Cliffsnotes the Light in the Forest (Cliffs Notes)

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THE LIGHT IN THE FOREST NOTES including • Life and Background of the Author • Introduction to the Novel • A Historical Overview of the Novel • A Brief Synopsis • List of Characters • Critical Commentaries • Critical Essays • Map • Genealogy • Review Questions and Essay Topics • Selected Bibliography

by Mary Ellen Snodgrass, M.A. University of North Carolina at Greensboro

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Editor Gary Carey, M.A. University of Colorado

Project Editor Kathleen M. Cox

Editor Greg Tubach

Copy Editor Tamara S. Castleman

ISBN 7645-8504-5 © Copyright 1999 by Cliffs Notes Inc. All Rights Reserved Printed in U.S.A. 1999 Printing Library of Congress No: 99-64196

The Cliffs Notes logo, the names “Cliffs” and “Cliffs Notes,” and the black and yellow diagonal-stripe cover design are all registered trademarks belonging to Cliffs Notes, Inc., and may not be used in whole or in part without written permission.

Cliffs Notes, Inc.

Lincoln, Nebraska

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CONTENTS Life and Background of the Author ..................5 Introduction to the Novel...................................7 A Historical Overview of the Novel ...................8 A Brief Synopsis................................................10 List of Characters..............................................11 Critical Commentaries .....................................16 Critical Essays ...................................................55 Land and Clothes as Symbols ........................................55 The Frontier Tradition ...................................................56 Character Duality..........................................................59

Essay Questions and Research Topics .............60 Selected Bibliography .......................................62

Center Spread: The Light in the Forest Genealogy Page Four: The Light in the Forest Map

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The Light in the Forest Map

Ohio River

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en

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Blue Mountains Pittsburgh (Fort Pitt)

True Son's Lenni Lenape village

Monongahela River

Ohio River

Susquehanna River

Third Mountain Paxton Harrisburg

Carlisle

True Son is forced to travel from his Lenni Lenape village in what today is Ohio, through Fort Pitt, to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. From there, Mr. Butler takes "Johnny" to Paxton, the family's home town. True Son and Half Arrow's journey back to their village is farther north, although the two boys come very close to Fort Pitt.

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Ohio

Muskingum River

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Pennsylvania

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THE LIGHT IN THE FOREST Notes LIFE AND BACKGROUND OF THE AUTHOR Conrad Michael Richter, the son of the Reverend John Absalom Richter and Charlotte Esther Henry Richter, was born on October 13, 1890, in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, a town named by his great-grandfather, a tavern keeper. His mother’s family included tradesmen, craftsmen, a United States congressman, and a hero of the War of 1812. Richter’s interest in philosophy and religion derived from his paternal grandfather and uncle, both circuit-riding clergymen, and his father, a former storekeeperturned-Lutheran-pastor to small parishes of coal miners. Opting for a writing career, Richter gave up his original plans to major in philosophy and religion. At nineteen, he began reporting for the Patton, Pennsylvania, Courier. To improve his writing style, he sought editing jobs on the Johnstown Journal and Leader and the Pittsburgh Dispatch. From 1910 to 1924, Richter served as a private secretary—a position that enabled him to travel—to a wealthy Cleveland family. During this period, in 1915, his short story “Brothers of No Kin” was included in The Best Short Stories of 1915. He also published various stories in Ladies’ Home Journal, American, and Saturday Evening Post, and wrote children’s stories for John Martin’s Book. Also in 1915, Richter married Harvena Maria Achenbach and settled outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The couple had only one child, a daughter. To support the family, Richter opened a publishing firm in Reading, Pennsylvania, but he earned little from his first published title, Brothers of No Kin and Other Stories (1924). When his wife became ill in 1928, Richter sold the Reading publishing firm and resettled first near the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and later in Arizona. A lover of history from boyhood, he studied American Southwest history and

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6 folklore by reading documents, diaries, military maps and charts, letters, and news clippings. To gain a full knowledge of the American Southwest and to enliven his fiction, he also interviewed elderly residents about their experiences. By publishing his stories in many magazines and anthologies, including Ghost Stories, Country Home, Western Trails, Farm Journal, and Woman’s Home Companion, he gained the lifelong support of his readers, who approved of his authentic detail and diction. He developed themes of fortitude and perseverance, which earned him a reputation as spokesman for the pioneer era. Most comfortable writing short stories, Richter published Early Americana and Other Stories in 1936, his first collection of American Southwest tales. He achieved a major breakthrough with The Sea of Grass (1937), a best-selling prairie novel about a cattle baron who settles in the Midwest. During his twenty-two years living in the American Southwest, he published many books, including Tacey Cromwell (1942), a story about a prostitute in an Arizona mining boom town, Always Young and Fair (1947), which details the life of a woman whose lover died in the Spanish-American War, The Light in the Forest (1953), about a boy who’s forced to choose between two racial and cultural identities, and The Lady (1957), an account of the unsolved disappearance of Doña Ellen Sessions from the New Mexico Territory during a range feud between herders and cattle breeders. His historical fiction examines progress during an era of national growth. It also examines the price of this prosperity in terms of family hardship, individual suffering and loss, and society’s breakup. Richter returned to Pennsylvania and focused his writing on Pennsylvania history in a trilogy, The Awakening Land (1966), subtitled The Trees, The Fields, and The Town, the saga of heroine Sayward Luckett’s family, pioneers in the Ohio Valley from the 1700s until the American Civil War. At Richter’s death in a Pottsville, Pennsylvania, hospital on October 30, 1968, Pine Grove established the Conrad Richter Memorial Fund, which supports the planting of trees. Outside his former home on Mifflin Street, his publisher and agent placed an informational plaque. Pennsylvania State University maintains a Richter collection, which includes his posthumous collection, The Rawhide Knot and Other Stories (1978), and a parallel to True Son’s

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7 story, A Country of Strangers (1982), the story of Mary Stanton, a female captive whom the Lenni Lenape rename Stone Girl. Richter’s attention to ordinary work habits, superstitions, rites of passage, dialect, and belief systems earned him the 1961 National Book Award for autobiographical fiction for The Waters of Kronos (1960), a work in which he altered his life story in Pine Grove to that of the fictional John Donner in Unionville. In addition, he earned an Ohioana Library Medal, a Gold Medal for Literature from Society of Libraries of New York University, a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant in 1959, and honorary doctorates from Susquehanna and Temple universities, the University of New Mexico, and Lafayette and Lebanon Valley colleges. He achieved his greatest recognition when he was awarded the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for The Town (1950), an appealing portrayal of pioneer life.

INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVEL Conrad Richter, American literature’s pioneer specialist, was passionate about American pioneer life and the people who settled the land. Of German ancestry, he drew on a frontier heritage that added drama to his writings. From notebooks, family memorabilia, and readings of such eyewitness accounts as Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, Richter acquired authentic details about spirituality, herb collection and healing, storytelling and singing, and open-fire cookery. His straightforward fiction portrays a nation changing from open spaces and blue sky to large cities and smokestack-filled skylines, changes that, in his opinion, resulted in a spiritual and moral decline. For style, Richter imitated the writings of Willa Cather to capture the fragile Western landscapes that buffalo hunters, railroaders, and investors were rapidly transforming. Interested in how people survive in a hostile world, he wrote about human experiences in frontier history. Central to his writing are the themes of love of freedom and learning from challenge, two themes that are important in his young-adult novel The Light in the Forest (1953). An American classic historical novel for young-adult readers, The Light in the Forest takes place in the last half of the eighteenth

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8 century on the Pennsylvania frontier. The story is loosely based on actual historical events. Colonel Henry Bouquet’s regiment defeated the Shawnee and Delaware tribes by introducing a smallpox epidemic to weaken the Indian forces. At a dramatic moment in October 1764, Bouquet marched to where the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers meet and demanded that the Indians return white captives whom they had captured. He threatened to slaughter Indian hostages and level Indian villages if his ultimatum was not met. Native leaders had no choice but to turn over 200 captives to Bouquet; many of these people didn’t want to return to white society. Bouquet’s reward for negotiating peace and securing a road west into Ohio was promotion to brigadier general in 1765. That same year, on September 2, he died of fever in Pensacola, Florida. The Light in the Forest opens in October 1764. An epigraph—a short poem or saying at the beginning of a book—taken from William Wordsworth’s poem “Intimations of Immortality” suggests where Richter got his idea for the novel’s title. The reference to light in the third line of the poem represents the poet’s concept of innocence found in young children. According to Wordsworth, “Shades of the prison-house” are the earthly experiences that spoil children’s innocent hearts with such human faults as meanness and cruelty to others. Richter’s novel centers on a cultural clash that pulls True Son from his Lenni Lenape foster parents and returns him to his boyhood identity as John Cameron Butler, child of wealthy white parents. True Son’s exposure to murder and racism in Paxton, Pennsylvania, causes him to return to his Indian parents, but he finds himself caught between the two cultures in ways not acceptable to either.

A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF THE NOVEL 1614 Dutch explorers enter Lenni Lenape territory along the Delaware River, which today forms the eastern border of Pennsylvania. 1631 Delaware Indians massacre Dutch settlers. 1681 England’s Charles II bestows the Pennsylvania charter on Quaker settler William Penn.

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1720

1750 1754

1759 1762 1763

1764 1766 1769 1776

Quakers establish Pennsylvania as a holy experiment in religious tolerance, which includes living at peace with Indians. Chief Tamanend of the Delaware agrees to a peace treaty, which lasts for seventy years. The Delaware migrate west to Ohio to join with the Wyandotte and Shawnee Indians against white settlers who are invading their lands. Pennsylvania authorities complete the Walking Purchase, a document that tricks the Delaware Indians out of a half million acres of land. Traders and settlers overrun Pennsylvania in search of land and furs. The French and Indian War begins multinational combat. Chippewa Indians (Ojibway), possibly led by Pontiac, chief of the Ottawas, defeat General Edward Braddock near Fort Dusquesne. In January, General John Forbes builds the foundations of Fort Pitt. Pontiac unites tribes as far south as the Mississippi River in order to thwart British expansionism. Settlers in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, annihilate the last surviving Conestogo Indians. On April 27, Pontiac holds a conference with other Indian tribes near Detroit, Michigan, to complain of British wrongs against Indians and to plan an attack on Fort Detroit. The French and Indian War ends. On July 31, Pontiac’s Rebellion threatens the peace; Pontiac’s forces seize ten forts and attack Fort Detroit and Fort Pitt. Combined Indian raids kill 2,000 Pennsylvanians. On November 17, Pontiac submits to British forces, and the Pontiac Rebellion unofficially ends. On July 24, the Pontiac Rebellion officially ends with a treaty signed at Oswego, New York. On April 20, a Peoria brave clubs Pontiac to death in Cahokia, Illinois. Quakers defend Indian rights. The Delawares sign their first treaty with the United States.

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A BRIEF SYNOPSIS At the start of the story, True Son, a white boy whom Lenni Lenape Indians captured at age four and later adopted as one of their own, is in turmoil. After eleven years with his Indian family, he is told that he must return to his white family because of a newly signed treaty. True Son fights against going, but his Indian father releases him to an army expedition that includes a guide nicknamed Del, who had once lived among the Indians and spoke their language. The expedition arrives in Pennsylvania, and True Son meets his white father and learns that his birth name is John Cameron Butler; his white family refers to him as Johnny. True Son/Johnny immediately dislikes his white father, whom he considers small and weak compared to his Indian father, Cuyloga. Johnny’s white family is appalled at the Indian ways that he has adopted and tries to get him to return to his white, Christian upbringing. True Son/Johnny distrusts white men, however, and is particularly upset to be among members of the Paxton Boys, a group of men known for massacring Indians. True Son/Johnny tries to run away, but he’s caught and returned. The entire time he lives in Paxton, he dreams of returning to his Indian family. The only white person he is able to connect with in any way is his little brother, Gordie. While recovering from a life-threatening illness, True Son hears his Indian cousin and best friend, Half Arrow, calling to him. Half Arrow has come for him. Unfortunately, Little Crane, who accompanied Half Arrow, has been killed by True Son’s white uncle, Wilse Owens, one of the Paxton Boys. True Son and Half Arrow vow revenge, but their plans are thwarted before they can finish killing the man. The boys return to their Indian home, and True Son receives a warm welcome. However, Little Crane’s family is determined to avenge his death and calls for war. Hoping to ambush a boatload of whites, the Indians ask True Son to be a decoy. Posing as a lost white boy, he succeeds in getting the boat to come toward him but is unable to carry through with the plan. Outraged, the Indians hold a trial to determine True Son’s fate. True Son’s father steps in and spares his son’s life, but he banishes True Son from the tribe and his Indian family forever. At the end of the novel, True Son is

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11 back where he started, approaching the white side of the forest. There’s one important difference however: In the beginning, he had two families willing to fight for him; now, neither family wants him, and his life is in danger in both cultures.

LIST OF CHARACTERS True Son/Johnny The protagonist, or main character, in the novel. The two names refer to John Cameron Butler, a Pennsylvania native whom Lenni Lenape braves (referred to by whites as “Delaware Indians”) captured in July 1753 at age four and reared for eleven years as Lenni Quis (translated as “True Son”), the son of Cuyloga and Quaquenga. True Son/Johnny is then forced to return to Paxton, Pennsylvania, his birthplace. In white man’s clothes, he bears himself with an intensity that suggests dignity but potential conflict. Cuyloga A Lenni Lenape brave and adoptive father to True Son. Cuyloga is a serious, deep-thinking parent who teaches his adopted son about the Great Spirit and helps tame True Son’s stubborn streak with wise words. To the boy, he is “an oak sheltering them from both the heat of the sun and the fury of the thunderbolt.” To the tribe, he serves as He-Who-Knows-the-Marks, the best of woodsmen. He is True Son’s stout defender, facing down a war party that forces him to choose between tribal loyalty and parental love. Quaquenga Cuyloga’s wife and True Son’s adoptive mother. The boy remembers her as “a spreading sugar maple providing them all with food and warmth.” Her fears for her son suggest a deep love for him.

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12 A’astonah; Mechelit True Son’s native younger and older sisters, who shudder behind Quaquenga as they watch their brother take his place among adult members of Thitpan’s war party. Half Arrow The son of Quaquenga’s brother Sumakek, or Black Fish. Half Arrow is True Son’s favorite cousin and faithful companion. He follows the column of returnees to Fort Pitt and keeps up a flow of jokes and laughter to cheer his pal. Half Arrow arrives in Paxton at True Son’s lowest point, caused by fever and homesickness. When he has the option of voting for True Son/Johnny’s execution, Half Arrow casts no vote and flees into the forest. Make Daylight A family friend of Cuyloga who committed suicide after his wife brought disgrace by deserting him for another man. Little Crane Another Lenni Lenape friend to True Son who follows his white wife on the march to Fort Pitt. Wilse Owens, True Son/Johnny’s uncle, kills and scalps Little Crane in Mehargue’s pasture. Kringas Half Arrow’s great-uncle, who teaches the boys about the bounty of nature that the Great Spirit gives Indians. Harry Butler True Son/Johnny’s white father, a pale, downcast landowner whose Paxton farmstead attests to wealth and success. While observing Johnny’s suffering from a mysterious fever, he blames himself for failing to guard against the Indian raid that carried True Son/Johnny from home for eleven years.

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13 Myra Espy Butler True Son/Johnny’s birthmother, a black-haired, black-eyed invalid confined to an upstairs bedroom. In genuine welcome, she greets her teen-aged son with tender compassion and a kiss. Gordie Butler True Son/Johnny’s white brother, a lively child of undisclosed age born after his brother’s capture. Gordie admires True Son/Johnny. Aunt Kate Stewart Harry’s sister, a pious, stiff-necked housekeeper for the Butler household. She disapproves of her nephew True Son/Johnny in native dress and carries off his hunting frock and leggings to end his standoff over wearing white men’s garments. When he lies near death, she returns his clothes, perhaps out of both guilt and concern for his welfare. Uncle Wilse Owens A powerful, overweight man who is a respected leader in Paxton. He hates Indians and believes that all of them should be killed. With harsh words and unfriendly eyes, he makes fun of True Son/Johnny’s native upbringing, believing that every Indian’s life is full of stealing, lying, butchering, and scalping. Alec Owens Wilse’s overweight son, who stares at True Son/Johnny wearing the jacket and pants he once wore. Uncle George Owens A skinny man who considers Indians “devils.”

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14 Colonel Henry Bouquet The leader of the expedition west to the Muskingum to take custody of white captives living among the Indians. History paints a dark picture of cruelty and genocide in the real Henry Bouquet. Del Hardy The twenty-year-old guide for Colonel Bouquet. Having lived among the Delaware in boyhood, the guide is nicknamed “Del” for his skill at speaking the tribe’s language. Sturdy, red-haired, and good-humored, he is an excellent choice of interpreter for Colonel Bouquet on the hundred-mile march from Fort Pitt west into hostile Indian territory. Unlike other whites involved in the return of captives, Del knows that native parents devote themselves to the white children whom they adopt. David Owens The hated “squaw man,” a white husband of a Muskingum Indian woman. When Owens decided to return to Philadelphia, he killed his wife and three daughters and kept their scalps. He doesn’t physically appear in the book, but we learn much about him. Peter Wormley A Derry township tailor later identified as “the Reading tailor.” Andy Goff A colonial shoemaker. Bejance A black man who makes baskets, he shares True Son’s role of the racial outsider. Bejance observes the boy giving in to white society and losing his native character. Corn Blade A native Indian who speaks Lenni Lenape and lives atop a distant mountain like a religious hermit.

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15 Neal A Paxton farmer who joins Mr. Butler and Uncle Wilse in returning True Son/Johnny and Gordie from their journey to visit Corn Blade. Parson Elder/Colonel Elder A minister to the townships of Paxton and Derry. Also, he is a farmer and captain of the Peshtanks, a local band of racist vigilantes. Elder predicts that True Son/Johnny will eventually return to white ways. Dr. Childsley A local physician who attends True Son/Johnny during an undiagnosed fever and bleeds him to remove the taint of an Indian diet. Thitpan Little Crane’s warrior brother, who refuses to welcome True Son back to the village because True Son failed to kill and scalp Little Crane’s murderers. In the final scenes, Thitpan humiliates and berates True Son and votes that he be executed by burning at the stake. High Bank, Niskitoon, and Cheek Bone Thitpan’s original party of warriors. Under-the-Hill, Pepallistank, and Kschippihelleu Recruits to Thitpan’s war party. Sumakek (Black Fish) Half Arrow’s father and Quaquenga’s brother, whose command of woods lore passes to his son and, during the return from Paxton, on to True Son/Johnny.

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CRITICAL COMMENTARIES CHAPTER 1 Summary In November, the Month of the First Snow, fifteen-year-old True Son faces a wrenching uprooting: He is among the white captives whom the Lenni Lenape and Shawanose are returning to white society. True Son was born to white parents but brought up in a Lenni Lenape village on the Tuscarawas River, in what today is Ohio. From age four, he was raised by a loving adoptive father and mother, Cuyloga and Quaquenga, and he thinks of himself as an Indian. To avoid being forced to give up his Indian heritage, True Son steals away from his parents’ lodging, blackens his face, and hides in a hollow tree. However, Cuyloga, his father, finds him and then drags him to the white authorities. Among the tents and temporary redoubts of white soldiers, True Son lies in despair with his face in the dirt. Del Hardy, a white military guard, tells Cuyloga that he must leave and go back home to his tribal village. Cuyloga says goodbye to True Son and requests that his son not disgrace the family. Because Del laughs at True Son’s tears, the boy vows to kill him. Commentary Richter only hints at True Son’s emotional and moving arrival among Cuyloga’s family after the sudden death of Cuyloga and Quaquenga’s first son from illness. The adoptive parents treat him like the birth son they lost and confer a name on him that reflects their sincerity—True Son. The words that Cuyloga speaks to remove “white thoughts and meanness” from the white boy now known as True Son are the beginning of acculturation—learning a society’s accepted ways of thinking and acting—that molds the boy into a proper Lenni Lenape brave. Also, to teach True Son to steel himself for hardship, Cuyloga’s discipline and training require his adopted son to endure burning from a hot stone and freezing from sitting in the icy Tuscarawas River.

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17 True Son now considers himself an Indian, the “true son” of Cuyloga and Quaquenga, so he doesn’t think the requirement that the white captives be returned to white society refers to him. He vows that “Never would he give up his Indian life. Never!” Priding himself on his woods lore, he creeps away to a secret place and is surprised when Cuyloga tracks him to his hiding place on the Pockhapockink Creek. Even worse, his father forces him to the white men’s camp. Distraught by the thought of returning to white society, the boy lies face down among the other captives. He takes comfort in an authentic detail of Indian life, the fragrance of the blended red willow bark and sumac leaves that serve as smoking material in Cuyloga’s pipe. The familiar smell assures True Son that his father remains nearby, but the white guards, including twenty-year-old Del, force all Indians to leave the camp by nightfall. From the novel’s first line, “The boy was about fifteen years old,” True Son/Johnny’s identity is in question. He is not immediately identified as an Indian, and he does not consider himself to be a white person. This conflict introduces a main theme in the novel: the nature of authentic self-identity. True Son’s sense of self has been turned upside down. After believing himself to be a worthy son of Cuyloga, he must now doubt not only his identity as an Indian but his Indian father’s record of never having been wrong. After almost a lifetime of being taught to despise the whites for their beliefs and their attacks upon the Indians, he sees himself “torn from his home like a sapling from the ground and given to the alien whites who were his enemy!” From the first chapter, we are introduced to the conflict raging within True Son as he is returned to his birth identity as Johnny Butler. We know he cannot easily accept the cultural change. Throughout the novel, as he struggles between two worlds, he is neither True Son nor Johnny, but “the boy.” As both whites and Indians faced their hard lives on the plains, they sought courage and stoicism. Cuyloga’s instructions to True Son to “go like an Indian” and “give me no more shame” reflect this theme (although True Son/Johnny ends up replacing courage and stoicism with anger and contempt), which is played out in many ways throughout the novel.

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18 (Here and in the following sections, difficult words, phrases, and colloquialisms are explained.) • Lenni Lenape (lih nee lih nah pay) literally, “real men,” the original name for the Delaware, a powerful agricultural nation established in the Delaware Valley. They are the parent tribe of the Mohican, Shawnee, Ojibway, and Nanticoke. • Shawanose the Shawnee, a nomadic tribe native to the Ohio Valley and members of the Algonquin language group. In the seventeenth century, the Iroquois ousted them from their ancestral home and forced a permanent migration to Pennsylvania. The most famous Shawanose were twin brothers, Tecumseh and Tenkswatawa, charismatic leaders and heroes of the Battle of Tippecanoe Creek on November 7, 1811. Tecumseh was killed in battle; his brother retired to Canada before resettling in Kansas. • the yellow vomit a native description of disease, perhaps yellow fever, one of the European maladies introduced by newcomers to the Western Hemisphere, which through vomiting and diarrhea quickly depletes the body. • redoubt a log structure used as a defendable stronghold against attack. • council house a meeting lodge where tribal elders and war chiefs conduct political discussions and settle territorial disputes. • Month of the First Snow November; the first of a series of native divisions of the year according to natural happenings rather than arbitrary names like January or May.

CHAPTER 2 Summary To Del, one of the white guards watching over True Son and the other captives, True Son is the “wildest and most rebellious” of the captives being returned to their white relatives. True Son demonstrates that he has reached a stubborn age, having to be tied with buffalo thongs, which he tries to loosen with his teeth. He rejects food and refuses to be assimilated back into white society in

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19 Pennsylvania. Del, who himself had lived with the Delawares as a child, suggests that True Son has no choice but to accept his white heritage. Commentary Del Hardy, who also lived with Indians in boyhood, is a character completely opposite of True Son in terms of his outlook on life. He looks forward to a career of military service and has accepted the whites’ need to retrieve their former community members now held captive or else retaliate against the Indians who “scalped plenty of our people in their time.” Del is beginning his career as guide and bilingual translator for Colonel Bouquet and will eventually serve under three generals. His current mission, traveling over a hundred miles into hostile Indian territory, brings out Bouquet’s devil-may-care attitude and his protectiveness toward the half-volunteer, half-professional columns that thread their way to the Muskingum River in eastern Ohio, a site made holy to the Indians by the juncture of the Tuscarawas and Waldoning Rivers. Del also serves as an Indian expert who understands that Cuyloga’s people genuinely care for their adopted sons and daughters and must make the difficult decision between giving up their adoptees or seeing “a white man’s town a settin’ there on the banks of their own river.” Del is the first character to sympathize with True Son. When he reminds True Son that the boy is white, True Son replies, “Nobody can help how he is born.” Here, True Son’s statement emphasizes a major theme in the book. True Son had no say in his upbringing—both white and Indian. He was taught by Cuyloga to be who and what he is, and he knows no other way of living. However, the white society that Del represents does not accept that True Son, who we later learn was named Johnny by his white parents, can be anything but white. Del, having lived with the Delaware, understands some of what True Son is experiencing. When True Son says, “I’m Indian!” and looks Del straight in the eye, Del doesn’t laugh. In some ways, Del is a prototype of what True Son may become if he is able to resolve the conflict between his Indian upbringing and his white birthright.

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20 Another theme in the novel derives from the final lines in Chapter 2. To Del’s question about where True Son can escape to, the boy replies, “A place where you can’t tramp me with your big foot.” The sentence captures the struggle between Indian and white, a lengthy tug-of-war over Indian lands that whites occupy and Indian beliefs about communal ownership of land that contradict whites’ claims to individual ownership of property. Note that Del has no idea what True Son means by his statement: Richter suggests that whites cannot understand how their fight for land affects Indians, who believe that property has a spiritual dimension that must be respected. In this way, the groundwork is laid for another major theme, the nature of God and the influence of religion for good or for ill in human behavior. • Generals Sullivan, Broadhead, and Wayne John Sullivan, Daniel Broadhead, and “Mad” Anthony Wayne, central figures in the settlement of Pennsylvania. • wolverine a four-footed mammal akin to the weasel. • panther kit

a young panther.

CHAPTER 3 Summary Having waited three days, Colonel Bouquet’s expedition leaves the camp on the fourth day and marches east, toward Fort Pitt, Pennsylvania. In a typical adolescent fantasy, True Son thinks of gaining his Lenni Lenape tribe’s admiration by committing suicide rather than returning to the white world. He makes three attempts to dig up poisonous roots and eat them, but he fails each time because Del keeps him tethered and carefully guarded. True Son’s cousin, Half Arrow, follows the expedition and reveals himself to True Son, but he stays hidden from the white soldiers because he’s afraid that they will shoot him. Another friend, Little Crane, accompanies his white wife on the journey. By noon, True Son has given up thoughts of suicide. Half Arrow shares True Son’s bread and a portion of the white man’s beef. To ease their

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21 final parting, Half Arrow offers farewell gifts to True Son: parched corn, moccasins made by True Son’s mother and sisters, and True Son’s bearskin bed covering. Commentary To enhance the drama of True Son’s forced march through the forest, Richter describes the woods and all of nature as being sympathetic to True Son’s plight. Nature shares True Son’s sorrow. The morning is gray, and an ancient sycamore tree that stands at the fork in the trail is divided into contrasting symbolic halves: A dead limb points toward the white world and a live branch toward the Lenni Lenape village. True Son’s comment that the white soldiers haven’t killed Little Crane, who’s accompanying his white wife as far as the soldiers will let him, is ironic and hints at what will happen in Chapter 10. However, the reader’s attention is centered mostly on the sprightly chatter of Half Arrow, the one bright spot on this most dismal day of True Son’s life. In this chapter, we experience Indian humor as Half Arrow and True Son smile and joke with each other. The many false stereotypes of Indians does not include them as smiling or sharing humor, but True Son and Half Arrow have inside jokes between them. Later in the novel, this difference between Indian and whiteman humor provides another point of contention between True Son and his white family. • Yengwes (yeeng wees) a native pronunciation of “English” and likely forerunner of the word “Yankee.” • May apple an important purgative and liver cleanser among native American herbs. The fruit is edible, but the roots are poisonous. • Bouquet Henry Bouquet (1719-65), a native of Berne, Switzerland, and a lieutenant colonel of the Royal American Regiment from 1754 to 1764. His authoritative account of the expedition against the Ohio Indians was published in Philadelphia in 1765 and in London in 1766. • leggings leg covers made of tanned animal skin to protect the wearer from cold or nettlesome underbrush. Unlike chaps, they shield the entire leg, including the calf and thigh.

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22 • breech clout a loincloth worn by native American males to protect the genitals. The garment is made from a single length of leather, skin, or fabric a foot wide and four to six feet long. After it is secured in front by a belt, it is passed between the legs and looped over the back section. Loose ends, either fringed or decorated with quills of stitchery, hang in front and back. • strouding a wool blanket worn as a cloak.

CHAPTER 4 Summary True Son, Half Arrow, and Little Crane discuss the odd behaviors of the white soldiers: talking too loud, getting too close to a speaker’s face, and talking all at once, like rude children. Little Crane also criticizes how whites are overly possessive of their things. True Son dreads the eventual separation from his friends. The trio spends the night on the western bank of the river that flows past Fort Pitt. The next morning, Half Arrow and Little Crane discover the corpse of a Mohawk, who has been murdered and scalped. Ready now to cross the river, Del informs Half Arrow and the other Indian followers that they must turn around and go back to their village. When Del unties True Son’s arms for the river crossing, True Son lunges at Del, who again ties him with ropes. Half Arrow reminds his friend that Cuyloga wanted True Son to avoid trouble with whites and to act like a stoic warrior. True Son crosses the river with the expedition, leaving his two friends behind. Commentary Chapter 4 illustrates the skewed logic of racist thinking. Ignoring the fact that True Son was born white, Little Crane says that white people are weak because they have mixed blood. Unlike the Lenni Lenape, an “original people,” whites are an impure race, made “foolish and troublesome” by conflicting traits of their ancestors. It doesn’t occur to Little Crane that the Lenni Lenape custom

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23 of adopting white captives adds the same impurities to the Lenni Lenape gene pool. To further prove white inferiority, Half Arrow derides the Bible as proof that whites have no instinctive morality; they must learn right from wrong by “the cumbersome labor of reading.” To Half Arrow, the idea of writing God’s word is unthinkable. He boasts that Indians know what is good and what is bad without having to rely on anything but themselves. Richter uses the two boys and Little Crane to criticize white ways. The three marvel that white men dishonor trees and seek rich dirt to plow into farmland. They ridicule whites’ ineptitude at fire-building and open-hearth cooking. However, what Richter fails to mention is white skills at creating metal cook pots and weapons and making spyglasses, three revolutionary innovations that American aborigines lacked until Europeans brought them to the Western Hemisphere. Later in the novel, Richter uses whites to criticize Indian ways, as when Myra says to True Son/Johnny, “You’ve had a hard fate, but thank God your life was spared and you’re home with us again.” Myra implies that the Indian way of life is more difficult, and thus less pleasing, than the white way of life. She fails to see Johnny’s robust health and strength as positive signs of the Indian culture. Both sides, then, are prone to highlighting the negative, while refusing to acknowledge the positive aspects of the two cultures. After a chilling act of random violence—the unexplained murder of a Mohawk—the two boys and Little Crane ally against the whites, even though the guards have killed a man the Lenni Lenape would deem an enemy. Richter remarks, “. . . though dogs may fight among themselves they are one against the wolf.” Using animals to express a moral is typical of Indian fables, which use situations in nature as models for developing wise, pragmatic, or ethical behavior. Using animals to express a moral is also common in other fables. Aesop, for instance, used animals in many of his fables, such as the story about the fox and the grapes. The unity among True Son, Half Arrow, and Little Crane emphasizes a prophetic point: True Son continues to side with Indians rather than with the white race. Little Crane assumes that white soldiers are responsible for killing the Mohawk, one of them making friendly talk with him while another slips behind and

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24 tomahawks him. But Mohawks are unpopular with the Delawares, too, so there’s no reason to exclude Indians as the Mohawk’s killers, especially given the use of a tomahawk. As Half Arrow delivers Cuyloga’s parting words, Richter works in two more wise sayings, or aphorisms: “It is better to wait for your cause to be ripe like a persimmon on the snow before you fight back,” and “It is wiser to be willing and be alive than be defiant and be dead.” In the presence of a crying bear, the stoic Cuyloga once stated that it is more fitting to tolerate adversity with courage and die like a warrior. His statements characterize True Son’s dilemma as True Son journeys across the river into the forest: to pretend temporarily to be a willing participant in his forced relocation back to white society, and thus stay alive, while plotting to fight back when the time is ripe, which he attempts later in the novel with disastrous results. Richter uses the forest here as a metaphor for the difference between the white and Indian worlds. The river that separates the two sides of the forest also separates the Indian world from the white world. The forest is dark, but in the openness of the river, the world is very light. Richter’s imagery of darkness on the Indian side of the forest is one of soothing comfort: “He could see the great oaks and shiver-bark hickories standing over the village in the autumn dusk.” Richter’s image of the forest as True Son/Johnny returns to his white family is also dark, but in a very stark way: “Here the desolate face of the earth had been exposed to dead brown weeds and stubble.” But the river that separates the two cultures is light: “. . . he felt around him a golden and purple brightness as if the sun had risen over the mountains behind him.” So, for True Son, the river is the light in the forest. As he struggles between his white and Indian identities, he is trapped in the light, where “he shivered with wet and cold.” • Mohawk a woodland tribe native to New England and Canada. • scalping the removal of skin and hair from a human skull. The practice ranged from removal of a quarter-sized circle from the crown to stripping the entire scalp and ears. The act was not a death sentence. In cases where the victim survived, damage to the cranium caused a lifetime hardship. Although the origin of scalping is unclear, history implicates European bounty hunters in its beginnings. Captain Pipe, a

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25 Delaware chief, reported to the British in 1781 that white authorities forced him to scalp victims and supplied hatchets for the task. • Mingo a nation consisting of Erie, Mingua, and Susquehannock. The Mingo settled in Sandusky, Ohio, in the 1750s. A rival of Algonquin-speaking tribes, they are marked by a distinct language called Mingo.

CHAPTER 5 Summary Outside Fort Pitt, local whites line the way to observe Bouquet’s column. Del anticipates ridding himself of the irksome task of guarding True Son. In Carlisle, curious settlers examine the former captives for identifying marks. After Colonel Bouquet calls the gathering to order, families begin identifying lost relatives. True Son rejoices that he and two girls remain unclaimed. However, he is embarrassed when a pale, weak-looking man rides up and claims to be his birthfather. On official orders, Del will accompany True Son to his white father’s home and act as a translator between True Son and the white family, named Butler. True Son characterizes the role of Del as a guard to protect the whites from a fierce Indian boy they once knew as a family member. Commentary Beginning with Chapter 5, Richter dramatizes the struggles of a single exile against a hostile, impersonal world. True Son sees himself as the lone Indian, who must rely on his own “Indian thoughts” and “Indian counsel.” He faces a white world that he characterizes as the “barbarous homeland of his white enemies” and is horrified at how whites have completely cut down the Indian forest, symbolic of how they will treat Indians in general. True Son wears the stoic face that conceals anger and fear as he approaches drunken soldiers and turncoat Indians before he passes beyond Fort Pitt to the white civilization that lies ahead. Again Richter speaks from an Indian point of view when he voices his dismay at the desolation of deforestation and spoiled earth.

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26 True Son mourns that “white destroyers” have left no habitat for game and puzzles over “curious wooden barriers [that run] alongside in a regular crooked fashion with spreading wooden horns at each angle,” an Indian’s view of the standard colonial-era split-rail fence. By late afternoon, True Son stands surrounded by homes of gray stone, red brick, and stucco that he describes as “prisons,” seeing them as models of “the glittering ostentation and falseness so dear to the whites.” When True Son finally meets his white father, he again encounters the total opposite of the Indian ideal of fatherhood and has contempt for this “inferior figure” who is nothing compared to his Indian father. In the white world, not even the concepts of family and fatherhood are the same. For True Son’s white father, reuniting with his son is an emotional meeting that he greets with misty eyes and a trembling hand, which True Son disparagingly interprets as revealing his feelings in front of all. When True Son says, “He’s not my father,” Mr. Butler recoils with his first inkling that True Son/Johnny does not view his return to his white family with happiness and relief. He and his son have no basis for communication; they do not even speak the same language. The last line in the chapter intimates that True Son has taken Cuyloga’s advice to heart and has already begun to plan to gain control of his life. • stockade an enclosure or defensive wall formed of sharpened poles set in the earth in order to inhibit attackers.

CHAPTER 6 Summary After two days of travel and a ferry ride across the Susquehanna River, Harry Butler reintroduces True Son, whom he calls Johnny, to his hometown of Paxton. At one point during the journey, the boy spurs his horse into the forest along the shore and hides in the underbrush, but Del and Mr. Butler soon return him to his horse. As they near the Butler mansion, Mr. Butler doubts the

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27 success of the mission. Once home, he introduces True Son to his brother, Gordie, and Aunt Kate. Upstairs in the house, True Son encounters his white mother, Myra Butler, who kisses him, calls him John, and laments that he has grown up in “heathen darkness and ignorance.” She compares him to his stubborn Uncle Wilse and threatens to keep him confined in the room until he speaks his “own name.” She does not want him to look like a “savage” in front of her family and friends who are coming to see him the following day. True Son rejects his white name but finally attempts to speak English, which Mrs. Butler sees as at least some progress. True Son is horrified by the gray pants and a yellow jacket she gives him to wear, hand-medowns from his cousin Alec. To True Son, they are symbols of white treachery. Commentary In this chapter, Richter further discusses the concept of ethnocentrism, the belief of a group that their customs and attitudes are normal and natural, as opposed to the lifestyles of outsiders, which the group considers strange or exotic. He indicates True Son’s identification with Indian ways by contrasting his reactions to the landscape to Del’s. For example, when roofs and chimneys first appear on the horizon, Del rejoices at this evidence of permanent white settlements. The sound of the English language and the promise of the settlers’ deeper penetration into the wilds uplift him. After journeying three hundred miles roundtrip on “savage trails and traces,” Del prefers a firm roadbed to a forest track, the opposite of True Son’s preference for soft moss underfoot. To Del, fences, barns, and sheds “had an air of white man’s industry and their houses of peace.” He is gladdened at the throngs of people that greet him and his traveling party, whereas True Son feels that the people are a menace. Only the name Susquehanna lifts the boy’s eyes to scan the area where an Indian burial plot was defaced and overtaken by white usurpers eager for land. In the shift of settings from the Lenni Lenape village to Carlisle, True Son has much to learn. His long stay among Indians is obvious in his unfamiliarity with multi-story homes. Gordie, who is delighted to have his brother home at last, demonstrates

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28 how to climb the stairs to an upper floor. At another social impasse, Gordie smoothes over a difficult situation by requesting True Son’s native clothing. Although previously separated by physical and cultural distance, the two brothers develop an unspoken understanding. The personal barriers between True Son and the Butler family are more than a young child like Gordie can breach. The resentful older Butlers, particularly the hostile Aunt Kate, draw an invisible line between those whites who grew up with their birth families in colonial Pennsylvania and John Cameron Butler, the white abductee who ceased being ethically, culturally, and spiritually white at age four. Except for the gentle younger brother, no one welcomes True Son on his own terms or offers him unconditional love. Ironically, True Son flashes the same dark eyes as his birthmother’s, a suggestion that the two share a stubbornness for doing things their own way, no matter what anyone else says. Some readers may not see the older Butlers as resentful, with the exception of Aunt Kate. Both father and mother are prepared to welcome Johnny back and love him. They don’t accept him as Indian, which is only natural because he is their biological son. Some might say that Johnny is the one who doesn’t even meet them half way. The Butlers have kept his image in their hearts as their own true son for eleven years, but he has not kept their image as his true parents. He has forgotten them and has replaced them with his captors, their tormenters. They aren’t prepared for him to be as “Indian” as he is, but they still think of him as their son. Readers can only speculate on how Johnny would behave with his Indian family had he been kidnapped at fifteen instead of four. The Butlers may be insensitive, but they are not unloving. The fact that Johnny prefers the people who caused his birthparents great fear and sadness compounds the horror that they have been living with since losing their child. • Peshtanks the original pronunciation of Paxton, a township in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The bloody history of the area strikes fear in True Son/Johnny, who connects it with a Peshtank massacre. • Susquehanna a river that runs from New York and Maryland into Pennsylvania.

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29 CHAPTER 7 Summary That night, True Son sleeps in an “alien place,” sharing a bed with Del. Having been told that some of his white relatives were part of the Peshtank men who massacred Indians, he thinks about Cuyloga’s description of a Christmas-day massacre of a Conestogo village, rekindling his hatred of the “white cowards,” who had tortured and maimed Christian Indians who had survived the attack and voluntarily moved to a Lancaster jail for protection. Outraged by this horrific memory, True Son wants to get away from Del, and he dreads meeting family members who he’s sure participated in these racist killings. Vulnerable and lonely, he leaves the bed and curls up in his bearskin in front of the bedroom’s fireplace, which he prefers to the airtight atmosphere of a bed—another element of white life that’s a direct contrast to the ways he grew up with. Even the natural act of sleeping is strange and uncomfortable. The next morning, True Son wears his familiar Indian hunting frock and leggings to breakfast. By noon, Aunt Kate threatens to bathe and dress him if he doesn’t wash with soap and put on the donated clothes. Gordie and Del teach him how to clean his body and to dress in the white manner of doing things. At a family reception, Uncle Wilse baits his silent nephew by insulting True Son’s Lenni Lenape background and the Indian language. When Del translates True Son’s defensive comments about the Indian language, Wilse insults True Son’s Indian father as a heathen who talked about God before murdering Christian men and women. Finally speaking in heavily accented, halting English, True Son retorts that Wilse, who talks about being a Christian, massacred the Conestogo. Wilse replies that they got what they deserved. To prove his insistence that whites are savages, True Son tells the story of David Owens, a white man who lived with the Muskingum but who slaughtered his Indian wife and daughters and returned to Philadelphia to live. Wilse slaps True Son for suggesting that David Owens must be Wilse’s brother because both men desperately hate Indians, but Wilse also says that he wishes that David Owens were his brother. True Son lapses into stony silence.

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30 Commentary The sedate, white setting of True Son’s bedroom contrasts the comfortable Indian lodge that was so familiar to him in the Lenni Lenape village. Eighteenth-century American colonial beds were often boxed enclosures walled in with sliding drapes to ward off drafts and hold in body heat. The feeling of suffocation annoys True Son, who is used to sleeping outdoors in contact with the earth. The bed will also be important in Chapter 10 as a battleground on which the boy struggles for his life against an undiagnosed fever. Still healthy here in Chapter 7, True Son feels imprisoned both in the house and in the unfamiliar clothes. His uncomfortable reactions mirror other stifling aspects of white life, such as wearing boots and the white man’s concept of discipline and family rules—again a direct contrast to those of his Indian family—all of which test the boy’s ability to obey his Indian father’s command to stay calm and not react violently. Another cultural humiliation is the job of carrying water. Within the clearly defined gender roles of the Lenni Lenape, hauling buckets is women’s responsibility. Note also that some stereotypes persist regardless of race. True Son finds the scent of white people “offensive” and cannot distinguish his relatives because “all whites look alike.” A more serious omen of things to come is the hate-filled encounter between True Son and his Uncle Wilse, which clearly establishes their relationship as victim and racist tormenter, respectively. Richter condemns white Christian hypocrisy when he narrates racist atrocities committed on Christmas. Cuyloga connects the assault against the Conestogo with December, “the month that the white men claim their good, kind Lord and master was born in.” After mounted horsemen burned the Conestogo village, the trusting Conestogo accepted shelter in the Lancaster jail but eventually were killed, in part because they had lost their “Indian caution.” Cuyloga summarizes white supremacy: “But the white men do not want the Indians even to share the common air.” His comments about scalping, indecencies, and mutilation reinforce True Son’s hatred of whites. One of Richter’s themes in the book is the importance of different languages to America’s racial history. Richter makes clear

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31 that because Indians have a rich language, and language indicates complexity and richness of thought, the Indian language proves that Indians are not simple savages but have a heritage and belief system equally complex and in some cases superior to that of whites. Through Del’s translation, True Son indicates that the Delaware language is the parent tongue that Indian speakers must learn in order to communicate with each other. To emphasize that the Delaware language is not “gibberish,” he notes that English contains at least three Delaware words: tomahawk, wigwam, and Susquehanna. When he begins to talk about the many ways the Delaware can refer to God, however, Uncle Wilse reacts as though English were the only proper language for religious use, scorning and degrading the Delaware for discussing God and then killing Christians. This chapter again points out both the contrast in religious views that separates whites and Indians, and their unified belief that their God approves of the killing that they do. Concerning True Son’s story about the senseless slaughter of the Conestogo, both Wilse and Uncle George Owens justify vigilantism, in which people take the law into their own hands. Such vigilantism was a system of retaliation that served as frontier justice before the rule of law was officially established. The uncles’ excuse about why the Conestogo were killed in cold blood is typical of the code of frontier individualism: Racists maintain that written law protects Indians while punishing white men. Again, we see the same arguments among racists today who claim that they need to take the law into their own hands by lynch mobs or firebombs because the established law is too easy on the perceived lawbreakers. To end the quarrel, Harry Butler instructs True Son that he must not argue with his elders. The boy responds in the least aggressive way he knows how: He becomes silent. Perhaps because nephew and uncle are equally racist against the other, Wilse recognizes the mask of silence that True Son dons as aggressive in its intent. “I’ll warrant he’s hatching out deviltry in his heart,” he says. Wilse believes that Indians naturally lie, steal, and kill white men, and he believes that it’s possible for white men to become Indians. He also sees that True Son is still an Indian, so he expects him to be trouble. Wilse’s claiming that the Conestogo Christians deserved to die because they were only pretending to be Christians until they could find a good time to slaughter the whites

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The Light in the Fo

Mrs. Kate Stewart

Harry Butler

=

Myra Butler

Wilse Owens

Georg Owen

Alec Owens

Gordon "Gordie" Butler

John "Johnny" Cameron Butler / (

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e Forest Genealogy

eorge Owens

Cuyloga = Quaquenga

Sumakek (Black Fish) Half Arrow

er / "True Son" Lenni Quis (adopted Lenni Lenape)

A'astonah

Mechelit

son who died of "Yellow vomit"

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34 ironically recalls Cuyloga’s advice to True Son to go along and wait until the time is right to extract revenge. We know that True Son has a plan. • ghost pipes Indian pipes, grayish forest plants that live on decaying plant matter rather than like green plants, which make food through the action of photosynthesis. • bolster a long pillow or cushion that extends across the head of a bed or the back of a settee to support the head and neck. • Conestogo a tribe of the Iroquois nation and kin of the Lenni Lenape. The Conestogo fought unsuccessful battles against the Mohawk and dwindled to only twenty survivors, whom whites slew in 1763. • Ottawa an Algonquin-speaking tribe living north of the Great Lakes that sided with American settlers during the French and Indian Wars. • Quakers a religious sect of pacifists who defended Indians. (Indians often referred to Quakers as “Quekel.”)

CHAPTER 8 Summary When True Son rejects the donated clothing, Mr. Butler sends him to his room, where he remains for several days. Peter Wormley, a tailor, arrives to measure the boy for new outfits; Andy Goff fits him with boots. True Son despises the cumbersome clothing of whites, especially the shoes, and reverts to wearing moccasins. Finally, Aunt Kate takes away his moccasins and his Indian clothing so that if he wants to leave his room at all, he has no option but to wear his “prisoner garb.” He resents his reading and writing lessons, hates attending church every Sunday, and ponders the white man’s limited understanding of the Great Spirit. He takes heart on an errand to the cabin of Bejance, an old black man who now makes baskets for a living, but who learned to love the woods while growing up among the Wyandotte. True Son longs to speak the Indian language, but the old man recalls only the words for “friend,” “Who are you?” “yes,” and “no.” He tells True Son about a man named Corn Blade, an elderly Lenape-speaker living

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35 atop Third Mountain to protect himself from the Paxton Boys, a group of Paxton men known for killing Indians. In late winter, homesickness overtakes True Son, whose mind sadly dwells on the foods of home and the faces of his Indian mother and sisters. During the first warm days of spring, he and Gordie take Dock, the horse that True Son rode from Carlisle, and set out to locate Corn Blade. However, Mr. Butler, Uncle Wilse, and a farmer named Neal overtake the two boys near the narrows of the Susquehanna. Wilse accuses True Son of lying and stealing. Mr. Butler makes no effort to stop Wilse’s ranting at True Son and determines to watch the boys more carefully. Commentary True Son surprises himself by missing Del, whose departure leaves the boy with no one who speaks Lenni Lenape. Left wordless, he has no choice but to use the English language to communicate. True Son also reflects again about the Great Spirit and what role the Spirit played in returning him to his white family. Note the similarity between Kringas’ counsel to “never think that the Great Spirit forgets you” and the rest of his discourse and current Christian theology on God’s mysterious ways and man’s need to recognize his total dependence on God. Whites and Indians unconsciously share many religious beliefs, but they put them into practice so differently that they see no relationship between the Great Spirit and the Christian God and thus no spiritual kinship with each other. On the return ride to Paxton after being caught by Mr. Butler, Wilse, and the Paxton farmer, True Son’s thoughts are about what he will not see rather than about what he does see. He loses “all the precious beckoning things ahead . . . the unseen valleys, the unforded streams, the untrodden forest and the great shaggy, unclimbed mountains.” However, he fantasizes that the mountains want to shove the whites into the river and partly regains his pride. • millstone a great disk of stone that rotates against a paired stone to grind grain that trickles through a central hole into the space between. • Great Spirit an English term for the Indians’ creator and ruler of the universe. The Indian god reveals himself in nature. Alternately

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36 identified as Manitou, Wakan Tanka, and the All-Father, he is uniformly accepted and revered through ritual prayers and a respectful oneness with the universe, a symbol of permanence. • Wyandotte (wy uhn daht) also known as the Huron, a tribe of woodsmen, hunters, farmers, and traders of the Iroquois nation who once inhabited Ontario and the north-central plains states. • bark-flags rectangles of birch bark that naturally sloughs off the trunk. Bark plays an important role in the novel. Young Johnny was making a bark playhouse when he was kidnapped. The makeshift structure prefigures, or hints at, the bark village that becomes True Son’s home. Later, Richter refers to a curly birch rifle, a weapon bearing a stock carved from a variety of birch that sheds thin strips of bark in gracefully fluted rectangles.

CHAPTER 9 Summary In March, Myra Butler, still confined to her couch in her upstairs room, remembers the July eleven years earlier when workers were harvesting wheat. She recalls how Indian raiders kidnapped Johnny as he made a bark playhouse under a hickory tree. Aunt Kate interrupts Myra’s sad memories to announce that Parson Elder is paying a pastoral call. Kate believes that Parson Elder is the person most responsible for Johnny’s return, and she tells the parson that he must help restore Myra’s low spirits in the face of Johnny’s poor behavior. Myra winces at Kate’s angry accusations against True Son. To keep peace in the family, the parson agrees to talk with the boy. After True Son joins the trio in Myra’s room, he dismays his mother and the parson by sitting on the floor and refusing hospitality. He concludes that the parson wants him to undergo Christian baptism. The parson admits that he seeks to improve the boy’s behavior, to which True Son replies that his behavior is morally ethical by Indian standards: He honors Cuyloga and Quaquenga and doesn’t swear. The parson admits that white people are often less than moral.

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37 As the discussion between True Son and the parson becomes more confrontational, the boy identifies the parson as Colonel Elder, captain of the Peshtanks, who slaughtered the Conestogo. The parson rationalizes the attack as a local peacekeeping measure against the perceived threat of hostile Indians. After the boy departs, the parson consoles the mother by commenting that True Son was brought up by an above-average savage and is now acquiring white traits and behaviors. The parson hopes that agricultural field work and a future attraction to a white girl may help settle the boy into the white way of life. Commentary Richter presents the complex human drama from alternate points of view. Myra Butler’s chronic illness is a paradox, a contradiction between an emotional illness and its physical effects, caused by the poignant loss of a child and—ironically—worsened by his return. The image of a mother suffering over a child makes us sympathize with Myra Butler, a loving character who took to her bed after Johnny was kidnapped. She prefers a dim room with windows closed as if to shut out the beauty of spring. Aunt Kate’s assistance in combing Myra’s hair and helping her into another gown suggests that Myra’s withdrawal has sapped her strength for even small personal tasks. Aunt Kate’s role as antagonist—a character opposed to the main character in a story—reveals the problems that the family faces in reorienting True Son, the novel’s protagonist, or main character, into white family life: • • • • • • • •

True Son tries to run away and takes Gordie with him. True Son is ungrateful. True Son prefers Indian customs. True Son eats only when he’s hungry, not at scheduled meals. True Son shames the family before their kin and neighbors. True Son won’t converse and belittles white discussion as uninteresting. True Son justifies the Indian point of view and value system. True Son has stolen knives, a rifle and patch box, powder and lead, and corn meal, or so Aunt Kate accuses.

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38 The never-ending hatred and mistrust between aunt and nephew electrifies the scene here in Chapter 9: Kate indicates that True Son’s facial similarity to Grandfather Espy emphasizes the fact that True Son is part of the Butler family, but she is tempted to criticize the boy as unfit because he acts as though he were raised “the offshoot of some squaw and no-account trader.” After Kate serves whiskey, True Son refuses his portion. Parson Elder declares that rejecting the drink is unsociable, to which True Son retorts that the white man’s whiskey causes Indians to get drunk, to sell their goods too cheaply to whites, and to commit crimes. He chastises the parson for giving whiskey to Gordie and implies that alcohol could make a drinker murder his own family. Central to this chapter is the contrast between opposing points of view. Richter uses the discussion between True Son and Parson Elder to express his belief that Indians learned how to swear and malign God from whites. However, so that one side isn’t seen as completely right and the other as completely wrong, Richter has True Son deny that Indians are capable of murdering and scalping children; True Son will learn differently later in the novel. The back-and-forth debate between True Son and Parson Elder forces the parson onto difficult moral ground: He must justify mob violence against Indian children. When True Son accuses the parson of supporting the Paxton Boys’ senseless killing of the Conestogo, the parson replies that the men were “out of hand” and might have killed his own horse if he had tried to stop them. True Son snaps, “Better your favorite horse than the favorite young ones of the poor Indian.” In the final stage of the parson’s argument with True Son, the parson assumes a how-dare-you-question-me attitude in order to bring the argument to an end while getting his own points across: He speaks quietly and firmly, asks no questions, provokes no outbursts, and allows no interruption. Finally, he dismisses True Son like a schoolboy let out of class. As often happens when adults overpower young people by denying them a chance to defend themselves and their actions, the youth’s feelings of powerlessness only widen the communication gap between generations. Parson Elder does acknowledge to the women that they need patience and shouldn’t be discouraged because more than ten years of Indian training can’t be erased overnight. His noting of the

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39 changes he has already witnessed in Johnny, seeing him only on a weekly basis in church, provides an inkling of the identity conflict that Johnny will continue to experience when he returns to his Indian family. He is too Indian to be white, and too white to be Indian any longer. • cradlers an evocative word that enhances Johnny’s innocence at the time of his abduction; cradlers are grain harvesters who cut stalks with a cradle scythe. • snaith

the curved handle of a mowing scythe.

• redded

dialect for “readied.”

• patch box a container for pieces of greased cloth or leather used as wadding for rifle charges or as cleaning rags forced down the bore by the tip of a ramrod. • Indian meal

coarse-ground corn meal.

• squaw as used by Kate, an insulting reference to an Indian female. Originally, the Narraganset term was a synonym for woman or wife. • dram a standard measure used in pouring alcoholic beverages.

CHAPTER 10 Summary True Son lies ill for a week with an undiagnosed fever. After Dr. Childsley, a Lancaster County physician, bleeds the boy’s feet, he blames Indian diet and lifestyle for the boy’s disease. Rapidly worsening, True Son lies motionless on his mattress and replies mechanically to Mr. Butler’s questions and concerns as though he were a stranger. To lift the boy’s spirits (and salve her conscience), Aunt Kate returns his Indian dress, which she had hidden. Parson Elder’s son rides to the Butler house and warns Mr. Butler that an Indian has been shot at Mehargue’s pasture. According to the parson’s son, two Indians searching for True Son approached Wilse’s place. The Indians supposedly grew bold and insulting after Wilse gave them rum to drink. The parson’s son cannot identify who ambushed the Indian. Disturbed by the

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40 events, Mr. Butler decides to conceal the news from his wife and Aunt Kate. To relieve his anxiety about the whole affair, he absorbs himself in the account sheets on his desk. Commentary The theme of parenthood grows more important in the final chapters of the book. Richter establishes the nurturing side of Harry Butler by placing him at True Son’s sickroom door. Filled with regret that he hadn’t protected the boy from the raiding Indians who captured his son eleven years earlier and that he hadn’t made True Son a present of the gun that the boy is suspected of stealing, the father determines to do better and to pardon his son of all wrongdoing. True Son’s mortal illness even inspires forgiveness in Aunt Kate. Richter suggests that her returning True Son’s Indian clothing is both a token of her acceptance of the boy and a way for her to lessen her guilt about how she continually accused and scolded True Son. As True Son faces death, we can see that his white family does love him although they have no idea how to show it and how to get him to respond. Their way of life requires True Son to behave in ways that are foreign to him; they expected that, as a white person, he would automatically behave as a white person despite being raised by Indians. To some extent, his failure now is also their failure. Another purpose of this chapter is to detail further the interaction and trade among local citizens. Paxton is large enough to have the services of a tailor, boot maker, parson, and doctor, even if the four also serve outlying areas. In addition, Paxton has a cooper shop, mill, and a militia—the standard balance of industry and military readiness that marked the American colonial era. The community’s need to have some type of police enforcement is evident in the details of the shooting. Apparently, the Indian was set up to encounter the area’s most racist citizen, Wilse Owen. His death from gunshot to the side and back suggests a cowardly ambush from behind, followed by scalping. To these outrageous actions, the ineffectual Harry Butler can only conclude, “Troubles seldom come singly.” Although the Indians ask for True Son, either no one makes the connection of friendship or no one cares. The only fear

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41 expressed is whether they were an advance party of attackers. Recall Uncle Wilse’s earlier warning to True Son about what would happen if any of his Indian friends came seeking him. In the last two paragraphs of the chapter, Richter stereotypes wealthy landowners like Butler by re-creating the paperwork that colonial farmers and landowners had to complete in order to keep track of their profits and farm operations. In a large, leather-covered daybook, Mr. Butler keeps records on accounts and “active property.” Dated May 31, 1765, the day’s transaction includes the sale of 521 bushels of grain, bringing in 992 shillings from wheat, 573 shillings from rye, and 82 shillings from oats—a sizable day’s income from farm produce. Butler concludes with the comments that his last keg of cider was “Very Potent” and that the sow he bought from Campbell produced eleven piglets. Mr. Butler’s final remark about “the satisfaction and benefits of honest work” reinforces the great emotional and cultural gulf between the money-minded Butler and his woods-reared son. The father fits the Indian stereotype of the money-centered white man who directs his energies toward personal gain. The language of the final sentence, including the phrases “ready cash” and “remuneration and accumulation,” perhaps emphasizes Butler’s lack of humanity. He’s interested more in money than in either True Son or the brutal killing of an Indian in Mehargue’s pasture. Other readers, however, would disagree that Butler is more interested in money than in his son. He clearly is overwhelmed by the entire situation. He wanted his four-year-old son back; he got a fifteen-year-old Indian. Instead of the happy time he expected when his son returned, he’s had nothing but grief. He does his books because he’s beside himself: He doesn’t want to think about the trouble that’s bound to be coming, and his son is dying. If his business gives him solace, then it makes sense that he would turn to it in a time of personal turmoil. Again, the problem is cultural: True Son wouldn’t understand how Butler can find solace in material things. Harry can’t compete with Johnny’s Indian father because he and Johnny don’t value the same things. • gallipot a small, ceramic vessel used to collect body fluids during bloodletting. A lip at one edge enables an apothecary or physician to

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42 pour the contents from the catch basin into a beaker for heating, stirring, examining, or testing. • miasma a forest vapor, fog, or gas thought to bear disease or create an unwholesome atmosphere. A fearful example of miasma is the “bad air” named “malaria,” a disease that still claims lives in marshy areas worldwide. • aboriginal race the first human inhabitants of an area, in this case, Native Americans. • cooper shop manufacturer of barrels and kegs. • lum

the Indian mispronunciation of “rum.”

• nib of his quill the sharpened point on a goose-feather pen. • do

an abbreviation for “ditto” in Harry’s account books.

CHAPTER 11 Summary True Son believes that his search for a messenger from his people strained his eyes and brought on his headache and sickness. He fears that the Lenni Lenape have forgotten him and that, as Bejance predicted, his soul is now white. Ruined by the squaw chore of hoeing, Aunt Kate’s Bible readings, and the doctor’s treatment with bloodletting and medicinal powders, the boy wills himself to die. At a crucial moment, True Son resurges to health at the sound of Aunt Kate’s shooing an Indian from the premises. That night, though still weakened by illness, he puts on his Indian clothes and slips out of his bedroom window. Imitating two types of owl calls, he summons and cautiously identifies Half Arrow, who leads him to the pasture where Little Crane lies murdered and scalped. True Son guesses that Little Crane’s style of humor must have made Wilse mad. True Son and Half Arrow bury their friend and then go to Wilse’s place in search of justice. Confronting Wilse, True Son blames him for killing Little Crane. Wilse admits the crime and then chokes his nephew into submission. To rescue True Son, Half Arrow hits Wilse with a hoop pole. An apprentice who appears on

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43 the stairs stops the two from scalping Wilse. The two boys flee into the night. Commentary Richter’s extended comparison of whites and Indians focuses on how each group communicates. Whereas whites read written letters and then toss them aside, Cuyloga always welcomes the human messenger, sees to his comfort, and then requests a public reading of the message. In native style, such conveyance of news requires “words and dignity sometimes noble as an oration.” Richter also refutes the stereotype that Indians are incapable of abstract messages. The scene is set five years before the birth of Sequoyah, the Cherokee inventor who, in 1821, perfected the eighty-six-character Cherokee phonetic alphabet. In contrast to Mr. Butler’s obsession with columns of figures and sums of shillings and pounds in Chapter 10, here in Chapter 11 True Son and his friend Half Arrow relish the freedom of the forest. For food during past treks into the forest, they chewed dried venison strips. However, Richter is careful to note that the boys’ excursions were not a reckless type of freedom; tribal discipline restricted the use of guns to adults and limited youthful duck hunters to bow and arrow. Richter creates a near-perfect picture of True Son and Half Arrow as “young gods in the forest” and glorifies the fragrance of an Indian village, which was “flavored with the scent of roasting meat and of burning red-willow tobacco.” At True Son’s lowest point, both mentally and physically, Richter reintroduces the image of light, which he cited in the novel’s epigraph. The concept of fleeing an earthly prison to return to a heavenly light appeals to the troubled boy, whose only ability to act on his own while confined in the Butler house is willing himself to die. It is at this low, troubled point that he hears an Indian approach and regains a hint of his former zest for life, which he has not felt in months. Richter describes True Son’s depression as a “lump long hard and dried up inside of him,” which melts at the thought of a message from his village. The mere thought of communicating with his tribe is “the first trickle of life-giving substance” that True Son has felt since he was forcibly returned to the

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44 Butlers. True Son rejoices that the Great Spirit has not deserted him after all. Richter uses images of animals to describe True Son’s departure from the imprisoning Butler house. True Son slides from his window to the ground like a “crumpled ball of spider down to the lap of his mother, the Earth.” Other images that reflect his Indian feeling of kinship with nature include “his aunt, the Night,” “his brother-in-law, the West Wind,” and “his very old uncle, the Moon.” Here, True Son feels that he is communing with nature. Richter, by giving different aspects of nature the stature of family members, suggests that nature is somehow protecting True Son. This point of view is much different than that of the white man, who seems to want to conquer nature, not participate in it. In the background, the Butler house takes on monstrous proportions, its single lighted window “one hostile yellow lamplit eye.” Later, the moon shines on new barrels and kegs, which are “white as skeletons,” a horrific image that reflects the boys’ state of mind after burying Little Crane. Richter’s descriptions of his characters take on added dimensions in this chapter. Half Arrow observes that True Son no longer sounds like an Indian. The description bears out Parson Elder’s prediction that the boy will soon lose the characteristics of True Son and become plain Johnny Butler. True to the prophecy, True Son stops Half Arrow from removing the heart of Wilse, an enemy who is also his uncle. In the items he offers Half Arrow for the journey, we have confirmation that True Son did indeed take the items he was suspected of stealing. Upon returning to Indian life, True Son must relearn the “good whistling sound of the Indian consonant” as he loses “the foolish Yengwe V and D which the Lenape did not need.” Another distinguishing characteristic, Indian humor, is a contributing factor to the murder of Little Crane, who inadvertently angered some of the town’s men with jokes based on the Indian concept of communal ownership. True Son’s time with the whites has taught him that they have a very different concept of humor. • terrapin an edible freshwater or coastal turtle prized for its eggs and meat. The shells are made into cups, spoons, dishes, and rattles used in ceremonial dance and healing rituals.

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45 • shad tree the shadbush, serviceberry, or juneberry, a shrub bearing sweet, juicy reddish-purple fruit. Indians used shadberries as flavoring for stews and pemmican, a trail food made of dried spiced meat stuffed into animal intestines. • the single-tree lugged a swinging wooden bar attached by lugs or bolts to a frame that runs parallel to the front of a farm wagon. The bar provides a flexible connection between wagon bed and the straps that harness dray horses or oxen. • purging a medical treatment employing strong laxatives and emetics, which cause a patient to expel poisonous or harmful body fluids. • sassafras a tall, fragrant laurel tree. Indians used sassafras twigs, oil, roots, and bark in tea, which herbalists prescribed as cough medicine or a seasonal tonic. • hoop pole a heavy levering device that forces the metal binder in place over a ring of barrel staves to tighten the joints and keep the finished container from leaking. • apprentice a student worker or beginner at a trade who labors without pay, receiving room and board, as well as tools and uniforms, while learning from a master practitioner, such as an ironworker, blacksmith, or apothecary. Apprentices, generally between fourteen and twenty one years old, agreed to a sworn and binding indenture, a formal contract to a seven-year period of study that forbade gambling, strong drink, dating, and late hours. • match coat the Indian machicote or matchigode, a length of cloth wrapped around the body or head as a hooded cloak. A woman’s match coat was called a petticoat. • Quekel the Indian pronunciation of “Quaker.” • mow haystack. • tow wallet

a rough pouch woven of flax or hemp.

CHAPTER 12 Summary Awakening on First Mountain, True Son rejoices that he is finally separated from the hated white settlement. For three days, he and Half Arrow travel northwest across three more mountains. At

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46 a point between Indian land and white, the two boys express different regrets: True Son dislikes having to abandon his white brother, Gordie; Half Arrow wishes that he could have killed Wilse while he had him down on the ground. When the two boys discover the log buildings of a half-breed trader on a river they identify as the Alleghi Sipu, Half Arrow wants to steal one of the trader’s two dugout boats. True Son hesitates about stealing from the trader, but Half Arrow argues that they would only be stealing from those who steal from Indians. He resolves to take only one boat because the owner is half-Indian. In his typical good spirits, he ridicules his cousin’s resorting to white morality. To elude the trader’s guard dog, Half Arrow waits until night and then nabs the boat that is tied with a rope. He and True Son float down river past Fort Pitt and on to the Ohio River. Commentary Richter begins the chapter with a religious rebirth as True Son revels in sleeping outdoors among “his father, the Sun,” “his sisters, the birds,” “his brother, the Black Squirrel,” and “his mother, the Earth.” At this point in the story, the boy assumes that he has cut all ties with the white world. His violent departure from Paxton means that the Butler family can never reclaim him, for by striking Uncle Wilse, he would be imprisoned, hanged, or tortured by the Paxton militia should he ever return there. Richter’s tone is uplifting as he details the westward passage of True Son and Half Arrow. True Son rejoices in “this path, this westward, ever westward path, deep in their Indian forest.” He exults in the names of eastern forest tribes who share trails along the Tuscarawas River, yet he must acknowledge that white intruders have driven many tribes far to the west. The atmosphere in this chapter remains somber because of True Son and Half Arrow’s infrequent encounters with white traders, who are a threat to the boys. The chapter’s action discloses mature thoughts and behaviors in both boys. Half Arrow’s decision to leave unharmed the “cutters down of the Indian forest” is but one example of how, in the forest and away from white civilization, he acts logically and unemotionally, in direct contrast to his rashness while briefly in Paxton. True

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47 Son’s hesitation at stealing the trader’s boat will be expanded in the disastrous water scene in Chapter 14, when his actions are viewed by the Indians as disloyal to the tribe. True Son rejoices in the sight of Fort Pitt and comments, “The last time I saw it, I was heavy and a prisoner. Now I go light and free.” But from some of his ways on the trail, we can sense that his expectations of his Indian homecoming may not be fulfilled completely. • hemlock an evergreen whose stem ends herbalists boiled as a tea to treat itch, diarrhea, and kidney disease. • spice bush the Caroline allspice or sweet bubby bush, a healing plant used as a stimulant. • hazel a valuable shrub whose bark has curative powers. It is steeped into a strong, aromatic, antiseptic tea similar to rubbing alcohol for bathing scratches, sores, and sprains. Indian healers used it for treating tuberculosis. • burr

the prickly outer shell of the chestnut.

• buttonwood the sycamore or planetree, which produces a buttonshaped blossom. • dugout the world’s first boat, a heavy wooden canoe made by peeling bark from a stout tree trunk, flattening the bottom with a plane, and then burning out the heartwood. • thong a rawhide tether sliced from dried animal skin and used like cord or twine. • fish weir an artificial V-shaped channel or dam in a stream that forces eels and fish into a net. • gauntlet a punishment course lined by facing rows of enemies who strike the runner with kicks, punches, lashes, and blows from clubs and tomahawks. The person who survives the course earns tribal respect and is spared execution.

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48 CHAPTER 13 Summary Once past Fort Pitt, True Son and Half Arrow travel openly, moving deeper and deeper into Indian territory. During the summer, they camp in a quiet glade and trap fish, swim, relax, and enjoy their journey. At the Forks of the Muskingum River, True Son rejoices that he’s near home. When he finally reaches his Indian home, Cuyloga welcomes his son. Commentary Here in Chapter 13, Richter emphasizes a central theme in the book: a return to freedom “as the Great One had made it.” True Son is glad to see no roads, cultivated fields, fencing, or clocks, all of which are symbols of white dominance. A “constant wheeling unfoldment of the river” becomes a seemingly unobstructed path back to Indian territory. Traveling alone and freed of the control of their Indian fathers, True Son and Half Arrow enjoy days of “primitive deliciousness,” hunting and fishing, “forgetting all else and by all else forgot, abandoning themselves to the forest and the bounty of its wild beasts.” They hunt at night by jack-lighting. Lashing a lighted pine knot to the bow of the dugout, the rower steers close to animal watering spots. While the animals stand riveted by the light, the hunter shoots at the prey. To celebrate that their tribe will soon recognize them as men rather than as boys, True Son and Half Arrow notch their ears and pull out the hair on the sides of their scalps to produce a brave’s roach, a tall ruff of hair that forms a defining ridge from the center of the forehead to the back of the scalp and trails off in a scalplock. Another focus of the slow homeward journey is the diversity of characters whom the boys encounter on their way over the final stretch. They hear dogs bark and see Shangas, the Exhorter, a tribal preacher. Nearby is a strong man, a crippled son, and a girl who formerly flirted with True Son. Next is a man who was scalped in battle, a friendly squaw, a big black dog, and a stutterer. By describing this mix of people and animals, Richter avoids the

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49 one-dimensional savage or stoic natives who are too often found in second-rate frontier fiction. Richter rounds out the scene with True Son’s reunion with his Indian family. Richter’s intent is twofold: to establish the normalcy of a native village and to contrast the hostility of whites who greeted True Son on his arrival at Fort Pitt, Carlisle, and Paxton with the warm welcome by True Son’s father and the entire tribe. • paroquet the small, long-tailed parakeet that once flourished in the eastern wild before hunters slaughtered them wholesale. • brush net

a net dragged behind a boat to snare fish.

• arbutus creeping forest heather that blooms pink and white and produces red berries. • thwart the rower’s seat, which crosses a boat and attaches to each side To place an object athwart means to lay it crosswise, from side to side, which is the safest and handiest way to rest a rifle when the boat is in motion. • northern meridian June 24.

the designation of midsummer, which falls on

CHAPTER 14 Summary For several days, most of the villagers rejoice at the boys’ return. However, Little Crane’s family does not join in the celebration. His brother, Thitpan, hates the whites who murdered Little Crane. To retaliate against the whites, Thitpan recruits a war party to seek vengeance. Cuyloga’s face becomes serious as he contemplates the wrongs whites have committed against Indians. Quaquenga urges Cuyloga to leave True Son behind because of the danger he faces among whites, but her husband asserts that the boy must reestablish his loyalty to the tribe. True Son thrills with the excitement of readying himself for battle, which buoys him like a stimulant “wilder than any root or game.” Marked with war paint and the plucked face and scalp of a warrior, True Son and Half Arrow trail the war party to a river. The

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50 party separates to inspect the trail and kill and scalp whites. On the reunion at a mountain spring, warriors share a detailed account of their foray against white settlers. As the men stretch the scalps for trophies, True Son notices that one scalp belonged to a light-haired white child. He hints that men should avoid mutilating children. Dark eyes flash resentment at his criticism of grown men. The next day, the war party uses True Son as a decoy by dressing him in pantaloons and a shirt. Three days later, a boat approaches. True Son begs the whites onboard the boat to rescue him from starvation. The white female passengers pity him; the men cautiously maneuver toward shore. When True Son observes a white child onboard, he thinks of Gordie and instinctively warns the whites to stay away from the shore. To avoid the volley of shots from the hiding Indians, the boat hastens downstream, out of danger. Commentary Richter enlarges on the theme of universal family joys in the foods, visits, smoking, dice games, and music that mark the return of True Son and Half Arrow. The celebration is fleeting, for at the height of the boys’ contentment, Richter inserts a letdown: To True Son, the celebration is like a dream, but a dream “with shadows in it.” Also, True Son’s and the village’s jubilant mood is tempered by the extreme hatred that festers among Little Crane’s survivors, who agitate for blood vengeance. Cuyloga declares that, like Black Fish, his back is “too broad to turn.” In Cuyloga’s opinion, the white invaders are completely responsible for the escalating frontier face-off of Indian against white: “How can you reason with him [the white man]? He is like a spoiled child without instruction. He has no understanding of good and evil.” The mounting tension results in councils of war, chants, and scalp yells, prefaces to combat that climax in the war song of farewell. True Son relishes the moment of departure, which offsets the humiliation of his last going, when he was dragged away “like a dog.” Richter maintains the distinct separation of male and female roles. Just as Myra Butler and Aunt Kate take no part in the Peshtank militia, Lenni Lenape women stand apart from the warinspired men who meet in the council house. As onlookers, the

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51 women and girls can only murmur their concerns. To Quaquenga’s fears for True Son’s safety, Cuyloga snaps, “Woman. Stay home and boil your pots.” Heavy with male self-importance, Cuyloga’s response to Quaquenga’s fears implies that only men can understand tribal matters and accept the responsibility of avenging blood for blood. Here in Chapter 14, True Son’s illusion of whites as totally bad and Indians as totally good crumbles. The boy feels morally compelled to acknowledge evidence proving one of Parson Elder’s allegations against Indians: that they kill and mutilate white children. In Chapter 9, True Son had claimed, “I see many scalp but no children scalp in our village. My father says men are cowards who fight children.” Richter illuminates True Son’s emotional uncertainty concerning Indians’ scalping children with a prophetic dream in which True Son sees the Butlers on a sled on snow. The dream’s setting turns into a boat on water. With the couple is an unidentified white child. The dream ends on a horrific note, the roar of falls downstream, and implies a great natural hazard, which symbolizes the unknown factors that lie ahead of the war party. For this pivotal chapter, Richter creates a fearful climax, the height of emotion and action beyond which things can never return to how they were previously. Although True Son does not acknowledge the change in his emotion, the sight of a child’s scalp changes his attitude toward Thitpan’s war party. No longer burdened by boyish innocence, True Son internalizes the heavy truth that Indians are guilty of some of the savagery which whites accuse them of. His newfound understanding, even if he is not fully aware of it, precedes his treachery, the deliberate turning away from Indian aims toward a higher goal, the rescue of an innocent white child from ambush. Faced with taking part in the killing of children, True Son feels for Gordie, the only white person for whom he feels sympathy. True Son’s action at the end of Chapter 14, however spur-ofthe-moment, creates a complex outcome that True Son could not have foreseen: He becomes a noble and honorable person at the same time that he’s threatened with both exile and violence from the tribe. From this point on, True Son will live in a world rapidly losing the pristine beauty and freedom that he had known in the

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52 forest with his Indian cousin. What lies ahead holds no promise for a boy coming of age along the Pennsylvania frontier. • hominy a cereal made from dried corn kernels soaked and boiled with oak ash to loosen the hulls. Cooks rub the inner kernels clean between their palms or whirl them in hulling pouches. After hominy is rinsed of ash, the kernels are cooked with herbs, vegetables, or seasonings or served plain with milk, like oatmeal. • Jew’s harp a small percussion instrument made of metal that emits a twang when held between the teeth and vibrated with the tip of the index finger. Movement of tongue and jaw muscles varies the sounds and rhythms. • mocker nut a hickory nut. It is called a mocker because the outside hull is large, but the nut meat is small. • Killbuck a community southwest of Millsburg, Ohio. • death mallet a multipurpose war club composed of a long wooden handle armed at the lethal end with an animal tusk, iron blade, or sharpened piece of quartz or obsidian. At the other end, a thong tethers the mallet to the wrist or waist. • riffle a shallow or fording place in a stream bed. • pied variegated or mismatched, a description of the patchwork scalp that Half Arrow sews from discarded trimmings.

CHAPTER 15 Summary True Son knows that he has betrayed Thitpan’s warriors. They bind him with vines, blacken one side of his face with charcoal, and whiten the other half with clay to symbolize the two faces of a traitor. As they discuss whether or not to burn him at the stake, each warrior throws a stick into the fire as a vote for True Son’s execution. Half Arrow abstains by running into the forest. True Son fears that his father will vote with the majority. Unable to agree to the death penalty, Cuyloga blackens his entire face and hands. The black mask indicates his allegiance to his beloved son, over whom “the rainbow arches,” and he says that if

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53 they kill True Son, they must kill Cuyloga as well, who gave him the bad instruction. Then he cuts True Son’s bonds. Addressing True Son, Cuyloga claims that although True Son has an Indian heart and an Indian head, his white blood is too thin to be mixed “with the brave redness of Indian blood.” Although he has saved his life, Cuyloga must banish True Son from the tribe. Claiming that the time spent in the white settlement has erased True Son’s Indian nature, Cuyloga leads True Son back to the road to Paxton and vows that the two must henceforth be enemies. Unwelcome in either culture, True Son cries out, “Then who is my father?” When he turns toward the distant shore, he finds himself alone once more. Commentary Richter makes good use of color imagery here in the last chapter. The symbolism of white against black, right against wrong, characterizes a child’s sense of justice, which tolerates no shades of gray. On his first test of manhood, True Son violates native values by remaining true to a higher order of justice. Yet Richter discusses True Son’s own confusion about why he acted the way he did: “He didn’t understand himself.” Because True Son is young and still very naïve, he cannot adequately understand and take pride in his choice to save the white child as a triumphantly humane act. Still yearning for proof of valor in combat, he longs for scalps as evidence of a warrior’s courage. Instead, he is treated like a white spy who may face a “dry and hot” death at the stake. During the high drama of the Lenni Lenapes’ open-air court action, True Son bolsters his fearful spirit with an Indian’s stoic resolve. In his words, “How could life mean anything to you if already your people had killed you in their minds?” When marked with white and black, True Son’s facial coloring represents the truth and righteousness of his act versus the tribe’s arbitrary decision of what is right and what is wrong. To further distance the boy from tribal approval, Thitpan’s supporters link True Son’s abrupt act of treachery with white treaties, “the crooked stripes of the whites’ talking papers.” The anguished debate forces a harsher choice when Cuyloga must decide between tribal loyalty or adoptive fatherhood. In his

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54 dignified speech, Cuyloga describes old loyalties as rotten vines newly sprung to life. As a preface to his decision, he recounts his duties to a son as teacher of woodsmanship, hunting, honesty, and honor. His disappointment is symbolized by the stout staff, which he has now broken. With a touch of pity, he describes his adopted son as Indian-headed and Indian-hearted, but instinctively whiteblooded. With stoic determination, the father promises to watch over his son on one last journey up the “white man’s road,” then to turn on him, foe against foe, should they ever meet again. To stress the pain of parting, Richter focuses on the vista where “ran the rutted road of the whites,” far from the freedoms of the Indian world. At the end of the novel, the outlook for True Son is bleak but not hopeless. As native and European cultures increased interaction on the frontier in the spheres of war, religion, exploration, and trade, many people made new lives for themselves. Native men brought up in woods lore found positions with the English, French, and colonial military as advisers, translators, and trailblazers. Some allied with religious settlements as aids to missionaries. Others thrived in the Mississippi Valley as trappers, traders, and mountain men. True Son’s background would have equipped him to thrive in such posts at the juncture of native and European settlements, although it seems unlikely that he will convert to a Christian faith or reside in the close confinement of a stockade, farm, or commune. The tragedy of True Son’s damaged relationships with his revered native family and the Butlers condemns him to a renegade existence that forbids contact with either clan. To round out his life, he would probably prefer a native wife, whom he could secure through trade with a willing family or by chance encounter with a homeless or tribeless woman who shares his predicament, perhaps after disease or siege has destroyed her village. As the number of footloose or unaffiliated people increased in frontier Pennsylvania, such alliances preceded makeshift or on-the-spot marriages, as demonstrated in Janice Holt Giles’ novel Hannah Fowler (1956), the story of Hannah Moore, a stranded young settler who selects a husband at random at Fort Pitt after the unexpected death of her father. The people who strengthened the American frontier were those who overcame hardship and loss to fashion new lives for themselves

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55 beyond the limited choices of structured towns. In unsettled territory, people like True Son made their own rules out of necessity and opportunity, often avoiding civilization through frequent moves, as is true of the early days of Daniel Boone. A positive vision of True Son as an adult pictures him thriving in his beloved forest and applying the teachings of Cuyloga to everyday life. However, happiness and contentment may elude him, for he will always carry the wounds of cultural upheaval that made him a captive child and youthful outcast. • the afternoon side of the river

the west bank.

CRITICAL ESSAYS LAND AND CLOTHES AS SYMBOLS Richter’s text is rich in visual imagery, particularly the use of paths, roads, tracks, trails, and traces, all depicting choices followed by native and white Americans to some anticipated end, whether adventure, livelihood, or vengeance. The confrontation of native peoples with European newcomers takes place along the frontier, an identifiable boundary that continues to shift westward as the influx of settlers displaces Indians. Settlers change the contours of the land by clear-cutting forests and plowing and fencing open fields. Thus, the symbolic road back to Paxton becomes a moral challenge for True Son. To the west, hostile Indians reject his membership in their tribe because he was born white; to the east, hostile whites, even members of the Butler family, act out of racial hatred of Indians. As True Son makes his way back into his birth family, the extended confrontation erupts in isolated acts of violence, discourtesy, and unsubtle sneers at True Son, a white boy acting “injun” in defiance of an ideal of white Christian propriety. Land is not the only element that changes with the arrival of Europeans to the Western Hemisphere. Varied clothing and hair styles symbolize membership in the opposing groups of Indians and whites. In the forest, True Son and Half Arrow wear the leggings, hunting frock, and moccasins of the forest Indian, a

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56 practical form of dress made from the skins of local animals. These garments are simply made from tanned hides. They protect the body from cold and wet while remaining as flexible as they were on the animals they once covered. In Paxton, True Son must wear the clothes and boots suited to colonial tastes and materials. Dressed in shirts, pants, and leather footwear, the boy can no longer feel the texture of earth under his feet. To him, white people’s clothing is another form of imprisonment, another denial of personal freedom. In the final scene of the book, clothing takes on a thematic significance by seeming to re-imprison the anguished True Son. Cuyloga forces his former son to bear the disgrace of treachery by wearing the clothing removed from murdered whites: the ridiculously ill-fitting pantaloons and blouse that True Son earlier put on for the planned ambush. True Son struggles to fit muscular, mannish shoulders and upper arms into a blouse intended for a girl. If the boy returns to Paxton, he will once more have to dress in the white man’s woven suits and clumping boots that separate him from his mother, the earth. Imprisoned in heart, head, and body, True Son faces a life of misery not of his own making. THE FRONTIER TRADITION The concept of colonization fueled a world body of lore called frontier literature. A major segment of Western literature in North, Central, and South America, its songs, ballads, adventure tales, legends, humor, drama, and myth also flourish in the Pacific, particularly Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand. Its standard literary devices, settings, and conventions are apparent in The Light in the Forest, as evidenced by these elements from the book: • nature lore, the elevation of virgin wilderness to the status of holy ground, spirituality, and sacred trust. For Half Arrow and True Son, a summer stay in the Ohio Valley forest offers an untroubled period of reflection and self-discovery. Similarly, other frontier nature lore approaches the fervor of Indian animism, a belief in divine spirits in lakes and rivers, mountains, wild animals, and trees. Notable works of this type of literature include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Jack London’s The Call of

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57 the Wild and White Fang, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling. • the family, a staple in all literature, which exists on shaky ground in a developing nation troubled by controversy and danger. For the Butlers, eleven years without Johnny is a long time to suffer fears for his life and longings for his return. Myra Butler so internalizes the theft of her four-year-old son from white civilization that she becomes an emotional and physical invalid in her bedroom. Her husband takes a less drastic retreat among his household accounts and lets material profits replace the child that vanished from their lives. Among other enduring familyoriented stories of the frontier are Lauren Kessler’s Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series, and Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller. • greed, the main motivation in conquering a land that belongs to someone else. As though they were wiping out the native history of North, South, and Central America, Europeans self-centeredly dubbed the Western Hemisphere as the “New World.” In The Light in the Forest, Lenni Lenape cynicism about their white neighbors derives from past losses as settlers stream into virgin forests. Former dealings with negotiators frequently soured as treaties misrepresented or concealed the white intruders’ true motivation: stealing Indians’ ancestral lands while forcing eastern forest dwellers farther from their home grounds. A standard theme in frontier literature, greed motivates much of Mark Twain’s Roughing It, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Eldorado,” and Edna Ferber’s Cimarron. • displacement, the social order that results when newcomers force residents off their land. Uncertain where he belongs and to what parents, True Son/Johnny is the perfect example of a displaced person. The only love he feels is for his Lenni Lenape family and for one white person: his brother, Gordie. To a lesser degree, he admires Del Hardy, a man who has undergone the same double-culture upbringing that True Son experiences. Cultural displacement is not unique to Richter’s story. It permeates much of frontier lore,

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58 including Michael Dorris’ A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, George Eastman’s The Soul of the Indian, Mary Haskin Richards’ Winter Quarters, and N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, House Made of Dawn. • the outsider, the outlaw or outcast, a standard figure of Western lore. True Son represents the social pariah. His inability to fit into the Indian way of life or the Paxton way of life at the end of the book places him on the outskirts of both groups. Because of his divided loyalties, he is neither Lenni Lenape brave nor patriotic son of the Butler family. His shaky position is common to the shifting values and lifestyles of the frontier, as depicted in the prairie lore of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia and such Western classics as Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, Dorothy Johnson’s “A Man Called Horse,” Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs, and Jack Schaefer’s Shane. • racial conflict, the unavoidable issues of ownership, lifestyle, and belief systems that arise when cultures occupy disputed territory. The distorted claims of one race against outsiders are found in The Light in the Forest, in the sufferings of both True Son and his black acquaintance, Bejance. Because the white people of Paxton feel racially superior, they metaphorically enslave Bejance and treat True Son with suspicion. Examples of other frontier literature dealing with racial conflict include Edna Ferber’s Giant, Laurence Yep’s Dragonwings, Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s Thousand Pieces of Gold, and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a testimony to frontier genocide—the killing of an entire race of people. • law and order, a core issue in the ill-defined territories as they passed from open range and forest to settled farm, hamlet, and town. The poorly controlled vigilantism of Colonel Elder’s Peshtank militia illustrates the potential for violence, even in settled areas like Paxton, which represents civilized society. Law-and-order literature divides into two segments: fiction, including The Light in the Forest, and nonfiction, including Theodore Roosevelt’s Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, the autobiographical Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshall, and Glenn Shirley’s Belle Starr and Her Times.

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59 CHARACTER DUALITY At the heart of Richter’s The Light in the Forest is the theme of duality, the pairing of unlike traits within the same character. One of the best examples of this theme is Del Hardy. Having grown up in the American colonial period and lived for some time with native Americans, Del is skilled at two languages and two lifestyles. His ease with True Son derives from his being able to think like a Lenni Lenape and to value the Indian concept of adoption. After a long journey into native territory, however, Del is pleased to return to the lifestyle he prefers. He suffers immediate disappointment in having to remain at the Butler household to protect both True Son and the Butlers from misunderstandings, arguments, and potential violence. A more complex example of duality is the unusual pairing of minister with militia colonel in Parson Elder/Colonel Elder, leader of the fierce Peshtanks. The two sides of this man provoke True Son, whom Elder tries to ease back into white customs. As a parson, he is sensitive to Myra Butler’s distress; he understands the hardships of a mother who must discipline a strong-willed son when she really wants to love and console him. With the optimism of a parish pastor, Elder advises her to allow work and peer friendships to help True Son accept the customs and expectations of white teenagers. However, Elder also speaks as the hard-edged, suspicious frontiersman who is a leader of vigilantes. He justifies the drinking of whiskey and rationalizes the need for killing Indians who supposedly pose a threat to Paxton. The conflicting natures of militiaman and minister seem out of place in one person. Clearly, the settling of hostile territory brings out these extremes in people who choose to live on civilization’s edge. The most complex duality in the book is found in True Son. Richter goes to great lengths to depict the boy in a happy mood while hunting, fishing, and camping with Half Arrow and jubilant at the welcome his Lenni Lenape family offers him when he returns to them. However, Richter knows that, historically, such happy endings were unlikely in a land experiencing such desperate racial turmoil. When True Son and his family recognize dissent among Thitpan’s party, they realize that the boy is about to be tested once

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60 more. Not only is True Son formally achieving the status of warrior, but he also volunteers for a situation that calls for playacting. By posing as a white boy in danger, he must fool other whites into steering their boat close enough to shore for Thitpan’s party to ambush. True Son succeeds at the ruse until he sees a child standing in the boat, and thinks of the unidentified white boy—who is as innocent of racism as Gordie, True Son’s white brother—as a hapless, helpless victim. Like the child whom Thitpan’s party earlier murdered and scalped, this small white boy does not deserve tribal vengeance for the death of Little Crane. True Son has internalized Cuyloga’s instruction not to make war on children. In fact, in his refusal to make war on children, he is really following what he believes is his core Indian belief, and he pays the price for refusing to go along with the attack that could also cost a child his life. Although he thinks of Gordie, is True Son, the reader must wonder, subconsciously remembering the trauma of his own abduction? At four years old, he probably did miss his white parents at first, and he was undoubtedly frightened initially at being plucked from his home and his play. The child on the boat may possibly have been taken prisoner and adopted as True Son was. True Son, unbeknownst to his conscious mind, may be preventing another child from going through his own scenario. The shift in duality from Indian to white breaks the tie of adopted son to father. No longer Lenni Lenape, the boy must make his peace with the white world and return to Paxton or else live on the edge between two cultures. Ironically, as his Indian tribe is deciding True Son’s fate, “never had he felt more Indian than at this moment.”

ESSAY QUESTIONS AND RESEARCH TOPICS (1) Contrast True Son’s plight at a crossroads between two cultures with that of either Art Croft in Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident, the sole surviving tribesman in Theodora Kroeber’s Ishi: Last of His Tribe, or the moral statelessness in Edward Everett Hale’s The Man Without a Country.

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61 (2) Summarize rugged elements of westward expansion in Richter’s book that parallel similar details in Mari Sandoz’s Cheyenne Autumn, O. E. Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth, Hamlin Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Johan Bojer’s The Emigrants. (3) Contrast True Son’s experiences with those of a real kidnap victim in Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary White Rowlandson or of fictional female captives in Janice Holt Giles’ Hannah Fowler, Scott O’Dell’s Sing Down the Moon, or Caroline Gordon’s “The Captive.” (4) Research the military service of Lt. Col. Henry Bouquet from 1764-65—at the end of Pontiac’s Rebellion—when Bouquet distributed smallpox-infected blankets to natives living near Fort Pitt. How did he influence the reclamation of former captives from the Lenni Lenape? (5) Write a short essay in which you discuss whether Richter sides in favor of the Indians or the whites in the novel. (6) Compare True Son’s two fathers—Cuyloga and Mr. Butler—in terms of sternness, love, loyalty, and compassion. (7) Discuss the effect of naming elements of nature—for example, Chingokhos, the big-eared owl—in the novel. How does Richter’s personification of plants and animals enhance his fiction? (8) Compare Richter’s lyrical description of the wild forest with those of John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra. Discuss how the two writers describe the joys of freedom in unclaimed, untrampled land. (9) Compare the final paragraphs of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee with the irony of the Conestogo massacre in a Lancaster refuge on Christmas. Comment on the native American ridicule of whites who claim to be Christians yet murder and pillage defenseless Indians.

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62 (10) Compare Colonel/Parson Elder’s role in the Peshtanks to Cuyloga’s role in Thitpan’s war party. What is the nature of mob mentality, and what is each person’s responsibility within it?

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Richter’s Works Brothers of No Kin and Other Stories (1924) Human Vibration (1925) Principles in Bio-Physics (1927) Early Americana and Other Stories (1936) The Sea of Grass (1937) The Trees (1940) Tacey Cromwell (1942) The Free Man (1943) The Fields (1946) Always Young and Fair (1947) The Town (1950) The Light in the Forest (1953) The Mountain on the Desert: A Philosophical Journey (1955) The Lady (1957) The Waters of Kronos (1960) A Simple Honorable Man (1962) Over the Blue Mountain (1967) A Country of Strangers (1982) The Rawhide Knot and Other Stories (1985) Writing to Survive: The Private Notebooks of Conrad Richter (1988) Critical Works BARNES, ROBERT J. Conrad Richter. New York: Steck-Vaughn, 1968. CARPENTER, FREDERIC I. “Conrad Richter’s Pioneers: Reality and Myth.” College English XII (1950): 77-82.

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63 EDWARDS, CLIFFORD DUANE. Conrad Richter’s Ohio Trilogy: Its Ideas, Themes, and Relationship to Literary Tradition. Hawthorne, New York: Mouton, 1971. FLANAGAN, JOHN T. “Folklore in the Novels of Conrad Richter.” Midwest Folklore 2 (1952): 5-14. GASTON, EDWIN. Conrad Richter. New York: Twayne, 1965. HOWER, JOHN. “Pine Grove Home to Conrad (www.leba.net/~jhower/Valley/Richter.html).

Richter”

KOHLER, DAYTON. “Conrad Richter: Early Americana.” College English 8 (1947): 221-27. LAHOOD, MARVIN J. Conrad Richter’s America. Hawthorne, New York: Mouton, 1975. RICHTER, CONRAD. “The Early American Quality.” Atlantic Monthly (September 1950): 26-30. RICHTER, HARVENA. Writing to Survive: The Private Notebooks of Conrad Richter. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. SNODGRASS, MARY ELLEN. The Encyclopedia of Frontier Literature. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-Clio, 1997. —-. Literary Maps for Young Adult Literature. Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, 1995. SUTHERLAND, BRUCE. “Conrad Richter’s Americana.” New Mexico Quarterly (1945): 413-22.

Historical Sources CHAMPAGNE, DUANE, ed. A Chronology of Native American History. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994.

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64 CORT, CYRUS. col. Henry Bouquet and His Campaigns of 1763 and 1764. Lancaster, Pennsylvania: Steinman & Hensel, 1883. DARLINGTON, MARY C., ed. History of Col. Henry Bouquet and the Western Frontiers of Pennsylvania, 1747-1764. New York: Arno Press, 1971. HECKEWELDER, JOHN. The History of the Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States. New York: Arno Press, 1971. PATTERSON, LOTSEE, and MARY ELLEN SNODGRASS. Indian Terms of the Americas. Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, 1994. SHIPPEN, EDWARD. Memoir of Henry Philadelphia: G. H. Buchanan, 1900.

Bouquet,

1719-1765.

SMITH, WILLIAM. An Historical Account of the Expedition Against the Ohio Indians, in the Year 1764. Philadelphia: W. Bradford, 1765. WALDMAN, CARL. Who Was Who in Native American History: Indians and Non-Indians from Early Contacts Through 1900. New York: Facts on File, 1990. WALLACE, PAUL A. W., ed. Indian Paths of Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania Historical Museum, 1987. WESLAGER, C. A. Delaware Indians. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.