Spoiler-free summary: Jim Keath ran away from home at age 11 to follow his uncle and become a mountain man. Shortly after, he is attacked by a grizzly bear and nearly dies, but is rescued by a group of Crow Indians, who heal him up and raise him for the next six years. By age 19, he has left the tribe and is living as a skilled mountain man like he originally wanted. However, a letter makes it to him from his biological family, and the book is an internal struggle as Jim chooses between a settled-down life in territorial Oregon with his brothers and sister and the freedom of the wilderness. Like most 1950s books about American Indians, elements here did not age well, some of which are core to the central drama of the book. There are some interesting frontier and adventure elements, however.
Discussion: This is the kind of book you just never see anymore, for several reasons. One is the age of the main character – a book today would probably try to find a way to make him 13 or 14, not 19 years old. Maybe it would get told from the point of view of his youngest brother.
Another is the genre. I saw these graphs on some social media feed or another showing film genre popularity, and the western fell off entirely in the 1970s. Earlier this year I watched through some old live action Disney movies from the 1950s and 1960s, and a lot of them are in this vein – the most famous might be the Davy Crockett miniseries-turned-movies, which came out a couple years after this book. From the sound of it, Boomer kids just loved stories of cowboys vs. Indians, but that almost completely disappeared by the time my millennial self was born. Maybe it was a greater sensitivity to the fact that Native Americans are, you know, people, and not forces of nature existing only to scare settlers and get killed by the hero. (The absolute worst Newbery winner is The Matchlock Gun, which has that plot.)
Granted, the Disney films are a little more nuanced than that, and so is Moccasin Trail. When someone insults Indians to Jim’s face, he recalls the moments of kindness he had with them. But he also recalls the brutal moments alongside them. The book wanders into racial essentialism a little too far – being an Indian by definition makes you violent, but luckily for the characters, Jim can never truly be an Indian, even if he acts like them sometimes. It veers into parody when it’s revealed to Jim in the final pages that his big spiritual moment that was required of him to become a Crow adult involved the 23rd Psalm in English, which is used as proof that he is a white man “clean through,” and he gives up the Indian religious items he used to hold dear for good as a result.
It’s also funny living on the opposite side of the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s and reading this. Jim starts out ruing the settlement of the west and wondering why white people can’t learn to live with the land instead of taming it. If this book came out today, his family would learn lessons from him about that, and get a little more in tune with nature. Instead, one of the big character turning points was Jim becoming a true believer of the settlers and their mission after watching some wagons fight their way through the mountains.
So, it’s tough to recommend this book. Given the title and the cover art, I kind of expected it to primarily be a travel story, and I was surprised when they got to Oregon less than halfway through the book. That might have been a more interesting route to go, since the stuff about Jim being a nature expert wasn’t bad. Maybe the plot is that Jim and his family learn about each other on the backdrop of an adventure through the west, and meet somewhere in the middle, instead of Jim rediscovering his whiteness being the main arc.
When I saw the next book on my list was called Heart of a Samurai, I got real nervous this would be another culturally questionable one, but breathed a small sigh of relief that it won the Honor in 2011.
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