Lords of the Plain by Max Crawford

In the Foreward to the new edition of this book, novelist Larry McMurtry tells the story of attending a White House dinner and hearing from Michael Deaver, Ronald Reagan's Deputy Chief of Staff, that the President had stayed up all night reading Lords of the Plain. Not surprising--if this book had been written in 1955 instead of 1985, it could very well have been turned into a movie, with Reagan as the young cavalry captain charged with keeping the peace and persuading the Comanches to move to the reservation. The final, decisive battle in Palo Duro Canyon would have made great cinema. Of course, the Hollywood of that time would have removed all hints of the moral and ethical ambiguity which permeates this telling of the "winning of the West."

Max Crawford has written a fact-based fictional story of cavalry versus Indian (the defeat of the last great Comanche tribe, which was led by the half-white Quanah Parker), but he has refused to follow either the old-Western formula of "good" civilization versus "evil" barbarity or the new-Western formula of sympathizing with and apologizing for the "noble Redskin." Instead, he has created characters who are all capable of both good and evil. As one soldier says, "Men will consider anything. We are all savages in thought...."

The novel is written as a first-person narration by Captain Philip Chapman, as if he were keeping a journal of his adventures and hardships. The language is just stilted and formal enough to be believable as the written thoughts of an educated young man in the 1870s. The pace of the plot development seems to be slowed somewhat by many of the day-to-day routines of army life, but they do serve to illustrate the incredible difficulties imposed by the isolation, terrain, and weather.

Looming over all the story elements is the eerie presence of the llano estacado, the flat, featureless staked plains of Texas. The narrator says, "No formation of any sort, no work of man or nature, was to be seen anywhere...there was nothing," and "The plain's monotony and desolation and unboundedness are those of eternity...." Author Max Crawford was born at Mt. Blanco, a community just at the edge of the caprock and went to school in Floydada, a small farming community on the plains. His descriptions are accurate, poetic, and haunting.

Recommended for those who enjoy thought-provoking Western adventures and for anyone who has lived on the llano, as I have.