Indian Story

MORNING LIGHT--Frank B. Linderman --Day ($2).

First published eight years ago by Scribner, under the title Lige Mounts: Free Trapper, this commendable novel tells of the making of a frontiersman, rather than the life of one. Its distinction does not lie in the story, which is adequate but not unusual: Lige, aged 19 in 1822, is caught up in the frontier enthusiasm, joins three companions in St. Louis, goes up the Missouri to the Yellowstone and on up to the Marias for a winter's trapping. One of the men is killed in a brush with the Gros Ventre Indians, the other two in a battle with the Blackfeet, who were stirred into hostility by Hudson's Bay men in a trapping war and defeated only by the aid of the friendly Crees. "Dad," the last of the trio to die, confesses to a shooting with which Lige was charged and advises Lige to leave the plains while he may. But Lige stays the winter with the Crees. After a trip southward and a disillusionment with civilization, by way of two robberies and a spree, he goes back to the Marias again, where there is more sky and a sweet Cree girl awaiting him. What lifts it out of the genre of Western stories is the sketching of the old Indian-surrounded life, especially the portraiture of northern Indians. Even if the girl Bluebird waxes Whitmanesque and thus goes slightly out of focus, the rest is an authentic presentation of poetic, finely balanced characters living a splendidly proportioned life, a life now traceable only in the files of the Indian Reports and a very few perceptive studies such as this.

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