John Ermine of Yellowstone

Summary

A sun-bleached cradle of wagons is shattered on the high plateau; in the splintered aftermath a flaxen-haired infant is lifted by Crow hands, renamed, re-baptized in ochre, and reared beneath the thunderous hooves of Yellowstone buffalo. Years coil like smoke: the boy—now John Ermine—rides with Fire Bear’s shadow, his heart syncopated to war drums, his gaze trained on horizons that whisper of belonging. Yet the plains keep a ledger of bloodlines, and when the shaman Crooked Bear flicks open that ledger with a single muttered truth, the ground tilts: the adopted brave learns the marrow in his bones is pale, the skin stretched over it a palimpsest of colonizer guilt. Identity fractures like river-ice in April; love—personified by a frontier schoolteacher whose textbooks stink of manifest destiny—offers fragile bridge-work. Cavalry sabers glint, mining syndicates gnaw the sacred mountains, and John, caught between treaty parchment and repeating rifle, must decide whether heritage is a story told around council fires or a ledger written in mineral rights. The finale detonates at twilight, when loyalties collide in a canyon whose walls echo both psalms and scalp songs, leaving only hoof prints and a solitary feather to argue over what, exactly, was won.

Synopsis

As a baby, John Ermine is stolen from a wagon train by the Crow Indians and is adopted by Chief Fire Bear. John grows to manhood, ignorant that he is a white man until his parentage is disclosed to him by Crooked Bear,.