A Dark Blackfeet Tale

I guess I figured that the best antidote to the horror show of our contemporary dumpster-fire-amid-a-train-wreck was an evening reading a horror yarn. Lucky for me, Lane Jacobson of Paulina Springs Books had him a copy of Stephen Graham Jones’ brand new The Buffalo Hunter Hunter for me. I dug right in, and let me tell you compadres, this Blackfeet tale is real-meat mountain doin’s.

Dig the caper:

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.

We know immediately that there is something uncanny about Good Stab, and a purpose in his insistence on telling his tale to the Lutheran pastor, Arthur Beaucarne aka Three Persons. Jones pulls off a hard trick — Good Stab’s recollections really do sound like a man telling his story orally. There’s a wonderful cadence and voice to it that one reviewer likened to “reading a dream.”

Good Stab is telling his story; we have to keep up with his nomenclature and his presumption that the landmark moments of the Winter Count are understood. Thus Jones creates a sense of authenticity. It’s bold and demands that we fall into his story, and it works.

Here’s a sample:

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The 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow alludes to the Marias Massacre in Montana, which occurred in January 1870, when a column of U.S. troops under Major Eugene Baker went out on a punitive expedition to hit a village of Blackfeet under Mountain Chief, where some Blackfeet outlaws were believed to be sheltering after killing an American rancher. Baker’s scouts, including the Metis trader Joe Kipp, told him they were approaching the wrong camp — a camp led by Heavy Runner — but Baker wasn’t interested in making distinctions. The soldiers struck the camp in the early hours of a cold winter morning and inaugurated a terrible slaughter, mostly of women, children and the elderly, as most of the men were out hunting. Some of the victims were burnt alive as the soldiers knocked down their tipis and set them ablaze.

Many of the victims were sick with smallpox, which repeatedly devastated the Blackfeet. Baker abandoned his sick prisoners to face the winter without shelter or provisions.

For some reason, this horrific incident has been mostly forgotten, though it was a worse slaughter than Sand Creek or the Washita, which are stronger in memory. And you can see that this might make for a haunted tale…

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I am disposed to like Stephen Graham Jones. He’s an ardent fan of Robert E. Howard and Conan of Cimmeria, tales he fed himself on as a young Blackfeet in West Texas, exiled far from his people’s northern homeland in the Backbone of the World. He also digs Waylon Jennings.

Jones is a writing prof at University of Colorado, Boulder. His classes must be a blast.

NPR reviewer Gabino Iglesias says that this book is Jones’ masterpiece. I’m only a few miles down this dark trail, but I can already tell Iglesias is right.

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Jones has also inspired me to do a post on Joe Kipp, who was a very significant figure in frontier Montana history. Charlie Russell himself immortalized his trading post: