James Welch (1) (1940–2003)

Sometimes the best books are old ones you missed their first time around. James Welch's debut novel, WINTER IN THE BLOOD (1974) is, for me, definitely one of them. Still in print after fifty years, it's taken its rightful place as a classic portrait of Native American life in the mid-20th century. Set on and around a Montana reservation, its narrator is an unnamed, disaffected young (32) man who never quite got over a tragic accident that killed his older brother, Mose, twenty years ago. show more And, just eight years after that, his father, First Raise, returning home drunk, froze to death in a snowbank. Since then he has lived aimlessly on the family's small cattle ranch with his widowed mother, Teresa, and his silent grandmother, who sits in a rocker and rocks. Things change some, but maybe not much, when Teresa remarries, to Lame Bull, who is pleased to become master of the ranch. Our narrator is okay with this, and works well with Lame Bull, but continues to drink and womanize in bars in towns surrounding the reservation. He meets some quirky and unsavory types, has blackouts and is beaten up a few times while looking for a woman who lived with him for a time. His grandmother dies and he visits Yellow Calf, a very old blind man, who lives alone near the ranch, and learns some family secrets about his Blackfoot/Gros Ventres heritage.

While not a whole lot happens here, the narrator's thoughts and daily activities - haying with Lame Bull and a shifty hired hand, drinking, carousing, one-night stands and more - are presented in great detail, making for a most absorbing read. I read it in just a few sittings and enjoyed the hell out of it. I see it got a rave review from Reynolds Price in the NYTimes Book Review, and Jim Harris called it "A wonderful novel." I'm fifty years late to the party, but I concur. My very highest recommendation.

-Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

I read this book when it was first published in the 1970s and held onto it, recognizing that it was a good novel. Rereading it some forty years later, I am stunned with its beauty and precision. Welch was a poet and it shows in his careful use of language. Every vignette of the narrator's life is shown as it unfolds with such attention to detail that you can see it all laid out before you. With his drinking and his sexual encounters, he is trying simultaneously to numb himself still further show more and to connect with an always elusive sense of meaning and value. This futility, of course, is rooted in the history of the Indian people, which Welch makes personal through the stories of the narrator's grandparents who were both young adults when the White men came and rounded up the Indians into reservations. Anyone who wants to write should study this novel for how Welch builds the tension and reveals why the narrator lives the life he does. Then they should go back and read it again for the beauty of the language. show less

A teacher recommended this book and I dutifully picked it up and inhabited another world, a Montana reservation where members of the Gros Ventre and Blackfeet tribes live outside of towns such as Harlem, Dodson, Havre, where they grow grain and run cattle. James Welch writes with humor and truth. His dialogue skills are rich and authentic: "Why don't you settle down?" I said to my hands. "Pay up," said the bartender. When he left, I said, "If you settled down you'd be a lot better off; you'd show more be happier, believe me, Agnes." "You bore me," she said. "You should learn a trade, shorthand," I said. "There's a crying demand for secretaries." She looked at me as if she didn't recognize me. "Shorthand?" she squealed.
His images of nature and characters put you right out on that flat grazing land of the West. "Evening now and the sky had changed to pink reflected off the high western clouds. A pheasant gabbled from a field to the south. A lone cock, he would be stepping from the wild rose along an irrigation ditch to the sweet alfalfa field, perhaps to graze with other cocks and hens, perhaps alone. It is difficult to tell what cocks will do when they grow old. They are like men, full to twists." Welch started as a poet and is quoted in Louise Erdrich's introduction: "we are storytellers from a long way back. And we will be heard for generations to come." The book was published fifty years ago and I am as excited about reading it as if it were just out, a new discovery. And his storyteller credentials are evident in the braided tale describing a cattle drive perfectly paced with a bar spree. The narrator describes his mother, "she had always had a clear bitter look, not without humor, that made the others of us seem excessive, too eager to talk too much, drink too much, breathe too fast...I saw...how much she had come to resemble the old lady." Highly recommended. show less

The classic account of Custer's Last Stand that shattered the myth of the Little Bighorn and rewrote history books. Custer's ill-fated attack on June 25, 1876, has gone down as the American military's most catastrophic defeat. This historic and personal work tells the Native American side, poignant revealing how disastrous the encounter was for the "victors," the last great gathering of Plains Indians under the leadership of Sitting Bull. Telling of the pride and desperation of a people show more systematically stripped of their treaty rights, hounded from their ancestral hunting grounds, and herded into wretched reservations, Killing Custer reveals how this defining moment in American history was no more a "Last Stand" than a final celebration of waning power and freedom. show less