Tributary

by Barbara K. Richardson

This lively novel tracks the extraordinary life of one woman in the frontier West who dares resist communal salvation in order to find her own. Clair Martin's dauntless search for self leads her from the domination of Mormon polygamy to the chaos of Reconstruction Dixie and back to Zion where she learns from Shoshone Indian ways how to take her place, at last, in the land she loves.

Winner of the 2013 Utah Book Award and WILLA Literary Finalist Award

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published September 4, 2012

About the author

Dirt, books and vistas are some of my favorite things. I have delivered sailboats, sold puptents, herded sixth graders and planted hundreds of trees as a residential landscape designer, all in order to write.

My historical novel "Tributary" won the Utah Book Award in 2013 and was a WILLA Finalist in Fiction for 2012. It follows the life of one young woman in 1870s Utah, who dares resist communal salvation in order to find her own. Molly Gloss calls it "a remarkable odyssey of the American West." Peter Heller says, "Richardson is a new American voice worth listening to."

My novel "Guest House" brings together kids I have taught, cities I have loved, women I've admired and the ongoing motivation to see, honor and make good homes for neglected children.

I love trees, natural ethics, old farmhouses and a handful of books. There are writers whose sensibilities elevate the whole human enterprise. I aim to be one of them.

My websites:
http://www.barbarakrichardson.com/ind...
www.dirtalovestory.com

Reviews

[Sandie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Claire Martin is an American hero. She's not a politician or a cowboy or a military leader. Instead, she is a woman in the frontier days of Utah and Idaho who does whatever it takes to carve out a life for herself. Born with a birthmark that covers half her face, she never feels accepted in any social situation.

Claire's life starts with her as an orphan; handed from one Mormon family to the next as people needed someone to work for them. Work is something Claire is familiar with and wherever she goes she gives a full days's work. She finally finds solace when working for Ada, another strong Mormon woman. Claire believes she has found a home, but when the son of a local church leader starts making advances to her, she realises that her only option is to leave and start over.

She chooses New Orleans, where she believes her mother came from before she left her as a small child. The only work she can find is as a laundress in a hospital, a job not many people are ready to take on. Claire works there, not caring that this is the African-American hospital, and that the patients there are considered not really worth saving. While there, she becomes attached to a young boy, Tierre, and soon considers him her son. When Ada's son writes Claire and asks her if she will come and help him start a sheep ranch, she leaves, taking Tierre with her.

Sheep farming is no easier than the other hard jobs Claire has worked at. With hard work and persistence, she and Stephen and another farm hand make the ranch a going concern. Things seem to be working out until Stephen gets religion and decides that he and Claire must marry. Claire is determined to never be owned by any man and it causes another life crisis.

Barbara Richardson has written a historical novel that details a life that is seldom thought worth mentioning but which created this country. It is the life of one of the millions of hard-working women and men who carved out a living from persistence and labor; from simply refusing to give up. Claire is a character readers will long remember; her pluck and fortitude make her the prime example of 'bloom where you are planted.' This novel is recommended for readers of historical fiction and those interested in how the West was won.

[Nan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hate rating books. A book like this is one reason why. I loved the scope of it, and the outsider's view of the West and of Mormonism. Clair, the main character, kept me reading. She was feisty and empathetic. I did, however, feel like the author had an agenda and often bent the characters and plot to meet that agenda. Clair's "mark of Cain" (her birthmark) was heavy handed. Making her an orphan might have been enough. Because of the author's agenda, I didn't always trust the history in the book. Great plot twists like Ada's betrayal also lost their power. Clair's trip to New Orleans, for example, seemed like a flimsy excuse to pick up a symbol of Western racism (a black kid named Tierre). The rainbow family Clair collected at the end of the book seemed implausible. I think I would have liked the book more if it had just stuck with one story (Ada's betrayal, for instance) and had not tried to be so much to so many.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

So beautifully written. This amazing woman's story should not be missed. Clair is so incredibly brave under some unimaginable circumstances.

[David Pace]

[Originally appeared in 15 Bytes, Utah's Online Arts Magazine, November issue.]

Remarkable as Barbara K. Richardson’s novel Tributary is, it is most remarkable, perhaps, because it seems to be one of the first literary works in memory that positions the history of the Great Basin in the broader context of its time. Set in the years following the arrival of the Mormons to Utah, this sprawling tale told in the first person dignifies the region, if rarely the “saints” who people it, with the weight of its narrative. Here the territory is not just a placeholder in the story of the west—or in modern parlance, a “flyover state.” Its heroine, plucky Clair Martin—the woman with the red stain of a birthmark on her left check—is its product, and its curse, its orphan and its lay prophetess. Clair is a proto-feminist—not entirely likable—and, lucky for the reader, stained with much more than just the splotch on her face.

Of the many questions this Western epic raises in the course of its scene-shifting from Brigham City to the Mississippi Delta and back to the Utah/Idaho border is, what happened to those 19th Century Mormons who left their tribe?

Not since Frank C. Robertson’s gritty biography of a homesteading family titled A Ram in the Thicket has the story of this lost generation of the American West been visited so grippingly. Clair is fiercely independent, not willing to marry, though willing to love, not only her beloved Tierre— the nine-year-old black orphan from Louisiana who ends up returning to the high mountain desert with Clair—but a scheming sheepherder whom she beds. Clair is the first to say that she holds a grudge against the Mormons who raised her, trammeled her spirit, attempted to marry her off as a plural wife, and, finally, looked the other way when one of them tried to rape her. And yet still she resonates, as humans tend to do, with the civilizing force of her youth even as she relentlessly critiques it, resists it and stubbornly makes it somehow her own.

Only “the continuous body of earth,” the landscape seems to give Clair sustained solace from psychic injuries that alternately torture and beguile her, that and the authenticity and spirituality of the Bannock and Shoshone, equally “marked” in her view as is Tierre (who eventually marries a Shoshone)—equally set apart with the “mark of Cain,” as is she.

The “white and delightsome” race of the righteous, a Book of Mormon phrase that has only recently been excised from scripture by apologists, sticks in her craw throughout this lyrical outing. And yet as with those who will follow her—outsiders of every stripe from what can seem like a hermetically-sealed and ideologically-driven community—Clair forms her family from those who, like her, have been “marked.” And the character of that nascent family, first in New Orleans but especially later near the River Raft Mountains in what is now Box Elder County, is a character yet to be fully formed and fully validated. (Might there be a sequel?)

Still, as with another Western spiritualist and mystic lover of the land—Terry Tempest Williams—Clair is too smart and too resilient to dismiss out-of-hand the clay from which she has been formed. Despite this novel’s ending with Clair’s initiation into Native ritual, I don’t believe Clair (or Richardson) is capitulating to the self-righteous rose water wash some insist—mostly Anglos—on splashing Native American culture. Nor is there a capitulation to bald pantheism. These don’t seem to be the answers to Clair’s dilemma based in longing for both independence and community. The beauty and rigor of Tributary stem from a tension, what author Levi Peterson referred to as “a fierce, grieving thing,” that rises uniquely in the people Clair can’t quite claim as her own any longer (if she ever could), but to whom she can never look away.

One of several books published by the new Torrey House Press, Tributary seems to have been largely overlooked by critics and the public since its publication last year. (The exception being, of course, that it was a finalist for the Willa Literary Award, named in honor of Willa Cather.) Is there a market for this stunning novel with the admittedly antique—sometimes arch–diction, 20-plus years in the making?

Perhaps not. Why?

For the devout the book isn’t certain enough in its moral (read: Mormon) purpose.

For the modern-day LDS apostate, it doesn’t burn the beast far enough to the ground.

For the “Latter-day Sometimes Saint” (to quote a poem by Carolyn Campbell), it’s offensive because it’s not a critique borne out of his or her own idiosyncratic complaints.

And for the outside observer living here in the gumbo of this self-described “peculiar people” with their lively but checkered history…will they also ignore Tributary under the old pretense that it is artistically inferior or worse, provincial? Bigotry not only knows no skin color; it knows no religion. And that, dear reader, is the cultural conundrum quite specific to where we live.

Perhaps only Clair Martin, the magisterial outsider/insider with the stained left cheek, could narrate a penetrating expose of just that. She’s already done a pretty brilliant job of getting the lay of this enigmatic land that is as much about an idea and its proliferating but largely reactionary counter-ideas as it is about rock and juniper, alkaline flats and big sky.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written, hard to put down saga about Clair Martin, an orphan who was rescued by the Mormon church in the mid 1800's and absorbed into their community and way of life. But it wasn't a pretty picture for women within the Mormon church at that time and Clair resisted the dictates handed down by the elders, instinctively knowing that she did not want to share a husband with numerous other women and bear children. She grew up to be a fiercely independent, hard working and resourceful woman, eventually leaving Utah for Mississippi to search for her parents. Her story takes many twists and turns. She found her way back to Utah where she carved out a life for herself and her unique adopted family.

Clair moved through her early life alone and unloved. It was chance human interactions, kindnesses and cruelties extended, and ultimately relationships that changed the course of her life and helped her form her own identity and path in life.

Page 81: "The power of one act of kindness to offset a hundred slights!"

All of the author's ancestors were Mormon pioneers and it's a grim picture she paints of life within that community in the 1800's. Richardson weaves in poetry and landscape descriptions that invite the reader to pause and re-read passages for the beautiful language. Of interest to me was her mention of "the favorite Mormon hymn", Love at Home. I find this favorite hymn in the Mennonite Church Hymnal giving John H. McNaughton credit for the words and John D. Brunk (a Mennonite) credit for the arrangement. The online Mormon hymnal makes no mention of Brunk. I will share two of my favorite verses not found in my hymnal. I have taken them to memory and sing them to my little granddaughter when I put her down to sleep.

Anger cools and pressures cease,
When there's love at home;
Children learn to live in peace,
When there's love at home;
Courage to reach out in grace,
Meet a stranger face to face;
Find a reconciling place,
When there's love at home.

There's no question you can't ask,
When there's love at home;
There is strength for every task,
When there's love at home;
Sharing joy in work or play,
Confidence to face the day;
Knowing love will find a way,
When there's love at home.

[Glenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tributary is the story of Clair Martin, an orphan girl born with a large purple-red birthmark that covers her cheek and neck. She is taken in by the Mormons living in Brigham City, Utah. She is passed around as a servant girl to those who needed her help. She worked hard but the Mormon doctrine didn't set well with her. She makes friends with Ada, a widow woman with views similar to her own. But with a polygamous marriage in her future, Clair leaves Utah and heads to New Orleans to search for her mother. While there she obtains work at a hospital as a laundress in the colored ward. She meets and befriends Tierre, a young black boy that she soon loves like a son. Clair receives a letter from Ada, stating that her son Stephen bought a sheep ranch in southern Idaho that needs civilizing by a woman with guts and strength. He was also looking for a young man to help them run the sheep to pasture. After one year she is promised one-fifth of the profit from the herd. When they arrive, things are not as they expected, but they both work hard on the ranch. Clair falls in love with Stephen, but he wants her to join in a polygamous marriage as well, so she declines the offer and is on her own once again.

I enjoyed reading the story of spunky Clair Martin, who dared to forge her own path in a time when women just didn't do that. She had chances at love, but none of them worked out for her. I feel that she just wanted to be loved, and because of her choices that never really happened the way she wanted it to. She was OK with it in the end, I just felt bad she went through so much suffering and heartbreak. She made her own way and she was tough--much tougher than I could have been. I didn't like the way all the Mormons were portrayed as closeminded bigots who beat up Indians and their leader Brigham Young supposedly didn't live by the rules that governed the church. In spite of that, I liked this tale of a fiesty woman who lived in the American West.

[Priscilla Stuckey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this novel! Bold and tender, with a narrator whose voice is so unique you will remember and enjoy her long after you put down the book. How does a woman find authentic family, authentic community? Especially if that woman lives on the nineteenth-century American frontier in Mormon Utah? Based on the history of the author's own Mormon ancestors, the novel traces Clair Martin's long journey toward a happy life, a journey that many women today know is fraught with perils—communities that don’t match the best in their members, loneliness in the midst of or outside of a family, relationships that take unexpected turns. The dialect and the language in the narrator's thinking are so spot-on, and so fresh and witty, that more than once a turn of phrase stopped me in my tracks and I had to sigh, “How does she do that?”

[Cherie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started this book because it sounded interesting, but I couldn't finish it. The author obviously has a bias against Mormons because there was not a good one in the book. She called them all "lunatics and lechers." She doesn't think much of men either, because likeable men in this book are few and far between. I wasn't impressed with her research. She didn't seem to know the difference between the United Order and a Coop. She also details how downtrodden and put upon Mormon women are and then she has one call a quorum for an excommunication. This would not be done by anyone other than the Bishop. I don't know how much other wrong information is in the book because I couldn't keep up enough interest to finish it.

[Jan Reelitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strong interesting woman, Clair Martin, realizes very quickly in her orphaned life that being a part of the Mormon world is definitely not for her. Marked by a large blemish on her right cheek, she endures bullying and loss of self-esteem.
Deciding to live on her own, she makes friends with another Mormon woman, who provides a cabin for her to life in and make her own way. Desperate to find out more information about her mother and father, she follows the only clue she has that they joined the Mormons in New Orleans. In New Orleans she befriends a young black boy who becomes her "son" and their lives remain entwined even after she leaves for her beloved West. Told with in a spare style and with clear wit and intent, this book is a treasure.

[Donna Good · Rating 4 out of 5]

My son introduced me to this book - he often spots books I will love before I have ever heard of them. And, so he did again. The exploration and settling of the West, a strong, albeit imperfect, heroine replete with every day courage, all make for a reading experience I truly savor. For those of you who enjoyed Ivan Doig's Dancing at the Rascal Fair, imagine Tributary as the healthy offspring from a mating of Doig's Fair and McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. And, for those of us who live in the West, Richardson got it right. It feels like home.

[Connie]

Received a review copy this week. So far I'm intrigued!

[Joan]

Loved this book! Great story of a strong woman who figures out what she wants and goes for it, despite the tough times and deep religious tradition.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great historical fiction about a gutsy pioneer woman in the 1800's, beautifully written.

[Naomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read my full review at: http://bit.ly/U6mmKo

My opinion: I don't think there is enough that I can say about this book.

Followers of my blog know that I read a lot. Currently I am at over 400 books for 2012 and am hoping to reach 700 by the end of the year. Unfortunately, with reading that many books, frequently once a book is finished, it is out of site...out of mind.

Clair Martin will not have this issue. I recently participated in an interview about what makes a book a gem for me. A gem for me is a book that sucks me in with not only a spectacular storyline, but a dynamic, strong main character that makes my heart "glow" to the point it makes me smile at happy moments and feel the pain during sad moments. That was Clair Martin.

I can't leave this review without talking about the storyline. Not only was the main character of this book strongly written , but so was the storyline with deep descriptors of locations that made me feel as though I was inside Clair looking out and seeing what she saw.

Now, I do have to add that this is a book that I could easily see being made into a Hallmark Movie Channel movie, like Love Comes Softly or Sarah, Plain and Tall. If you like the characters and settings of those movies, Tributary is a book that you will fawn over.

I do have a side note. I tend to jump at books that are "compared" to my favorite writers with Willa Cather being my number one. I have read every Willa Cather book, several including My Antonia multiple times. I don't think it is right to compare Barbara Richardson to Willa Cather. Cather has a to her works that was lacking in Tributary that was written somewhat in a more modern fashion. On that note, does it detract from the awesomeness of this book? Absolutely not, Tributary has its' own personality.

Now, I need to get on my soapbox for a minute. Tributary is a prime example of dynamic Indie authors and publishers that produce high quality product that can compete with any traditional house publishing houses. OK, off my soapbox!

[Charlie Quimby · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Barbara Richardson won a Utah book award for her novel, Tributary, it reminded me I'd never posted a review. More than a year late, my specific recollections have dimmed, but my appreciation of this historical novel remains.

We meet Clair Martin as a young orphan taken into the fold of a Mormon community in pre-civil-war Utah, accepted only as a minion to scrub and chop and ease the March of a Saint into Heaven. She bears a birthmark that stains her as a virtual, inferior Lamanite, and she finds nothing in the Book of Mormon that speaks to her.

She grapples with her place in this world, then heads east to discover her family, only to find new rationales for her domestic slavery.

And then she heads back, she thinks, to a free life in a new territory...

I tend to stay away from historical novels, so I can't put Tributary in that larger context. My concerns and sensibilities are rooted in the current age. But this novel will reach readers of contemporary fiction because it very successfully creates a credible historical voice and story that bridge to the present without loading the heroine down with anachronistic beliefs and attitudes.

The question Richardson asks of pioneer Mormonism—"what happened to the women who left?"—is relevant today and beyond the Mountain West.

She does a great job of illuminating the ways self-aggrandizing men, -isms and society exert control over women in the name of love and protection. There's nothing schematic or didactic about this perspective. I don't even know if she did it intentionally. Perhaps that's what made it a compelling and satisfying read for me.

My wife started Tributary upon my recommendation and then left on a trip without the book. She bought an e-book so she could continue it while she traveled. Consider this a second-hand recommendation from a prodigious, exacting reader who is not shy about abandoning books that don't grab her.

Disclosure: Tributary is published by my publisher, Torrey House Press, so I am moderating my rating to a 4.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thirty years of Clair Martin’s life make up the pages of Tributary. A life of scorn, preaching, pain, suffering and justification, all told in first person by Barbara Richardson. Born with a large birthmark, Clair’s mother left her in Utah while very young. She was passed off by the Mormons to various people in the Church who were in need of help. No one helped Clair, it was up to her to make it or not. She got encouragement from one widow for her lovely flower cards which she sold for spending money.
She is nearly raped by a son of one of the Church elders and decides it is time for her to leave Utah for points South and East. She lands in New Orleans where she becomes a laundress in the colored ward of a local hospital. She falls in love with a little boy she names Tierre (“T”). He’s back and she’s not but it doesn’t matter to Clair because he becomes the son she cares for and raises to read, study and work hard. They decide, after receiving a long letter from the widow, to return to Utah and go North to a sheep ranch owned by the lady’s son, Stephen.
There’s nothing in northern Utah and not much in Clair’s soul when she finds, ultimately, that Stephen has converted to Mormonism and already has two young wives. He wants a third – Clair – but she won’t give in.
Through the 1850’s to the 1880’s, Clair and her friends, enemies and T travel dirt roads by foot, wagon and horseback to learn what God and Brigham Young have in store for them. The scenery is so well described that I could see it with my eyes closed and living in New Orleans in the 1870’s! There must have been nothing like it.
An outright wonderful story by the author of Guest House and one you should take the time to read slowly to enjoy the moods and thoughts of a self-made woman dealing in a world of men.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a tale of a strong woman who is always seeking a better life, never quite satisfied with what she is given, but willing to pull her own weight rather than complain. That strength (plus the Western theme) was what kept me reading, and what I imagine would be enough to satisfy most readers.

Unfortunately there was some stuff that I didn't like. Clair's weakness (or was it simply unfamiliarity?) about men was uncharacteristic, or at least not explained in light of her other strengths. I also stumbled over some passages that seemed clunky and I didn't know if they were typos or supposed to indicate something. Ada's character was also confusing - did she just toe the line to be allowed to stay, or did she actually believe in Mormonism?

There were some interesting bits of history and the setting was great. It was well paced and the plot flowed along nicely. Molly Gloss is another author to read if you want stories about strong and lightly flawed (in the best sense) women in the old West.

[Kayann Short · Rating 5 out of 5]

Following in the auspicious tradition of Western women writers like Mari Sandoz, Willa Cather, Mary Austin, and Isabella Bird, Barbara Richardson’s novel Tributary, published by Torrey House Press, enlarges our portrait of the West by placing new stories and characters on top of the familiar ones. Richardson’s protagonist, Clair Martin, is a young woman in Utah of the mid-1800s who refuses to follow the Mormon church’s polygamous practices or its submissive roles for women. Finding others who share her outsider views, Clair learns to trust her own moral sense, forging a life independent of marriage with a new model of family and love. Tributary proves that the people who settled the U.S West, as well as the people impacted and displaced by that settling, have important stories to share beyond cattle and sagebrush and white men driving one across the other.

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give this 4.5 or 4.75 stars if I could, because I'm really stingy with 5 stars, but given the excellent characterization and beautiful writing in this novel, it deserves 5 on this not-very-flexible scale. The historic background and the spare, if beautiful, description of wild Utah is woven painlessly into the story, without long asides for description. The characters are real and human and loveable. My only reason for withholding a full 5 stars is the slightly less-than-satisfying ending, which is probably an important factor in keeping protagonist Clair and the novel itself, believable.

[Joan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book. The characters are well thought out and interesting. The settings are beautifully described and easy to visualize. I liked how the settings helped to set the tone for the characters thoughts and moods. I like the independent spirit of the main character, Clara, and the steps she took to maintain that. I found her interesting in that she did think that she could verve but eventually she would discover that it was more important for her to stay true to herself.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am usually not very interested in reading historical fiction but read this with my book group (and thanks to my book group for introducing me to books I would not otherwise have read). I was very intrigued by Claire's story, and what life was like when the Mormons settled in Utah. I loved Claire's independence and courage to not follow something she didn't agree with or believe in. The descriptions of the landscape are beautifully written.

[Danica Ramgoolam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the idea of this book but I was left wanting more and wishing for more from Clair. Also the relationship and traveling between her and a black boy wasn't believable in this time period. I felt like there should have been more trouble for them. That said I loved the author's prose and the way she brings the places Clair visits to life.

[Angela A. Christensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written! I the Clair's emotions so well. This character was a strong independent woman who broke free from anyone controlling her in a time frame when that was nearly impossible. A must read!