wandering, hardscrabble household, the blending of two cultures is idealized but not sanitized. Beaver Dick is so ripe a mountain man that “if he fell asleep, his clothes could probably walk him home without waking him.” But he reads Dickens and “Alice in Wonderland” to the family while Jenny moves them through a nomadic existence with inherited knowledge: “When we left, the campsite always looked exactly as it had when we’d first arrived: undisturbed. She simply wanted to pass through without a trace, like geese passing overhead on a southward flight.”

The author takes on the daunting task of re-creating without cliches a landscape that dwarfs humankind and where only specialists in brute survival can expect to live through the winter. But there are modern implications: young felons “eating cobbler in a jail cell, probably telling each other jokes,” while their victim lies dead. There’s a hint here to remind us that the Idaho Territory lives on in Central Park and East L.A.

The text of each chapter is taken from Beaver Dick’s actual letters and diary entries. They speak with rough authenticity hard for fiction to equal, and they lead the narrative in too many directions. The Leighs’ young children are little characterized or differentiated. Still, when the last child is born dead in a catalogue of woes that overtakes the family, the eyes sting at a handful of words that create the scene.

While the author retrieves from tragedy her fictional Carrie with a marriage-and-happy-ever-after ending telegraphed from the first chapter, the strength of the writing lies in its research and the underplayed description of unqualified sorrow. The book begins to work when the author’s hushed prose meshes with Beaver Dick’s own words:

“oh i wosh i could give to the world my experance in indian life and the rocky mountins so thay could understand it but i lack education to do it myself”

There’s a strong whiff of the textbook in this, the second in Harcourt’s “Great Episodes” historical-fiction series. Opposite the title page is a grainy, evocative photo of the Leighs outside their tepee. Simplified maps appear throughout, and the book is bracketed by an author’s note and epilogue. But this is a story potentially strong enough to stand unaided.