Russell G. Vliet (1929-1984) was a playwright, novelist, and poet. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of a naval medical officer. He was educated at Southwest Texas State University and did graduate work at Yale. Vliet three times won the Texas Institute of Letters Award, twice for collections of poems and once for his novel Solitudes. In 1968 he was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Fiction. He was the author of three collections of Poetry: Events and Celebrations (1966), The Man with the Black Mouth (1970), and Water and Stone (1980). Vliet died in May of 1984, in North Adams, Massachusetts, just days after completing his final novel, Scorpio Rising.
I read this book a long time ago, and I don't remember much about it, other than it's a tragic love story about a Native American girl and a white teenage boy set in the 19th century American West.