THE LIGHTHORSEMEN: A Novel of Indian Territory

Fiction

A witness to change

THE LIGHTHORSEMEN:
A Novel of Indian Territory

By Jack Shakely
214 pp. Strider Nolan

Reviewed by Bob Sanchez

The Creek Indian Billy Mingo murders a man who he says really “needed killing.” The year is 1895, and the law catches up to him.

Mingo surrenders to the Lighthorsemen, the Creek Nation’s law enforcement, and he admits his guilt. Creek judges sentence him to death, but according to custom they tell him to go home and be with his family for most of a year and “return on the first Saturday in August 1896 to be executed.” Mingo complies on the appointed day, and in the audience the journalist Edward Perryman watches the man’s death by firing squad. Perryman is deeply impressed by the murderer’s honor and bravery, and by the system of laws that command such respect even from a convicted criminal. Perryman decides to become part of this honorable Creek legal system, first by becoming a Lighthorseman and eventually a lawyer to protect his people.

The execution shows one of the story’s strengths, opening a window into Indian culture and the trouble that so many Indians have in adapting to the onrushing flood of white men and their written laws. As one character states, the Creeks are “on the road to disappearance.” The conquering whites allot head rights to the Creeks and other tribes, meaning they return small parcels of the land they had snatched from the tribes in the first place.

Meanwhile, men like Perryman adapt to inevitable change—he attends a college in Arkansas, becomes first a Lighthorseman and then a lawyer, and watches as a distant Congress decides the fate of fading native civilizations. Whites even intrude on lands Congress has set aside for the Indians, and Washington quashes a proposal that Indians be given their own state, with land that is eventually incorporated into the state of Oklahoma.

And then there is oil. Through Congressional sufferance, the Indians maintain control of their territories, but what about the minerals under the surface? What will happen when whites learn that the Creek lands aren’t worthless after all? That underneath the surface lie vast quantities of oil? The answer will determine whether tribes enter the twentieth century with any hope of wealth at all, and it is beyond the tribes’ control.

Edward Perryman is an honorable man and a likeable character who wants to protect his tribe under difficult circumstances. But he doesn’t drive the plot, nor does anyone else. A way of life is mostly gone, and Perryman is more a witness to change than its agent.

Though last to be published, this is the middle volume in Shakely’s trilogy of Indian country. It's preceded by the prize-winning Confederate War Bonnetand completed by POWs at Chigger Lake. Both have been reviewed on this site, and Jack himself occasionally reviews for the Internet Review of Books. Shakely is not only a fine writer, but he is well versed in his subject matter—as he notes, “I am proud to be mixed-blood Muscogee/Creek.”

This enjoyable short novel offers a glimpse of America’s past that you certainly didn’t see in high school history books. Readers will enjoy the entire trilogy.