American By Blood: A Novel

by Andrew Huebner

In "American by Blood," three U.S. Army scouts leading an infantry column arrive a day late to join Custer at the Little Bighorn. They come upon the ruins of th Seventh Cavalry, a trail of blood and corpses defiled by wild dogs and swarms of flies. It is a scene that will haunt these three young men in vivid and irrevocable ways. With the loss at Little Bighorn, their mission to find and help clear the land of the Indian tribes ineluctably becomes one of vengeance as well. They journey into limitless wilderness after their prey, skirmishing in the dense forests and the high plains.

The scouting party consists of James H. Bradley, who discovers that war is as much a test of the heart as it is of his ideals; William Gentle, who finds himself torn between his desire to emulate the older soldiers and his fascination with the Indians they hunt; and August Huebner, who wishes to see an America beyond that which he knows and escape the slums of the newly industrialized East.

Gus Huebner was the author's great-great-grandfather, who in 1875 left New Jersey to join the army int he West. Family myth has it that he arrived a day late to the Battle of Little Bighorn. From these scant biographical details, Andrew Huebner has imagined a rich and powerful novel of the American West. American by Blood unforgettably combines epic storytelling and evocations of awe-inspiring natural beauty with a shattering repudiation of some of our nation's most central myths.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Native American

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this up at a thrift store since the subject looked interesting. As one reader pointed out, there are no quotations so it was hard for me to keep up with who was saying what. I felt like the locations jumped around and that was hard to keep straight too.

I noticed that the author is from New York and I wonder if he'd ever ventured out to Little Big Horn or Montana. Or maybe I'm not understanding what he describing, but in chapter three he writes:

"The three scouts left again in the deep blue just before dawn. Rain lay heavily on the leaves of the cottonwoods and wet on their faces. A flock of white birds led them over wide open pale gold grasslands. Bradley had dreamed of his father, sleeping fitfully. The weather broke for a few hours and though it was still cloudy, a teasing purple-edged sun peeked over the great and distant mountains. They rode toward it. They circled the river valley, skirted the edge and headed west onto the high plains." At that area of Montana, the mountains are west, not east as he describes so the sun would be rising east over the plains, not west over the mountains. Just kinda ruined it for me since the author missed that detail.

But I thought that his descriptions were really vivid and well done though, so there's that. Battlefield descriptions were almost uncomfortable to read!

Wish I could give it a 2.5 but I just couldn't give it a three, so two it is.

[Barbra · Rating 3 out of 5]

This read is about three young Army scouts living in the months just after the battle of Little Big Horn who come face to face with their complicity in a series of slaughters. The United States Army’s mission is to herd the last free native tribes onto reservations which became one of bloody retribution. It is a powerful novel which draws you into a gripping read which captures the horror and shock that these three young scouts encounter and become part of .......The one thing I didn’t like is the fact that there are no speech marks throughout and it’s a bit hard to know what is conversation and what is not......

[Daniela Bon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Descriptions in the book were fantastic and very detailed but the locations, who was talking and what was happening was a bit hard to follow along with sometimes.

The topic of the book was very interesting but I do believe it could have been written a lot better. For that I gave it 3 stars

[Kim Zinkowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unrated at completion...Ginger's cousin wrote this.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, dark, and powerful!

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Action packed and intense. An interesting look at Custer's Last Stand and its aftermath.

[Ria · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful novel set in the American old West. The action takes place between June 1876 to September 1877.
The story centres around three friends, Huebner, Gentle and Bradley. Each one has their place in history and Heubner is the great, great grandfather of the author who was to fight with Custer but arrived a day to late, Gentle is the man known for killing Crazy Horse and Bradley was the first solider to discover the Custer massacre.
Brutal, moving and harrowing this book charts the progress of the three friends in their bid to engage and seek out the Indians encountering many skirmishes and actual battles of the period along the way.
A no holds barred and graphic tale of the gruesome nature, aftermath and tragedy for all concerned involved in the bloody wars between Indians and white men.
An epic recounting of history that is partially true and pieced together from scraps the author knows of his relatives involvement of the period this is a thought provoking record of the needlessness and brutality that descended to the point of massacre and slaughter between races and cultures.
Evocatively told against the beauty of the American backdrop and the author purposely uses lyrical images of nature as a technical device to highlight the glory of the world against the seeming futility of war and naturalistic symbolism features heavily as imagery within the novel throughout and allows the reader a respite from the butchery and makes them think of the world before the wars and the simplistic lifestyle of the Indians.
All in all the author has gone to a lot of trouble to write with feeling and accuracy and brings an immediacy of past events to a reader that maybe has little knowledge of the time period involved or the events leading upto it.
A great read.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somehow this book appeared on my library bookshelf. It must be left over from my study of the Battle of the Bighorn years ago and I had not read it. It interested me because the author has written a novel about what occurred during the six months following Custer's demise as the US Army follows the native Americans to their ultimate end.
This is Andrew Huebner's first published novel. The realism is exceptional but somewhat overwrought. I kept thinking about man's inhumanity to man as I struggled through the pages of gruesome slaughter to the Indians and the disheartening psychological impact of the killing to the four main characters. Though the history is somewhat in order this is a novel. William Gentle is portrayed as a young man of eighteen when in fact he was in his late forties during the time of the novel.
I finished this book because it made me think......I'm not sure I would pick up Huebner's second novel unless it, too, somehow found it's way to my bookshelf.

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Huebner writes about the aftermath of the Little Big Horn as seen through the perspective of three army scouts. Much of the writing is interesting, but the book wanders in the same way that the scouts do.

[Drew]

American By Blood: A Novel by Andrew Huebner (2000)

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A finely crafted first novel. The dust seems to lift right off the page but that could have been just me.

[Sarah]

didn't finish it, didn't like the way it was written