Twenty-year-old Jacob Ariesen is uprooted from his home in Concord, Massachusetts in the year 1850. His father is hell-bent on getting to the California gold fields after hearing about the strike at Sutter’s Mill.While on the California-Oregon Trail, his family is killed and he is left for dead.The eighteen-year-old daughter of a Dakota war chief, acting on a Vision that had shown Jacob to be her … her destiny, saves his life and through her, he is adopted into a band of the Mdewakanton Dakota, putting into play events that will lead Jacob, now known as Yellow Hair, to go to war against the United States of America.Yellow Hair knows the Dakota cannot win against the Americans; nonetheless he is obliged to fight. Where will he find himself when the conflict is over and what repercussions will he face for his part in the war?Yellow Hair documents the injustices done to the Sioux Nation from their first treaty with the United States in 1805 through Wounded Knee in 1890. Every death, murder, battle, and outrage written about actually took place. The historical figures that play a role in this fact-based tale of fiction were real people and the author uses their real names. Yellow Hair is an epic tale of adventure, family, love, and hate that spans most of the 19th century.
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As a child of the 1960s, and with a father who was a huge Western fan, it was easy to get carried away with the dramatic and sweeping misinformation that was paraded before us. John Wayne led the charge across the plains and the common theme running through these Hollywood epics was ‘the only good injun, is a dead injun!’
Then in my late teens I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown and my love affair with many of the western films was at an end.
I had read the reviews of Yellow Hair and I was interested to read this fictionalised version of actual events. I was not disappointed and as I was introduced to the back stories of the white settlers, and their often very pragmatic and desperate reasons for heading into the West, I began to see how it was not usually a malicious intrusion and greedy land grab but two cultures being misled and manipulated by the US Government and those with commercial interests.
You reach a point early on in the book; having been introduced to the settlers in this wagon train, when you are shocked into the recognition of how very dangerous their undertaking was and how unprepared the majority of them were.
Then begins the saga that becomes the story of a white man living as part of this besieged indigenous people, struggling to maintain their traditions and to survive the destruction of their way of life and the land that sustains them.
The list of injustices is very long, and the brutality of the clashes between the cultures, graphic and very disturbing. Peace was brokered time after time and promises were made that were only as good for as long as it took the ink to dry. You will be shocked at your sense of outrage as the behaviour of those in power and also saddened that these once proud and flourishing tribes should be so decimated in just 85 years.
Andrew Joyce does not pull any punches, but he presents the facts well and fairly. The thread that binds the story together, and humanises it, is the story of a young man with a foot in both cultures. Seeing the events and catastrophic impact on both settler and Indian through his eyes, will make you question much of the history written by the victors and then dramatised for our entertainment.
I recommend that you read the book for yourselves and you can find it here:
I have read two other books by Andrew Joyce and always thought that the amount of research that goes into his stories is staggering. Yellow Hair is no exception. From the first chapter, the author spent a great deal of time researching the subject matter. It is also clear the author has exceptional writing skills since the story itself is well crafted, exciting, and hard to put down.
It is the story of the Dakota tribe of indigenous people and their struggles to maintain their customs and lifestyle as the white settlers encroached and destroyed their territory. The author uses a white settler who is a lone survivor of a wagon train as the focal point as the story unfolds. A female member of the Dakotas rescues the young immigrant. She nurses him back to health, and he eventually earns brave status within the tribe. His name is Yellow Hair for the apparent fact that he is a blond-headed white man.
The balance of the book follows Yellow Hair through the actual historical events of that time. The US was engaged in a Civil War. The affairs of native Americans were pretty much an afterthought to the significant concerns of the war. Only after the murder of several settlers did the government turn its attention to trying to solve the “Indian Problem” through annihilation.
The author takes us on a long journey of injustice and struggle. We witness how the agents cheated the Native Americans out of their land. We see how the government set up systems never to pay the native Americans monies owed. We suffer through the hunger and lack of dignity fostered upon the Dakotas by those out to grab more land. The telling of the story is with great skill by Mr. Joyce. The book tells the historical account as if it is happening right now. The reader is immersed in the detail and can feel the emotions of the characters. At times the action is so tense it is tough to set the book aside until the scene’s resolution.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read more about the injustices perpetrated upon Native Americans while enjoying an action-packed story that will have the reader on the edge of their seat.