Texas Tech University Press -- Aurora Crossing

B O O K S

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NOW AVAILABLE

11/2008. 392 pages.
3 maps
978-0-89672-636-9

$27.95 cloth

Also by Karl H. Schlesier

Coming soon: online ordering! In the meantime, please call 800.832.4042 or 806.742.2982 to order.

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"A satisfying, ethnographically detailed coming-of-age novel, set in the tumult of a war that threatens to become genocide. . . . Worthy of a place alongside the work of Vardis Fisher, James Welch, Michael Blake and other novelistic interpreters of northwestern Indian history." --Kirkus Reviews

A Nez Perce youngster seeks his destiny amid war—
and conflicting worlds

Aurora Crossing
A Novel of the Nez Perces

Karl H. Schlesier

In ancient creation tales of Indian tribes of the American Northwest, nasawaylu, Old Man Coyote, was the spirit who finished the world started by the Supreme Being. A master of animals, holy person, and trickster, nasawaylu sometimes bestowed special gifts on an Indian child seeking a guardian spirit. One such youngster is Nez Perce John Seton, who struggles to determine whether the message given him by Coyote is a gift or a trick.

Reared first in an Anglo township in north central Idaho, then on the Nez Perce reservation, and finally on the Salmon River with the Lamtama band of free-roving Nez Perces, Seton has always followed the fortunes of his mother. After her death he elects to stay in the camp of old Hemene, a respected Lamtama leader. Still a novice in all three of the sharply contrasting worlds he has known, Seton is drawn irresistibly and irreversibly into the Nez Perce War of 1877. His quest to find a place in the clash of cultures is a magical saga, a search for meaning in the fabled Trickster’s message.

The events to which Seton is an eyewitness are recorded in history. Depicted by Karl Schlesier in compelling detail, they yield a reluctant but compelling hero. The Nez Perce march of 1877 covered 1,200 miles across some of the most rugged mountain ranges in North America. Six bands, numbering 750 men, women, and children, herded more than 3,000 horses and fought thirteen engagements with armies sent to intercept them on their way to the Canadian border, where they sought a last refuge.

“I was lucky to study anthropology under Karl Schlesier. I am luckier still to discover how much more we have to learn from him. Like Old Man Coyote, Aurora Crossing brims with special wisdoms.”
—J. M. Hayes, author of The Grey Pilgrim and the Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery series

Karl H. Schlesier taught anthropology at the universities of Wichita State and Kansas for thirty years. His fieldwork has taken him from the central Pyrenees of France to the arctic slopes of northern Alaska and twice into federal court as an expert witness for the Cheyenne Nation. Among his other books are Plains Indians, A.D. 500–1500: The Archaeological Past of Historic Groups and the novel Josanie’s War.