We didn’t see much game—few deer, no antelope or buffalo. We lived on jackrabbits, prairie dogs, and camas root.
The Dakotas are an empty land. They will be emptier when we are gone.
Perhaps men will be different in the Grandmother’s land.
Perhaps they won’t abandon what they know to seek paradise.
Perhaps they will make paradise where they are.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
HISTORICAL NOVELS BLOOM IN THE BRIAR PATCHES OF HISTORY. Ground plowed every spring by eager PhD candidates is too exhausted for Story to germinate. We can know too much to dream.
So while this novelist can—with a twinge—alter the signatories of the “Address from the Colored Citizens of Virginia” (was “Norfolk”), bringing imagined characters to the valley of the Little Bighorn in June 1876 takes more guts than brains. Lucky for me, new archaeological data and our latter-day willingness to credit survivors’ (indians’) accounts has revised our understanding of the final hours and movements of the five troops of the Seventh Cavalry. Scholars are fairly well agreed on what Custer did and why he was overwhelmed. What that officer was thinking—why didn’t he attack? why didn’t he support Reno? why didn’t he anticipate and prepare for the indian assault?—will be debated for years.
Little Bighorn students will complain rightly that Ben Shillaber is a composite of several historical figures and that I have oversimplified Custer’s indian scouts. Though Isaiah Dorman, a black interpreter, married a Sioux woman and died at the battle, he certainly wasn’t Edward Ratcliff. I admit these sacrifices to Story without apology.
The recipe for Terrapin Soup is Charles Ranhofer’s.
The menu for Charles Dickens’s dinner at Delmonico’s is reprinted with permission from Delmonico’s: A Century of Splendor, by Lately Thomas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).
The recipes for Rainy Day and Son-of-a-Bitch Stew were adapted from Dan Cushman’s Cow Country Cookbook, reprinted with permission of Clear Light Publishing, Santa Fe, New Mexico, www.clearlightbooks.com.
It takes more than one cook to make a book. My grateful thanks to:
Knox Burger
Chris Calkins
Dr. Lucious Edwards
Dr. Susan Doyle
Dr. Doug Christian
Dr. Douglas Gordon
Bud Griffin
Christian Higgins
Professor Ervin Jordan
Starling Lawrence
Jeri Lynn Tingley
Evelyn Timberlake
And thanks to the helpful staffs at the Leyburn Library of Washington and Lee University, the Library of Virginia in Richmond, the Library of Congress, the Montana Historical Society, the Gilliford Baptist Church, the Gallatin Valley Historical Society, the Virginia Historical Society, Fort Laramie, Fort Phil Kearny, the McFarland Curatorial Center in Virginia City, the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, the New York City Historical Society, the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia Alderman Libary, Swem Library of the College of William and Mary, and Special Collections at Virginia State University.
More praise for
Canaan
“I loved Jacob’s Ladder, but [Canaan] is even better. McCaig’s prodigious imagination and profound research lead us on a journey through the landscapes of Reconstruction and the turbulence of the wars for the West. He combines a farmer’s eye for the natural world, a poet’s ear for language, and the narrative flair of a bred-in-the-bone storyteller. The result is a novel that is credible, compelling, and humane.”
—Geraldine Brooks, author of March
“Lyrical.”
—Warren Bass, Washington Post
“[A] profound fascinating look at the grim Reconstruction Era.”
—Harriet Klausner, Midwest Book Review
“This well-wrought sequel to McCaig’s Civil War novel Jacob’s Ladder (2003) . . . is authoritative.”
—Publishers Weekly
“McCaig’s extensive research is revealed in the book’s rich historical detail and revisionist perspective. Black life in Reconstruction-era Virginia is portrayed particularly well.”
—Doug Southard, Library Journal
“Well-paced language and haunting imagery. . . . [Canaan is] an affecting historical novel, recounted with compassion.”
—Booklist
“McCaig takes readers on a tour of war-ravaged Virginia . . . he weaves together dazzling strands of story. McCaig has spun pure gold.”
—Vick Mickunas, Dayton Daily News
“Canaan is a huge, dusty Manifest Destiny of a story that details the false starts and lost opportunities of the Reconstruction era.”
—Roanoke Times
“The tale unfolds in rich social, political and economic detail . . . [the] description is vivid and crisp.”
—Florence Gilkeson, Southern Pines
Praise for
Jacob’s Ladder
“This novel blots out the protection of historic distance. It is astonishingly immediate. Its research is magnificent but never intrudes. It becomes the story of war itself, how brutal it is, how courageous, how slowly and inexorably mad.”
“Jacob’s Ladder is an exciting historical novel of that same superior order as Thomas Flanagan’s Year of the French. McCaig has a fluent command of both the great events and the life-giving particulars of his memorable Virginians.”
—John Casey
“Boldly capricious, blessed with a host of vivid and memorable characters and a wealth of striking and credible events, Donald McCaig’s powerful, compassionate story is deeply rooted in the real and living presence of Virginia before, during, and after the Civil War. Jacob’s Ladder is historical fiction at its finest, and it places Donald McCaig in the pantheon of the best and brightest American novelists.”
—George Garrett
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by Donald McCaig
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First published as a Norton paperback 2008
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Manufacturing by Courier Westford
Book design by Barbara M. Bachman
Production manager: Anna Oler
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
McCaig, Donald.
Canaan : a novel / Donald McCaig.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-393-06246-5
ISBN-10: 0-393-06246-5
1. Indian women—Fiction. 2. Santee Indians—Fiction. 3. Freedmen—
Fiction. 4. Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865–1877)—Fiction.
5. Indians of North America—Government relations—1869–1934—
Fiction. 6. Little Bighorn, Battle of the, Mont., 1876—Fiction.
7. United States—History—1865–1898—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A2555C36 2007
813’.54—dc22
2006034218
ISBN 978-0-393-33046-5 pbk.
ISBN 978-0-393-34756-2 (e-book)
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
ALSO BY Donald McCaig
Jacob’s Ladder: A Story of Virginia during the War
An American Homeplace
Nop’s Trials
Nop’s Hope
Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men
The Butte Polka
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