Savage Country

July 10, 2017
Hunters, skinners, and teamsters slaughter herds of buffalo on the Old West plains of 1873 in Olmstead’s ninth novel, in an orgy of killing for profit on a grand and wasteful scale. Olmstead (Coal Black Horse) presents a grim, gruesome tale of buffalo hunting and harsh, deadly frontier life. Elizabeth Coughlin, recently widowed, is set to lose her ranch to a cheating banker named Whitechurch. Desperate to pay off her debt, she and her brother-in-law Michael organize a large hunting party to go into Comanche territory to find the last massive herd of buffalo, which have been hunted nearly to extinction. Despite a warning that Whitechurch will try to kill them, Michael and Elizabeth lead the party to the hunting grounds, enduring prairie fires, floods, heat, cold, fatigue, injuries, illness, gory evidence of Comanche atrocities, and the ever-present danger of ambush by Whitechurch’s gunmen. Michael is a stone-cold killer, patient advisor, and teacher of fieldcraft, and Elizabeth shows remarkable courage, judgment, and strength of character as the leader of the unwashed, profane, rough men in the bloody business of killing and skinning a thousand buffalo a day when not killing each other. This is a powerful depiction of the brutality of the Old West, where life was cheap and easily taken.

July 15, 2017
Hunting the last of the buffalo."For weeks countless swarms of locusts, brown-black and brick-yellow, darkened the air like ash from a great conflagration, their jaws biting all things for what could be eaten." This sentence appears on the first page of the novel. The use of imagery from nature to describe a human tragedy is emblematic of Olmstead's (The Coldest Night, 2012, etc.) style, as is that idiosyncratic--and harrowing--final clause. Like Coal Black Horse (2007) and Far Bright Star (2009), this is a historical narrative that takes place in an unforgiving landscape, and the precision and poetry of the author's language have a paradoxical effect: they make the setting strange and distinct while imbuing characters and their actions with a particular immediacy. Even the simplest phrase can be heavy with meaning. For example, a locket that contains not a photo, nor even a photograph, but a "photographic portrait" suggests the newness of this medium, suggests luxury, makes us understand that this image is precious. It puts distance between the reader and the man with the locket even as it helps us understand something about this hard man gazing at a woman's face. Olmstead makes the reader pay attention, which seems fitting in a world where one careless move might result in a rattlesnake bite or a gunshot wound. This story begins in 1873, in Kansas, where Michael Coughlin has arrived to settle his dead brother's debts--debts he'd hidden from his wife, Elizabeth. Even as she's adjusting to her loss, she's forced to confront the fact that the beautiful home, the vast farm, the cattle...none of it is hers. She realizes that the buffalo hunt her husband had been planning before his death was a wild effort to save all of them. What follows is a story about America told through its land and its animals and its diverse people and, especially, through the experiences of two vivid, singular, powerful characters. Another gorgeous, brutal masterpiece from a great American writer.

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Starred review from September 15, 2017
Like so many outstanding novels about the taming of the West, there is a tragic ambiguity at the heart of Olmstead's brutal but beautiful tale of the last buffalo hunt. Although we admire the courage and unbridled individualism of the men and women who subdued an unforgiving country, we also recoil at the horrors they left in their wake, both to the land itself and to the indigenous peoples and animals who had managed to maintain an ecological balance before the arrival of white settlers. In the 1870s, Elizabeth Coughlin is the wife of a rancher who, deeply in debt, has killed himself, leaving Elizabeth with the burden of saving the land and providing for the hired hands. Before his death, Elizabeth's husband had hatched a desperate plan to set things right: a dangerous buffalo hunt below the aptly named Deadline, the demarcation point separating civilized Kansas from the treacherous Indian country to the south. Aided by her brother-in-law Michael, she gathers a Magnificent Sevenlike band of misfits to undertake the seemingly suicidal hunt.What follows is an epic journey into a heart of darkness partially of their own making and partially defined by the worst that the unrelenting landscape can throw at them, from titanic lightning storms to rattlesnakes to the greed and treachery of their fellow hunters. The field of battle is strewn with victims (there are no victors), but none is more tragic than the buffalo, its ravaging described in the most visceral of details. For a certain kind of uncompromising yet lyrical writerthink of Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, or William Kittredgethe West offers a stage for a special kind of archetypal, almost Shakespearean tragedy, and Olmstead makes the most of it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2017

In 1873, her husband's death leaves Elizabeth Coughlin in deep debt to the dangerous and conniving Mr. Whitechurch. Her only hope of raising money is a buffalo hunt planned by her late spouse. With the grudging assistance of taciturn brother-in-law Michael, who had been a professional game hunter in Europe and Africa, she and her husband's hired men head into Native lands. No one is quite prepared for the dangers along the way--wild storms, poisonous snakes, wayward travelers, wildfires, animal bites, and Native warriors. Elizabeth, unlike many female characters in stock Westerns, begins to develop her own sense of independence and self, although Olmstead (Coal Black Horse) could have fleshed her out a bit more. Graphic descriptions of hunts and violence may turn some readers away, but the accurate account of such violent times, and in particular the hunts that decimated vast buffalo herds of the West, is necessary. VERDICT Fans of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove will enjoy this thoroughly researched epic Western. [See Prepub Alert, 5/3/17.]--Brooke Bolton, Boonville-Warrick Cty. P.L., IN

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