Blackfoot Redemption

How often do you read a solid academic book that is also a page-turner? Blackfoot Redemption tells the hauntingly poignant story of Spopee, a Blood Indian man convicted in a Montana court of murder in 1880. Spopee spent most of the next thirty-four years in an insane asylum in Washington, D.C. Finally pardoned in 1914, he was returned to a homeland unrecognizably different from the one he left, but ... I cannot bring myself to give away the ending. Whether you are interested in the history of the Blackfeet, the history of crime and the courts, the history of insane asylums, or just want to be drawn into a compelling, tragic, true story, Blackfoot Redemption is well worth picking up. Spopee probably did kill Charles Walmesley in November 1879, although he possibly did so in self-defense, and possibly in Canada. Despite his poverty, he was remarkably well represented by top lawyers (Republican lawyers in a predominantly Democrat state). Still, after a trial of dubious fairness, he was convicted of murder in December 1880 and sentenced to death. William E. Farr's telling of the story of the trial and the events leading to the eventual commutation of his sentence to life in prison offers instructive glances into contemporary state and national politics. After his death sentence was commuted, Spopee was sent first to the Detroit House of Correction but was transferred in 1882 to the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C. By then the Blackfeet had been erroneously informed that he had died, and soon the staff at the asylum lost all record or memory of what Indian community Spopee had come from. And so Spopee languished until he suddenly became a cause célèbre in 1914

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