Book Blurb:
In 1872, sixteen-year-old Goes First, a Crow Native woman, marries Abe Farwell, a white fur trader. He gives her the name Mary, and they set off on the long trip to his trading post in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan, Canada. Along the way, she finds a fast friend in a Métis named Jeannie; makes a lifelong enemy in a wolfer named Stiller; and despite learning a dark secret of Farwell’s past, falls in love with her husband.
The winter trading season passes peacefully. Then, on the eve of their return to Montana, a group of drunken whiskey traders slaughters forty Nakota—despite Farwell’s efforts to stop them. Mary, hiding from the hail of bullets, sees the murderers, including Stiller, take five Nakota women back to their fort. She begs Farwell to save them, and when he refuses, Mary takes two guns, creeps into the fort, and saves the women from certain death.
My Review: 4 stars
Crow Mary by Kathleen Grissom is a beautifully researched and important look into the lives of the Indigenous people and the real-life person Crow Mary.
In complete honesty, this book came with extremely high expectations as her first book Kitchen House and second book Glory Over Everything were two of my very favorites. I am still, years later, thinking about those characters. So of course, when this came out, I had set a very high bar.
Crow Mary was an incredible woman and lived a harrowing, courageous life. She married a “yellow eyes” named Abe Farwell and he took her from Montana to Canada where he had his fur trading outpost. There she met Jeanine, a member of the Métis tribe, who became a loyal friend and gave Mary a sense of belonging. She also had run-ins with an evil fur trader who became a sworn enemy.
Grissom’s incredibly detailed descriptions and fleshed out characters allowed the story to come alive. There was a perfect amount of suspense in the storyline that led to learning and understanding more about the American Indians in the late 1800s. They suffered greatly during this time.
I applaud Grissom’s ability to honestly represent Mary’s life and give justice to the Crow and Métis people.
Quotes I liked:
No one is without fear. But only the brave take action in spite of that fear.”
“Drink can make a good man bad and a bad man worse.”
“It’s a Crow woman’s right to choose her husband, so…”
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