This is a novel I have been wanting to read for years. I had enjoyed reading several of the other novels written by James Alexander Thom, based on historical figures who had existed in the early settlement of the midwest. I had become aware of Red Heart years ago, but hadn’t been able to find it, until I discovered it as an ebook in Apple Books.
The novel is based on the life of Fanny Slocum. The novel begins In 1778 with five year old red-haired Fanny living with her pioneering Quaker family in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. During an Indian attack, Fanny was kidnapped by the three Indians, who killed and scalped one of her older brothers. The Indians gagged Fanny and carried her off on horseback, traveling quickly for days, before they eventually getting her to an Indian village. There she was given to an Indian woman who had had her daughter killed by Whites when they had earlier attacked the tribe.
As time went by, Fanny slowly learned the tribe’s language and she slowly adapted to her new life with the tribe. Her red hair was was always an attraction with the other Indians in the tribe. While initially missing her birth family, she soon found love with her new mother, and began to really enjoy the freedom she found living with the Indians, which was not as restrictive or structured as her life had been with her Quaker family. She began to see that the Indian culture was similar to that of her Quaker family, with their values of peace, kindness, and honesty. Fanny loved being part of the religious ceremonies for planting and harvesting, even though they were so different from the religious traditions she had known as a very young child.
Although Fanny was accepted and became a member of the village, the Indians in her village hated Whites, and it didn’t take Fanny long to see why. The Indians worked hard to grow the garden crops needed to get them through the hard winters, but time after time, White armies would attack the villages in the fall, before they could harvest, burning their gardens and their wigwams. This forced the tribe to retreat further and further away from the Whites, and having to start all over establishing a new village. This destruction occurred, year after year, as the white settlers, took over more and more of the Indian’s land.
With another white army about to attack the village, Neepah, her Indian mother who Fanny had come to love, arranged to have Fanny sent away to live with Neepah’s elderly parents who lived in a village near Niagara Falls. Neepah, who had stayed behind to help protect their village was killed by the Whites. Neepah’s death was very traumatic, for Fanny, but she soon found love and became the adopted daughter of Tuck Horse and Flicker, Neepah’s elderly parents.
The attacks of the whites continued year after year, destroying the wigwams, crops, and Indian villages wherever the Indians tried to establish them. White traders sold the liquor that destroyed Fanny’s first husband, and later one of her children, who was killed by a young drunken Indian. Fanny soon learned to hate whites too and never trusted them. She hid herself from them, fearing they would take her sell her back to the Quaker family she could hardly remember.
Red Heart covers a fascinating and untold story, full of the history, the struggles, and the culture of the Native people of the time. I found it immensely interesting and enlightening. I was very touched toward the end when Fanny an old woman in her seventies, finally got to meet her two brothers and a sister who were still alive. Fanny Slocum lived an amazing life, and I happy that James Alexander Thom, had presented it in such a readable and gripping novel.
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