The Spirit of the Border - Book 1

Really bad cover art.

This is a weird read for me.  I read Spirit of the Border by Zane Grey on my Kindle.  I've been struggling with insomnia, so I searched the Kindle trying to find a free book.  I wanted something that wasn't British, since I've recently reread so many Austens.  I like the Kindle for middle of the night reading because you don't have to turn on a light!  I picked this one for some reason.  A few years ago I read Zane Grey's most popular book, Riders of the Purple Sage, and was surprisingly impressed by it.  This book however, had so many uncomfortable elements to it, that while it was an interesting read, it wasn't a pleasant one.

The border referred to here is somewhere in the Ohio wilderness.  The book is set on the border between the colonies and the American Indian territory or maybe it was British territory.  The story is based on a massacre of Native Americans who were living with the Moravian Christian missionaries.  Apparently, many of the Delaware tribe had been converted.  However, there was such ongoing bloodshed between the pioneers and the natives, tensions ran so high at one point soldiers from the Pennsylvania militia went in and massacred all the converted Indians in the village, ironically named Village of Peace.  This actually happened and is called the Gnadenhutten massacre. 

Apparently, Zane Grey's ancestor was Jonathan Zane who figures in this story.  Grey really changed the story up from what actually happened though and makes it seem like some horrible renegade white men have riled up the unconverted Native Americans to want to kill the Christian ones. He has Williamson, the captain of the militia and responsible for the historical massacre, at the scene but refusing to help defend the Indians from slaughter.  So Grey really played around with the facts.

This book was published in 1906 so the characterization of the natives is really stereotypical and Grey uses lots of words we'd find offensive today, such as red man and paleface and savage, etc.  However, even though it really is steeped in superior white man vs savage red man, there is also respect for some of the Indians, if they have become Christian.  And even without being Christian there are some positive language about the nobility of the 'savage.'  The white men who go out into the wilderness are strong, toughened and ruthless.  But every interaction is bathed in steep awareness of the different races.  Honestly, in today's climate of intersectionality and hyper-awareness of what 'categories' everyone belongs to, all I could think was: the more things change the more they stay the same! 

There's a lot of brutality, scalping, stabbing, torturing, relentless pursuit, beautiful girls getting raped and murdered.  It's pretty gruesome towards the end of the book.

The plot centers on two brothers, identical twins.  One is a Moravian preacher and the other longs to live a free life of adventure in the wilderness.  They both love the same girl, the daughter of an older missionary.  Three different romantic relationships bud and bloom during the book.  Or four, if you count the one girl who is loved by both the brothers. 

Grey is a good writer; He's descriptive but stops short of being purple prose.  The people are a bit wooden and not quite as fleshed out and nuanced as some of the greater writers, but he one can see why Grey's style was so popular. 

It was an interesting read from a sociological perspective.  R who is currently on a reading jag about the progressives during the turn of the century/early 1900s was saying how awful they were.  They really did think they could perfect society through science.  Eugenics was part of that and the ever present American original sin of seeing everything racially was a potent ingredient.  It's such a shame humankind can't love one another better.  But, as I say, even in a book so replete with racially divided thinking, there were glimmers of humanity. 

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