Destiny's course

They took the whole Indian nation
Locked us on this reservation
Took away our way of life
The tomahawk and the bow and knife
Took away our native tongue
And taught their English to our young
And all the beads we made by hand
Are nowadays made in Japan

That 1971 hit song by Paul Revere & the Raiders sold two million copies while narrating how the land belonging to the original inhabitants of the USA was misappropriated and the native tribes slaughtered and forcibly resettled under President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830. By 1880, the Indian way of life was history.

This ethnic cleansing and genocide was documented in Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, published in 1970. On March 27, 1973, Marlon Brando rejected the Oscar for the best performance in a lead role (in The Godfather) to protest against Hollywood’s depiction of American Indians as savages or worse.

While Louis L’Amour’s pulp fiction hailed the Apaches as the finest cavalry in the world, the destruction of the American Indian way of life was portrayed as almost a process of evolution. President Reagan was awarded L’Amour the Congressional Medal of Honour in 1984, 139 years after John O’Sullivan propounded that it was the Manifest Destiny of the white settlers to expand throughout the continent. Some settlers started vigilante militias which maintained that “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

Robert Baush’s fictional novel Far as the Eye Can See recreates the turmoil of mid-19th century America. Bobby Hale, a white soldier who has survived the US Civil War in which 7,50,000 men were killed between 1861 and 1865, accompanies settlers migrating westwards in 1869 but leaves the expedition along with the Indian guide to make a living by trapping animals and selling their fur.

Living in the wilderness instills in Hale an appreciation of the Indian way of life where the land and the children belong to the community. However, with rumours of gold deposits in Indian territory and with the government encouraging settlers to stake claims to tribal land, Hale is employed in 1876 as an army guide but makes it clear he will not join any attack on Indian settlements.

During a solo-scouting mission, Hale thinks he is being shadowed by a hostile Indian whom he shoots at. He discovers he has shot a young woman escaping from Indian captivity. Hale realises he cannot abandon the injured woman, nicknamed Ink because of her dark complexion — her father is white, her mother, an Indian. While escorting her to the nearest fort, Hale hears a child screaming. They come across a little Indian boy standing near the body of his mother who has died while giving birth to a stillborn child. They decide to take care of the boy whom Ink calls Little Fox.

Days later, when Hale and Little Fox are hunting for food, Ink is captured by a vigilante militia whose members assume she is an Indian, and assault her. Hale kills them and rescues Ink. At this stage, history catches up with them. They are near the spot where General Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment is being annihilated by Sioux Indians on June 25-26, 1876. The battle is remembered as Custer’s Last Stand.

Hale realises his commitment to Ink and Little Fox transcends everything else. Ink suggests they move to the land of the Nez Perce tribe to which her mother belongs. “The Nez Perce live in peace with the white man and all others. We can live there and raise the boy. We can teach him not to hate,” Ink says.

The book ends with Hale loading up “for the long trek to the land of the Nez Perce.” However, in his acknowledgments, the author mentions Garcia’s Tough Trip To Paradise, a memoir covering the period 1878 to 1879 — three years after Bausch’s book ends — and which “is especially informative about the tragedy that befell the Nez Perce whose destruction ended in the European conquest of the Great Plains.”

Amor vincit omnia — love conquers all — goes the saying. Does “all” include “manifest destiny”? Was Ink’s dream short-lived? It is a question that remains unanswered. What endures is the landscape Bausch writes about. The book begins with Hale’s first-person account: “From a break in the rocks where I stand, the country is as big as any whole earth I ever dreamed of. The trail stretches so far, you can barely see where the sky meets the ground. Some rolling purple clouds clamour in the furthest corner, light up with blue fire and a rumbling, and I know it’s rain miles and miles from here.”

Reading this book as a travelogue could minimise the angst of what happens to the innocent who are overwhelmed by “manifest destiny.”

Far as the Eye Can See
Robert Bausch
Bloomsbury
2015, pp 307
450