The Book of Dreams

Forget Annie Oakley. Forget the attack on the Deadwood Stage. The Battle of Little Bighorn was the real showstopper. No one had ever seen a spectacle like this before: the 7th Cavalry with Custer in the lead, Indians rushing to meet them, the war cries, the gun shots, the screams of outnumbered men and then the silence, the blue sea of bodies lying motionless in the dirt, a pony nosing among the dead. When Buffalo Bill walked out to survey the carnage, he rewrote history just by being there, and the Indians--who had slipped out back to smoke and wait for a scene change--were marked. Their savagery filled the tent like some terrible thrill.

Thomas Curwen is the deputy editor of Book Review.

It wasn’t true, of course. William Cody was nowhere near the Little Bighorn at the time Custer made his last stand in 1876, and the Indians themselves disappeared a year later, riding with Crazy Horse from the Powder River to their slow deaths at Ft. Robinson and beyond. But little did this matter to Cody’s audience. When fact and sentiment collide, truth is shattered. Such was the drama of the show and the tragedy and tension that underlie James Welch’s novel, “The Heartsong of Charging Elk.”

The year is 1889. Charging Elk, an Oglala Sioux, wakes up from days of dreamy delirium in an infirmary in the South of France. The room is dark; he understands no one. He’d been performing with the Wild West Show in Europe for almost six months when he’d come down with the flu during an appearance in Marseilles. He’d been on horse back, chasing a buffalo, and had taken a spill, broken a couple of ribs. Now he’s recovering, his mind swimming in this strange new world with memories of that ride to Ft. Robinson 12 years before, of his teenage years living outside the reservation, of his audition for Cody, the train across the country, the boat across the Atlantic.

The source of this story, Welch tells us, was an Indian called Featherman, who’d gone to Europe with Cody’s show the year of the Universal Exposition in Paris. He died in the hospital, but Charging Elk survives, slipping out of the sickroom and into the streets of Marseilles, forgotten by the show, which has moved on to Italy, forced to fend for himself with only his ceremonial songs to accompany him.

It’s a familiar story--a stranger in a strange land--but Welch takes the conceit one step further, creating a Wild West show of his own, a drama Cody never considered. What became of the Indians after their surrender at Ft. Robinson? Where did they go once they were denied their land, religion and language, after the last ghost dance and Wounded Knee in 1890 and as the 20th century began to tear into them? Other writers have plowed this ground, but Welch finds his answers in a vivid historical context that allows him to focus on the distance between what-was and what-is.

Bookended by the first and last tours of the Wild West Show in the South of France in 1889 and 1905, the novel depicts the world of the Oglala through the mind of Charging Elk and the impressions of the people around him. Trapped in this country without passport or money, he is unavoidable: tall, long-haired, dark-skinned. Welch builds his plot by throwing into orbit around him a number of richly imagined characters: the police chief and his sergeant who detain him on charges of vagrancy; the American vice-consul who tries to repatriate him; the journalist who sees his career in the story; the family that takes him in; and others he meets later on his journey: the prostitute Marie, the convict Causeret and the farmer and his daughter Nathalie.

With a deceptively simple story line hinged on a murder, Welch succeeds in developing Charging Elk as an individual and--not without irony--as some thing to be preserved less for his own worth than for the white man’s curiosity and moral salvage. As Cody rewrote the history of the Little Bighorn, the French draw conclusions for their own convenience about the meaning of Charging Elk’s life and their own. He should be back in America, the journalist writes, “riding gaily across the plains of his beloved Dakota, hunting and fishing with his comrades, or perhaps married to a comely squaw and settled into a productive life of raising papooses and corn.”

Let the French struggle to understand this stranger in their midst; it is his curious, guarded innocence--as he sees pigeons or an octopus for the first time or grows accustomed to working a six-day week in a soap factory--that creates the most compelling and tense narrative. Transformed in stages from enemy to noble savage and citizen, he plays a number of roles: prisoner, factory worker, farmer, stevedore. But none is more haunting than the homesick and homeless man that he is, a man both connected and disconnected to the world he walks in, someone who, while watching a snowfall, is transported to the Badlands or while sitting in a courtroom, reflects on tribal notions of good and evil.

“The Heartsong of Charging Elk” is as much a book of memories as it is a story of survival. As Charging Elk himself wonders about the meaning of his fate, he imagines a world in which “his mother [is] beading or standing at her iron stove, his father sunning himself with the other men or perhaps riding High Runner for the pleasure of it; [his best friend] planting potatoes and surrounded by his own children . . . living in his own country, watching the same sun rise every day, the familiar animals. . . .” It is of course a fantasy; the truth is nothing he can know. Welch reveals the tragedy of the Oglala through Charging Elk’s dream life in which he learns about the massacre back home and ensuing clampdown.

Soon after the Little Bighorn, the last ghost dance and Wounded Knee, ethnographers believed that the Indians would soon vanish. Cody first put them and their endangered world on display, and the machinery of popular culture has kept them there. Political correctness has tempered the terms of our wonder. War whoops and savagery have been replaced by blessings of sage, fry bread and dream catchers. Both are, of course, worlds stuck in amber.

The Indians didn’t vanish. They shape-shifted into something more difficult to capture. We see glimpses of it in the photographs of the time, in the faces of the boys sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania and in the faces Edward Curtis captured in his monumental work. It is Welch’s achievement to show what lies behind their expressions through the experience of Charging Elk as he is posed in the pages of this evocative novel.