Slow account of ‘Trail of Tears’

I lived in hopes of a repeat when I read excerpts of the glowing reviews printed in the end pages of the paperback edition of Thirteen Moons and realised it is based on a true story.

The beginning was brisk enough with orphaned 12-year-old Will Cooper sold by his relatives as a “bound boy” to run a trading post on the borders of the Cherokee Nation.

En route he “wins” his life-long love, Claire (also aged 12) in a card game, leaves her with Featherstone, the man he presumes is her father, and proceeds to the trading post at Wayan — an indeterminate area not yet annexed by the United States but outside the accepted limits of First Nation (Indian) territory populated mainly by Indians or Indian-European mixes. There he meets and is adopted by Bear, chief of the Cherokee nation. He lives among the Indians, learns their language, teaches himself French from books he orders for the post.

He renews his acquaintance with the mixed bloods Claire and Featherstone who, he finds, is a wealthy man and plantation owner, complete with slaves growing tobacco and living like any other rich man in North Carolina before the Civil War.

Will wants to marry Claire but knows he can’t because he is white and she is one-eighth Indian and the laws of North Carolina foreshadow South African apartheid that forbade inter-racial marriage, however slight the mixture. Then he learns Claire is Featherstone’s wife — in law but not in fact.

Will’s trading prospers; he teaches himself law, goes to Washington to plead the cause of the First Nation people — but in vain. Praise for this novel must be due to a rather rambling account of the infamous Trail of Tears when the US army forced First Nation people and those of mixed blood off their land, with no compensation whatever, to make way for white settlers. One wouldn’t think a book documenting the tragedy of the Indian Nation in North America could be dull. Sadly, Thirteen Moons is.

We get seemingly endless descriptions of scenery, never-ending accounts of encounters with faceless bureaucrats in Washington.

The story has so much potential but the author seems to be suffering from what can best be described as verbal diarrhea. I confess that, even though I’d have like to know more about the Trail of Tears, I gave up when half-way through. I glanced at the end — and even gave up on that, too.

Feeling somewhat guilty in view of the praise heaped on this book — in the end-paper blurbs — I looked up Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier on Amazon.com and was reassured to find most of those submitting reviews to that website agreed with me.

This book is dull and overly long, but if you’ve time to hack your way through this tiresome jungle of prose, albeit some of it beautifully written, you’ll find Thirteen Moons at Nigel Khan, bookseller.