The June Rise : The Apocryphal Letters of Joseph Antoine Janis

Sweeping from the austere beauty of the Rocky Mountains to the high plains, The June Rise brings to life the true story of Joseph Antoine Janis's visionary transformation from a Missouri farmboy to an advisor to Lakota chief, Red Cloud. Author William Tremblay creates a riveting collection of imagined letters by Janis that chronicle this pioneer's apprenticeship to his father in the beaver trade and his marriage with First Elk Woman, an Oglala holy woman, all the while capturing the spirit of the land in poetic descriptions, even as it becomes a killing ground during the Indian wars of the nineteenth century. The story turns to tragedy when his mixed-race sons, Pete and Willie, are murdered by the mixed-race sons of Janis's nemesis, John Reeshaw. After the battle of Little Big Horn, the U.S. government issued Janis an ultimatum: divorce First Elk Woman and keep his homestead in Colorado, or relinquish his land and share her fate in the Badlands of Pine Ridge Reservation. The compelling forces that shape his decision form a classic story of the American frontier. This novel is, above all, a love story of the first order. The story of a "squawman," as whites married to Indian women were called. In 1840, in Colorado, Joseph Janis tries to create a settlement of such families, but is turned down by the U.S. government and given a choice: remain on his homestead without his wife, or join her on a reservation. He chooses the latter. By the author of Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada.