Bernie MacKinnon's Blog - Posts Tagged "sand-creek"
Grim Anniversaries
Hi Everybody—
One thing that spurred me to publish Lucifer's Drum this past summer was that fact that the event it's based on—Jubal Early's nearly successful attack on Washington DC—was marking its 150th anniversary. But over the past three and a half years, practically any given day has commemorated the 150th anniversary of something bloody. Case in point: today marks 150 years since the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, when Col. John Chivington and his soldiers attacked a peaceful encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho. They killed approximately 130 of them, including many women and children. The Cheyenne chief Black Kettle survived somehow, only to die in a similar sneak attack four years later, at the Washita River in present-day Oklahoma. This time the attacker was George Armstrong Custer, who that day earned a new nickname among the Cheyenne: Creeping Panther. It was during the Civil War that western expansion and consequent conflict with the western tribes entered its final and worst phase, a phase that would end in the freezing cold of Wounded Knee Creek in 1890.
And tomorrow will mark the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Franklin, south of Nashville. Which gives me the opportunity to speak of Howard Bahr's darkly beautiful gem The Black Flower. Franklin is the centerpiece for that novel. Unlike another work of Civil War fiction which had a big impact on me—Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, with its classic depiction of Gettysburg—The Black Flower unfolds through the eyes of rank-and-file soldiers and of civilians, not colonels and generals. Its chief character is a Confederate rifleman, Bushrod Carter, who is mulling the possibility of becoming a deserter (a common thought, then, I'm sure, given what these men had been through and the growing sense of hopelessness) while events tumble toward grand-scale tragedy.
I don't think I can adequately convey the effect of Mr. Bahr's quiet restraint. Out of it rises something like an epic fugue, an anthem of sorrow. I am not saying it is all tone—the story is plenty gripping. The sense of what it was like—the texture of time and place, the sights and smells—is so potent that it makes you feel you have been teleported to Nov. 30, 1864. And the depiction of the battle—again, no general's eye-view but a foot soldier's—thrusts you into clamor, terror and chaos in a way I have never seen done. The moment before the doomed Confederate assault—a moment stretched to dreamlike infinity in the soldiers' minds—leaves you feeling, "Yes, it must have been like that." At the end you feel the satisfaction that comes with experiencing a fully realized work of art—but you also mourn, for people long dead.
For anyone who's interested, here is the Amazon link for The Black Flower:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Flower-No...
Well, folks, gotta move. Talk at you again soon.
—Bernie
One thing that spurred me to publish Lucifer's Drum this past summer was that fact that the event it's based on—Jubal Early's nearly successful attack on Washington DC—was marking its 150th anniversary. But over the past three and a half years, practically any given day has commemorated the 150th anniversary of something bloody. Case in point: today marks 150 years since the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, when Col. John Chivington and his soldiers attacked a peaceful encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho. They killed approximately 130 of them, including many women and children. The Cheyenne chief Black Kettle survived somehow, only to die in a similar sneak attack four years later, at the Washita River in present-day Oklahoma. This time the attacker was George Armstrong Custer, who that day earned a new nickname among the Cheyenne: Creeping Panther. It was during the Civil War that western expansion and consequent conflict with the western tribes entered its final and worst phase, a phase that would end in the freezing cold of Wounded Knee Creek in 1890.
And tomorrow will mark the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Franklin, south of Nashville. Which gives me the opportunity to speak of Howard Bahr's darkly beautiful gem The Black Flower. Franklin is the centerpiece for that novel. Unlike another work of Civil War fiction which had a big impact on me—Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, with its classic depiction of Gettysburg—The Black Flower unfolds through the eyes of rank-and-file soldiers and of civilians, not colonels and generals. Its chief character is a Confederate rifleman, Bushrod Carter, who is mulling the possibility of becoming a deserter (a common thought, then, I'm sure, given what these men had been through and the growing sense of hopelessness) while events tumble toward grand-scale tragedy.
I don't think I can adequately convey the effect of Mr. Bahr's quiet restraint. Out of it rises something like an epic fugue, an anthem of sorrow. I am not saying it is all tone—the story is plenty gripping. The sense of what it was like—the texture of time and place, the sights and smells—is so potent that it makes you feel you have been teleported to Nov. 30, 1864. And the depiction of the battle—again, no general's eye-view but a foot soldier's—thrusts you into clamor, terror and chaos in a way I have never seen done. The moment before the doomed Confederate assault—a moment stretched to dreamlike infinity in the soldiers' minds—leaves you feeling, "Yes, it must have been like that." At the end you feel the satisfaction that comes with experiencing a fully realized work of art—but you also mourn, for people long dead.
For anyone who's interested, here is the Amazon link for The Black Flower:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Flower-No...
Well, folks, gotta move. Talk at you again soon.
—Bernie
