Tie My Bones to Her Back

July 1, 1996
It would be hard to find a more brutal and unsentimental portrait of the American West than the one offered in this bleak yet beautifully written novel, Jones's sixth (after Blood Tide, 1990). In 1873, after the suicides of her parents, German immigrants in Wisconsin whose farm was about to go into foreclosure, gutsy, sharp-shooting Jenny Dousmann takes to the Great Plains with her buffalo-hunting brother, Otto. He follows the herds with his partner, Raleigh McKay (a Confederate Civil War veteran whose bullet killed Stonewall Jackson), and two assistants, one a Cheyenne half-breed named Tom Shields. Jenny's experiences on the Plains include rape, after one of the men brings back a false report of Otto's death; an escape into a blizzard in which she's reunited with Otto and saved by a bloody buffalo carcass; and a growing respect and love for Tom, whose people she and Otto will eventually join. A climactic confrontation pits Raleigh, now a guide for foppish English game hunters, against a group of Cheyenne, accompanied by Tom, Otto and Jenny. Savagery rules the narrative: there are graphic depictions of scalpings and other mutilations, and Jones's chapters on the buffalo hunters deliver a powerful vision of greedy and wasteful government-sanctioned destruction of the natural world as white hunters litter the landscape with skinned, rotting bodies. This is elemental storytelling, populated by richly drawn characters and propelled by language that has the force and accuracy of a Cheyenne warrior's arrowhead.