Tough Trip Through Paradise 1878-1879
by Andrew Garcia
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Book Summary Information
Author: Andrew GarciaEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1967-01-01
ISBN: 0893012505
Number of pages: 409
Publisher: Caxton Press
Book Reviews of Tough Trip Through Paradise 1878-1879
Book Review: Best Western I've ever read
Summary: 5 Stars
Bennett Stein obviously did some pretty heavy editing to cut Garcia's manuscript down to novel size, but the final product flows perfectly. Stein swears that all the words are Garcia's and that's half the charm of the story. The choice of words, figures of speech, and turns of phrase that Garcia uses are things that a modern Western writer would never think to use. You don't hear people talk like this any more. I once tried to read Buffalo Bill's autobiography, and put it down permanently when I came to the part, complete with engraved illustration, entitled "Shooting my First Indian". If that was the "old school" western, writers have swung to the opposite extreme nowadays with what I might call "new age" westerns. In them, depending on the desired story line, the Native American (never an Indian, much less an Injun as Garcia puts it) is either a pathetic and helpless victim of white oppression, or some kind of transcendent metaphysical being so in touch with the Earth that he merely prays and the animals walk up to him to be lovingly killed.
Garcia's manuscript blows all these stereotypes to hell. He spent the better part (according to him) of his life in a world where "Injuns" and whites representing a very wide spectrum of faith and morality were all angling to get the advantage of each other (or avoid each other) in a world that was new to all of its participants. The Indians we meet are real people with complex characters well-drawn, rather than the side-show targets or enlightened saints of other Westerns. Likewise, the white men (there are no white women) range from honest to foolish to despicable, but are always interesting characters. There is no "The Indians this" or "The Whites that" in this story. It's all about individual people making their own individual decisions about what to do at any given moment. Sometimes their choices are noble, sometimes they are cowardly, and sometimes they are horrifically cruel.
The beginnings of limits in the wild West are just starting to appear in this 1879 story. The gold miners have already mined out their gulch. The soldiers live in "strong teepees" and call up reinforcements on the "click-clack". Bozeman is fading as a trading center as steamboats push farther up the Missouri. Everywhere in life, interesting things happen on the edges and borders. In Garcia's life, we have two major borders -- the border between the White world and the Indian world, of course, and also the border between the free, open, and lawless world, and civilization with all it entails.
The historical facts covered in this book have been written plenty of times by others, but Garcia personalizes every camp site, every confrontation in the wilderness, and every battle. It's one thing to read about the Big Hole battle in a history book, with its formulaic recitations of the positions of the opposing forces, the leadership of both sides, and the general progression of the battle throughout the day. It's quite another to wonder what the soldier was thinking who smashed a teenage girl in the face with the butt of his rifle, breaking her teeth. When he got out of the army, did he go back home to his wife somewhere and look at her face differently? We may read in some other book that some of the graves of the Indians were looted. "Looted" is just a word. But when we read here of that same girl, the only survivor of that battle amongst her entire family, going back and finding her father's grave, torn up and with his bones out of it, and hear her cry her heart out, we learn what looting a grave really means.
Tough Trip Through Paradise is one of the most personal narratives of the old West, and it's certainly the most gripping and best-written personal narrative. As I read it, I kept thinking, "this can't be true", but Stein and Garcia assure me that it is, and I believe them. It's one hell of a story.
Summary of Tough Trip Through Paradise 1878-1879
Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for the University of Idaho Press
This book grew out of a manuscript left by Andrew Garcia on his death in 1942. Ben Stein acquired the manuscript and edited it to tell Garcia's story of the 1877 war between the U.S. government and the Nez Perce people, the end of the buffalo herds and other historic events in Western life.
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