Tough Trip Through Paradise: Montana 1878 by Andrew Garcia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is an amazing work, edited together from the memoirs of a 19th Century Montana mountain man and trader, Andrew Garcia aka The Squaw Kid. The bulk of the book is an extraordinary tale of young and naive Garcia throwing in his lot with drunkard tapper Beaver Tom and ending up alone and living by his wits in the remote wilderness. Coming into his own, a second act finds him struggling to balance the demands of enemy Blackfeet and Pend d'Oreilles tribal bands in the area. In the particularly fascinating middle act, Andrew's "Injun" wife In-who-lise tells her story or following Chief Joseph as one of the Nez Perce and being wounded and abandoned in the end of that tragedy a mere two-day's ride from sanctuary in Canada with Sitting Bull. Following this, Andrew takes his wife back two the two-year-old battlegrounds to find her mother's gave. While failing in that, they do find the grave's of Nez Perce chief's Red Eagle and Gray Wolf. This is about 1879 and the disinterred chief's where disturbed to be scalped for bounty and the sad pair re-bury them including setting aside an Indian war lance head. Andrew tells how in 1930 returning once again as a widower to find the land a government-maintained park steals away in the night that artifact as a memento. This would be an excellent end to the memoir, but editor Stein decided to tack on a few more chapters, most of which cover the murder of a miner Hay and a revenge attempted by his brother which almost cost Garcia his own life.
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