Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan

Author:Timothy Egan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (www.hmhco.com)
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

FEAST FOR BIBLIOPHILE

REMARKABLE WORK ON RED MAN OF AMERICA

That was a Washington Post headline of a story touting “one of the most remarkable and expensive publications ever planned.” From Geneva came a formal letter from Dr. Herman ten Kate, a leading European intellectual: “You are doing a magnificent thing, building not only an everlasting monument to a vanishing race, but also to yourself. I am sure that if the Indians could realize the value and purpose of your work, and perhaps a few of them do, they would be grateful to you. In fact, viewed in a certain light, your work constitutes a redemption of the many wrongs our ‘superior’ race has done to the Indian. Some passages you wrote are masterly.”

Those “many wrongs” inflicted on small nations by the much larger one continued to trouble Upshaw. The Crow reservation, on an ownership map, now looked like a quilt made of several thousand square scraps. Not only was the tribe still losing people—in a generation’s time, the population had been cut in half—but its reservation was being carved out from under them. Much of the good land, with its pasturage for cattle and its well-watered valleys for growing grain, had passed into white hands. In all respects, the modern age meant only one thing—decline.

“You are decreasing at the rate of three percent a year,” Curtis lamented to Upshaw one night as he went over census numbers. “Take this pencil and figure out your own solution.” Upshaw didn’t have to do a calculation.

“If I live to be an old man there will be none of my people left,” he said.

“There will be a few left,” Curtis replied—but only those who can master the ways of the dominant culture.

When Upshaw wasn’t at Curtis’s side, he was in court, or in meetings with state politicians—the public face and mouthpiece of the Crow. He started to push back in his correspondence with the imperious government overseer Dalby. The lord of Indian country in Montana had mentioned that he was off to Washington, D.C., for congressional hearings. Instead of his usual lip service about trying to “be a man,” Upshaw was direct. It was crucial that the Indian inspector stand up “in this trying time in order to get justice.”

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