Scarlet Plume, Second Edition

by Frederick Manfred

  There is the key, perhaps, to the deep and enduring appeal this book holds for so many of its readers, that it raises so many questions about so many issues. I have found myself stubbornly frustrated when someone asks me what this book is about. A plot synopsis does no good in representing it to someone. Neither does praise for the characters. The difficulty is that it’s about so many things: survival, love, war, justice, forgiveness, Yankton culture, the failings of Christianity, the hidden history of Minnesota, race hatred, miscegenation, sexual prowess, sexual intimacy, love of family, the ineffectuality of missionaries, comparative economic values, the raising of children, the futility of intellectualism.

  At its core, it’s about the ways in which “heathens” can be more Christlike than Christians are, as we may see in the character of Scarlet Plume. The parallels are evident throughout. Scarlet Plume is the son of a chief regarded as especially wise and prescient. He is able to perform miracles. He has superhuman physical abilities—he may not be able to walk on water, but he can run down an antelope and become a credible wolf. He is at one with nature, and he makes it his mission to save people from harm—both his own people and his people’s enemies. He willingly suffers execution at the hands of occupying soldiers, letting himself be sacrificed for a crime he did not commit, hanged as part of a public spectacle on the day after Christmas. Scarlet Plume spends much of the story costumed as a wolf; ironically, near the beginning of the novel Judith witnesses the vicious character Jed Crydenwise crucifying a wolf and skinning it alive.

  The white men we see throughout the book seem to be sadistic, ineffectually Christian, or indifferently self-serving. The Indian men, with the exception of Scarlet Plume, fall more or less into the same pattern. The same goes for most of the female characters. Maggie Utterback is as unpleasant as any in the book, and the gentle Sunflower becomes a sacrificial victim as a result of her kindness. Manfred is scrupulously evenhanded about blaming both the whites and the Indians, and he seems to regard leaders on both sides as mostly bloodthirsty, indifferent, or ineffectual. The whites have exploited the Indians, who have in return found ways of making life difficult for settlers. Dishonesty is rampant in both camps. The missionaries are not consciously hypocritical or coercive, but they are no match for the traders and petty officials. The penalty for their ineffectuality is that it is the Christian Indians and those who linger around the agencies who are the cruelest participants in the massacres.

  No fictional counterparts to real-life rescuers like John Otherday and Paul Mazakutemani appear in Scarlet Plume. Similarly, only a few characters who carry out illustrative roles in the text are “good Christians.” Even they are soon gone from the story. As in historical America, from earliest times to the present, civil religion displaces “real Christianity.” When injustice is uncovered, it always seems to be too late to do anything about it. It is too late to expect more reprieves from President Lincoln, it is too late to stop the legal machinery, it is too late to postpone the hanging, and it is too late to get the missionaries to intervene more effectively.

  As Manfred said in one of our interviews, “I try to be fair to them. I’ve heard many missionaries preach. They really believe what they’re saying. I don’t happen to believe it, but I’m not writing my story, I’m writing their story. So then I try to present it as if these people really believe this. It has to be convincing to the reader that these are really missionaries and this is what they truly believe.” The more real he makes Judith’s sister seem, he said, the more credible it is when Judith disagrees. If Manfred wants his readers to take his criticism seriously, he has to acknowledge that while the whites are victorious their victory does not confer or affirm moral superiority. By the same token, that the Yanktons are defeated does not mean that they have an inferior understanding of the world.

  Throughout the book, Manfred emphasizes the cultural, philosophical, and ethical contrasts between the Yanktons and the whites—religiously and in daily life. He shows how Yankton children learn more self-reliance than white children. The Yanktons have a more thorough grounding in the ways of nature because their religion is pantheistic, he once said in a television interview, but white culture has a better understanding of astronomy. Some claim that white culture introduced the practice of scalping, while others say there is evidence that it was practiced in North America long before the arrival of Europeans. However, there can be little doubt that it was practiced more widely among Indians, and with more elaborate justification. Hair has different meanings in different cultures. In Scarlet Plume, Judith learns about the differences in funeral customs and their meanings. Manfred has been praised for his illumination of cultural differences, and for the “stylized and sympathetic perspective” with which he treats Yankton culture. He doesn’t present himself as an expert on Indians but as a student of Dakota culture. I heard him praised once by a tribal member who said that Fred knew more about some aspects of Dakota life than some Dakotas did, but that you’d never hear that from Fred himself.

  He began studying Sioux culture, and particularly that of the Yankton division of the Sioux Nation, while he was working on Lord Grizzly. He then interviewed and made friends with some Yankton people while he was working on Conquering Horse. Because of his acquaintance with Yanktons knowledgeable about traditional ways, and his careful incorporation of that knowledge into his books, he has been praised by tribal representatives for his respect for Native culture. Consequently, Scarlet Plume is respected among Dakota readers in spite of its depictions of extreme violence and cruelty by some of the tribe during the 1862 war. Manfred has said, “I want to make sure to show that there were three kinds of Indians [involved in the war]. There were the old-line Yankton. They weren’t part of the slaughtering and ravishing and raping. . . . And every society has its bastards, its evil men. . . . And [there were] the Indians who accepted Christianity, and when they decided it wasn’t for them, they revolted. They had nowhere to go, and they didn’t go back. They were just suddenly crazy in their ravishing and raping. . . . They had dropped both moralities, their old one and Christianity. They were just floating in between.”

  Of course, he depicts the viciousness of some white participants as well.

  The depiction of outrageous brutality in the novel, especially in the first third of it, has generated quite a bit of criticism, though not as much as might be expected. Manfred has made the point that he did not set out to depict excessive violence but that the violence is inherent in the history. The violence in the beginning of the book may seem excessive because so much of it is individually targeted, with sharp-edged weapons, but in actuality the ending of the book is just as violent, though its violence is carried out by more “civilized” people. The attack on the train of carts bearing the Indian captives is extremely vicious, and the hanging of thirty-eight Sioux still stands as the largest mass execution in the history of the United States. Violence pervades the book—the horrific initial massacre is echoed in every event throughout the story. As one commentator on a website said, “I almost didn’t get into the book: The first chapter was so horrific! Later I realized how the gravity of the novel . . . was only achieved because of the graphic writing.”

  Graphic writing—that brings us to consideration of another frequently noted aspect of the book. When the phrase “graphic writing” is used, by common understanding we know that what is under discussion is either violence or sex. Nobody ever mentions “graphic writing” when they’re talking about effusive restaurant reviews or typography. This is not the first book of Manfred’s that has provoked negative reactions among some readers because of its sexual content. In fact, as he tells us with good humor in the preface to Green Earth, members of his own family told him that a scene in his first novel, The Golden Bowl, was “pure filth,” which has always struck me as an interesting juxtaposition. For many years, people of northwestern Iowa and southwestern Minnesota referred to him as “that guy who writes dirty books.” But Scarlet Plume, his fourteenth book, publish
ed twenty years after The Golden Bowl, is the first that can be properly called sexually explicit. It introduces discussion and description of rear-entry sex, masturbation, rape, child rape, genital mutilation, pleasurable consensual intercourse, and abundant admiration of the size of characters’ genitals—all without gutter language (the male organ is consistently mythologized under the term “phallus”). I bring all this up primarily because there are some persons in our culture who still regard this subject as taboo. But it is absolutely vital to the central concerns of the book, which include the dangers of war (including sexual violence), the hypocrisy that accompanies some common religious posturing, the sexual frustrations inherent in loveless marriages, the intensity of desire under extreme duress, the differences of sexual practices in different cultures, and the problems of miscegenation taboos.

  Let us grant the author his central premise: that a woman kidnapped, raped, and forced to witness sexual atrocities during a war and who is starved for love might become deeply infatuated with her rescuer, a member of the enemy culture, leading to all sorts of difficulties for both of them. It is laughable to think that such a story could be told without dealing frankly with the matters mentioned in the list above. It is almost inconceivable that it could be told without frank language, unless by resorting to clinical terminology divorced from human feeling.

  The controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover was first published in Europe in 1928. After a celebrated court case, it was allowed to be published in the United States in 1959. Scarlet Plume originally appeared five years later. I contend that no one ought to be shocked by it. For the most part, reviews published at the time praised the book without objection. I would not hesitate to recommend it to high school students if they had any desire to read it for its other content. The problems Scarlet Plume raises have not disappeared from the worldwide stage, and its historical significance is inestimable.

  I have been sorely tempted to go on and on here about why I think that in spite of its occasional clumsiness this novel is important to our understanding of Minnesota history and American history. I am continually fascinated by its use of language (always a rewarding subject in Manfred’s books), and I have steadfastly resisted inflicting my take on the book’s theology. Most of all, in this introduction I have decided to forego discussing the issues of miscegenation raised by the book, as this topic demands in-depth scholarly analysis. However, I do want to urge you to consider those matters as you read the novel.

  I promise you that Scarlet Plume will reward your reading efforts and will provide much for you to think about, much to be disturbed about, and much to engage your emotions. You will never again encounter its like. And after you have finished it, there’s a lot more Manfred to read.

  Foreword

  Arthur R. Huseboe

  Scarlet Plume is the fourth of the Buckskin Man Tales in order of writing and the closest of all five to the territory that Frederick Manfred calls home, the Siouxland of Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Nebraska. Its events spring out of the soil of his first adopted state—Minnesota—and spill over into his second—South Dakota. Just as the abducted Judith Raveling in Scarlet Plume moves with her Sioux captors from Minnesota into the plains of South Dakota, so over the years Manfred’s creative imagination has expanded out of the narrow confines of farm life on the northern prairies into the vast and varied landscape of the frontier West, the old Dakota Territory, the wide plains that the Sioux Indians roamed over freely before the coming of the white man.

  Not until the writing of Scarlet Plume, the thirteenth of his novels, did Manfred realize that he had created a special series of fictional accounts of the Old West, tied together on a basis of accurate facts and each dealing with a different important era in the history of America. In the spring of 1962 he had been reading for the second time Buckskin and Blanket Days by Thomas Henry Tibbles, reminiscences about Plains Indian life in the 1850s and 1860s. From Tibbles he had already absorbed countless details in preparation for the writing of Conquering Horse (1959), his first Indian novel of pre-white days, but now Tibbles’s title provided a name that could tie together all four novels about the frontier West: The Buckskin Man Tales. Manfred decided that the tales should include Lord Grizzly (1954), about mountain man times in 1823; Riders of Judgment (1957), about the Johnson County range war of 1892; Conquering Horse (1959); and now Scarlet Plume, written but not yet published, about the Sioux Indian Uprising in Minnesota in 1862. With the later addition of King of Spades (1966), a tale of love and death in the Black Hills in 1876, Manfred would complete his vision of the historical process that during the nineteenth century had shaped the people of the Northern Plains.

  It was the first of the Buckskin Man Tales, Lord Grizzly, that taught Manfred how to handle the historical research that so enriches Scarlet Plume and the other books in the group. Until late 1944 he had drawn primarily on his own wide-ranging experiences as the basis for his writing, but in that year he came upon the story of mountain man Hugh Glass and his terrible wrestle with a grizzly bear along the Grand River in South Dakota. In a copy of the WPA Guide to South Dakota he discovered a woodcut and the account of Glass’s terrible wounding, followed by his crawl across half of western South Dakota, and by his unusual revenge. The sheer magnitude of Glass’s ordeal appealed to Manfred, but, even more, he was drawn to learn more about frontier days on the Northern Plains because in writing his first novels, especially The Golden Bowl (1944) and This Is the Year (1947), he had come to the realization that his knowledge of his own farm people was incomplete: he did not fully understand the land on which they had settled and flourished. Who were the Indians and white men, Manfred wondered, who had lived and traveled here? Something was wrong, something was missing. His characters up to now had no background; they came from nowhere. Manfred realized that he knew nothing beyond his grandparents and nothing about the land on which their grandchildren were now living. Furthermore, while the term “Siouxland” that he had coined fit very well the white farmers of the region of the Sioux River, it also carried the intriguing suggestion of a larger area, the land where the Sioux had once roamed, from western Minnesota and Iowa across the Dakotas and into Wyoming. Manfred began to burn with a passion to know the answers to his questions.

  The thought of a novel about such unfamiliar material as mountain men and Indians, however, was at first a discouraging one. He knew nothing of the mountain man and only a little more about Indians. Fortunately, his birthplace in northwestern Iowa had been a few rods off old Highway 75 and so he had some early familiarity with the Sioux, for he had seen their caravans traveling back and forth between Flandreau, South Dakota, and Nebraska. More significant was the fact that from 1936 to 1937, while playing basketball for a business school in Sioux Falls, he had developed a close friendship with a young Sioux named Jimmy Wells and he had also roomed with a man who had been brought up among the Indians. These experiences, however, were not nearly enough to go on if he were to capture the reality he wanted. He would have to do extensive reading, more than he had ever done before.

  In the winter of 1944–45 Manfred started a Hugh Glass tab in his notebook and entered items from time to time from his wide reading. But not until 1952 did he bring a climax to his campaign to learn everything that he needed to know about mountain men and Indians. It included visits to the reservations, especially to Pine Ridge, where he had long talks with Andrew High Pine and where he went with the reservation leaders to get a tree for the sun dance. At Fort Berthold in North Dakota he talked many days with an old Ree, a Mandan, and a Sioux. Later on he traveled to the Grand River in South Dakota, where he recreated parts of Hugh Glass’s crawl south to the Cheyenne River. As further contributions to accuracy he gathered flowers, weeds, and insects as he followed Hugh Glass’s trail between Lemmon and Pierre and then had them identified at the University of Minnesota; and near his home in Bloomington, Minnesota, he dragged himself about the bluffs, his leg in a splint-like contraption, learning how Hugh might hav
e managed with his broken leg tied to a tree branch.

  When Lord Grizzly appeared, it impressed reviewers and readers everywhere as an accurate picture of the fur trade frontier. His good friend Fred Blessing, an archaeologist and an expert on Indian lore, encouraged Manfred to write a full-length Indian tale. Even Indian readers, who would seem to have every right to be dubious, recognized the verisimilitude of Manfred’s portrayal of the Arikaras and the Sioux. One of the most unusual acknowledgments of that fact came one day, a couple of years after Lord Grizzly had appeared, when Manfred was working in his cabin overlooking the Minnesota River. Without warning a single drumbeat shook the building and he jumped from his chair. Out in his yard was a group of Indians, led by Otto Thunder, dressed in ceremonial regalia and gathered in the shade about a large drum. After several minutes of drumming and singing, Otto rose and turned to the cabin. “This thank-song was for Fred Manfred, our friend,” he said, and the group climbed quietly into their cars and left.

  Following Lord Grizzly came Conquering Horse and even deeper and wider reading about the Plains Indian. Manfred had struck up an acquaintance with William Lemons, who had lived at Standing Rock reservation for a time, and he introduced the novelist to a woman living in Minneapolis, Angela Fiske, an Indian in her late seventies. For Manfred it was a marvelous discovery, for Angela had been brought up in the old ways. Long visits with her about traditional Sioux beliefs and daily life rounded out Manfred’s book learning and gave him the confidence that in Conquering Horse and Scarlet Plume his vision of Indian life in Siouxland was a true one.