Grass Heart
The fate of the Mandan Amerindians (the ‘White Indians,’ also once thought to be migrant Welsh) of the upper Missouri River makes up one of the classic cases of the horrible effect of a white man’s disease – here smallpox – on a Native American people, so when we identify the scene and the 1830s we know that a human disaster will inevitably follow. The Mandan heroine, Grass Heart, has a dramatic (and occasionally comic) emotional life; she falls in love with a “warrior” who becomes a berdache – a female impersonator (whom Walsh unfortunately gives drag-queen mannerisms) – then she marries a completely unsatisfactory man, is captured and carried off by a Lakota, and finally finds surcease with a sexy Cheyenne warrior, all this before she is eighteen years old. But the center of her existence is her father, Good Plume, and when the fatal epidemic strikes, and she tries to protect him, she becomes part of a sequence of events of near-epic intensity and duration.
Walsh creates some good and complex characters; her savages are neither noble nor bestial, and the white actors, while seldom very admirable, are not caricatured. Her re-creation of the great river in its seasons, as its permanence contrasts with those who lived or died on it, or came to it to trade and explore, is easily and sometimes brilliantly done. This is not a great novel of the West, but an emphatic, if sometimes carelessly written work of well-combined history and imagination. The author seldom puts a fictional foot wrong, and builds toward a solid, believable (if slightly melodramatic) ending.
