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Book Blurb:
In Autumn of 1860, twenty-four-year-old Chaska, a member of the Ute Nation, is beginning to see the effects of the Americans trespassing on her tribe’s land. The mother of three young girls just wants to raise her children in the Ute ways as her own mother taught her. Instead, she is faced with one challenge after another as her family’s camps are destroyed, their water is poisoned, and their food supply is diminished. Miner, trappers, and traders, who once simply passed through the Ute lands are now settling down and building towns.
“Why do they call us Natives, but don’t consider us the owners of the land?” Chaska asks of the Americans who seek to drive her tribe into extinction.
The story takes place wholly in Colorado where seven bands of Ute―the Mouche, Capote, Weeminuche, Tabaquache, Grandriver, Uintah, and Yampa―live as nomads traveling high up on the Rocky Mountains down into the plains. Each family unit hunts and gathers only what is necessary to sustain them. In the winter, the bands come together to live out the cold, snowy months sharing stories and preparing the warmer months.
By 1868, the Utes are forced to give up much of the ancestral land, signing it over to America in an agreement often called the Kit Carson treaty. In exchange, the Ute retain land that encompasses two million acres, or almost half of Colorado state.
Quintessential frontiersman Kit Carson provides the reader with the American side of the movement west, detailing how and why it was important for the country to expand to the Pacific. In certain circles, Carson is rumored to have killed more Native Americans as a trapper and Indian agent than anyone else of his time.
Once the tribe is forced onto the reservation, none are not allowed to continue their nomadic ways. If there could be a silver lining, it is the flat, open field used to race their beloved ponies. That is, until Father Meeker arrives.
Editorial Review:
The wind picks up again, carrying with it a sense of hopelessness. Ahwatt thoughtlessly swats at the wind, trying to make it go away. We have done nothing wrong except live our lives. These people come here thinking the land is wide open, theirs to take. It’s uncontrollable... yet we must find a way to survive. We both just want peace but have vastly different ideas of how to manage that.
“Struggling Towards Hope” is a entwining story of two unlikely main characters – a strong Ute Indian woman named Chaska, and the legendary frontiersman, Kit Carson. First and foremost, this is a story of greed, the same greed depicted throughout history, only this time it is wielded by the surging pioneers making their way across the West, eating up the land as quickly as blood eats up a fresh bleached cotton shirt. Yet, through the eyes of a young mother and wife, Chaska reveals the utter loss of her way of life, the disappearance of not only the culture, the language, the traditions, but also the horrific and insensible slaughter of her people and the buffalo herds. All for what? For foreigners to come in and claim what was not theirs to take.
At the outset, the journey of her tribe from camp to camp as they moved according to the season, was fraught with danger as they feared the settlers whom they called merikac, or ‘Americans’. For hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years their footpaths mingled with those of their ancestors, on dirt paths zigzagging through the mountains to the plains – with no disturbance, and the peace they felt linked them to nature, to all the elements. Their way of life and their tradition was their religion.
The story goes back and forth between Chaska’s story and Kit’s, and finally mingling them when Chaska discovers Kit half-dead in a cactus patch. She takes him back to the camp, determined to help him recover and with a sense that forming a bond with him will help her people come to an accord with the merikac. Her brother, who leads the Ute, has his own thoughts about the encroaching landgrabbers.
Kit’s story is quite different from the heroic frontiersman he was made out to be, and I tend to believe he was far more like Ms Close’s rendition than those dime-store novels which made him so famous. His story begins after he has ran away from home at sixteen to become a mountain man and trapper in the West, yet his size (thus his name ‘Kit’) hindered him from becoming the man he wanted to become. After a fall from his horse in the desert, he is rescued by the Ute woman, Chaska, and so begins his lifelong love/hate relationship with the Indians.
Often times, I felt a little uncertain about his feelings, a little see-sawing of his character from loving them so much that he marries into the tribe, to the utter hatred to the point that he wanted them all wiped out of history. In truth, I never fully engaged with his character, more so from not liking him than from any fault of Ms Close to enliven him on the page. I suppose me not liking him as a reader shows the author’s finesse at fleshing out his character to that point.
The character I really liked, and engaged with was Taos, Kit’s horse, and the interactions between the two was delightful and showed the rare connection many cowboys had with their trusty steeds.
This story truly is a journey of two separate individuals – one trying to find himself in the vast openness of the Wild West; and the other trying to cling to what she already knows.
I also enjoyed Kit’s association with Fremont when he is wrangled into helping the man along one of his expeditions, and thought this passage really showed Ms Close’s skill as an author to paint a picture for the reader.
One of the best things about scouting for Fremont is the chance it gives Kit to keep an eye on the Utes.... One of the worst things about scouting for Fremont is the man himself. His demands verge on the ridiculous.... Delicate map-making instruments must be unpacked and carefully set down on polished mahogany tables Fremont has brought in his wagon.... the man is as delicate as his precious instruments..... The men joke he’s just a mail-order cowboy. Those assigned to the march are all seasoned frontiersmen, capable of standing on their own if need be. Fremont is an entirely different story. “That Fremont, he’d be better as a porch-percher than an expeditioner.”
What happens with Chaska and her tribe is as unsettling as what happened to the Jews under Nazi oppression. Assimilation or eradication - those were the only two choices for the Native Americans – and when Kit is party to herding the Indians into reservations despite any former connection he might have had to Chaska and her people, the result is devastating. Ms Close’s book shows the raw and real pain imposed upon the Indians, who were hunters, who honored the land, and who relied on their way of life to survive. When gone, when there was nothing left but hopelessness and starvation... well, just read this story and you will see both sides of history through different eyes. Chaska represents the remaining hope of the American Indian; Kit represents the greed and disconnection to anyone in the way. Even though he marries an Indian woman, his callous manner displayed in full force when he takes his only daughter to live with relatives in Missouri and leaves her there to pursue his own ambition.
All in all, for anyone who wants a good historical western, this is a good place to start. From a writing standpoint, the book was an easy read to finish in one sitting, and flowed nicely.
*****
“Struggling Towards Hope” receives four stars from The Historical Fiction Company
"Struggling Towards Hope" is the Silver Category Winner for Historical - Western for 2021
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