Thunder in the Mountains

Thunder in the Mountains is not a work of “modern” history, as most readers would characterize that, nor is it a postmodern excursus on conflicting discourses. Daniel J. Scharfstein is, instead, giving us an old-fashioned morality tale of almost biblical proportions in which every event and each character is a parable for aspects of the postbellum human condition. Read as a fable for our times, it is fascinating; read as history, it is as exhausting as it is frustrating. This is crafted as a Sophoclean tragedy with a Weberian plot. Oliver Otis Howard, the so-called praying general of the Civil War, brings his deeply rooted Puritan ethic to bear against irrational disorder in postwar America. As the director of the Freedman's Bureau he attempts to slip everyone into a one-size-fits-all straightjacket of Protestant conformity, only to fail miserably in light of national complacency over the fate of freed slaves. Humbled but not broken, he is assigned to bring order to the wilds of the Department of the Columbia, which included all of the old Oregon Territory and newly acquired Alaska. Standing in the way of the forces of rationalization is the preeminent charismatic figure of Chief Joseph (Heinmot Tooyalakekt—Sharfstein's spelling) whose every footstep releases the animistic spirits that inhabit the homeland of his ancestors. When not busy trying to stamp out the rowdy saloon life around his Portland headquarters, Howard is bent on bringing disenchantment to the Nez Perce world by settling Joseph and his people onto carefully mapped rectangular farm plots on a reservation that his band had never approved. In good J. R. R. Tolkien style, the grand struggle ensues, the elven enchantment is broken, and the mundane rule of men prevails; in this case, the realm of real estate and railroad developers who bring “progress” in the form of structured capitalism to dominate the world. Of course, as this is a tragedy, both men, who are equally endowed with hubris, end up disillusioned

Art · Charisma · Disenchantment · Feud · Honor · Literature · Plot (graphics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Tragedy (event · American Environmental and Regional History · American Literature and Culture · History · Law