BookLife Review: Wolves of Eden, by Kevin McCarthy

historical novel, Dakota Territories, Red Cloud's War, Native American conflicts with US Army, frontier, settlements, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, post Civil-War, Irish immigrants, Jewish soldier

Set in 1886-1868 Wolves of Eden by Kevin McCarthy (@kevinmccarthy.author) parses the grittiness and horrors of Red Cloud's War, an uprising of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe nations against the invasion and occupation of the Dakota Territories on tribal lands. The US Army built fortified posts ostensibly to "protect" migrants heading from the East to the Gold Rush in Montana. The ranks of the Army were filled with Irish immigrants who had served as mercenary soldiers in the Civil War, and other displaced former Civil War soldiers or unemployed farmers and felons. Most suffered or developed PTSD from the past War or their brutal battles with the Native American warriors.

At once a Western epic and slice of both post Civil War and Native American history, McCarthy advances his fictionalized tale in the alternating narrator voices/chapters of an earnest and righteous investigating Jewish sergeant operating under a perpetually intoxicated Irish captain and that of a lowly captured Irish private journaling and recounting the tale of his misdeeds from his cell. The descriptions of the plains are both majestic and romantic and the setting for horrific and primitive combat. A hard and graphic but riveting war story, laced with white settler invader privilege that lays bare the crimes committed against native people as the United Stares was settled.