Tie My Bones to Her Back
A Novel
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
After her parents’ deaths and the recession force her out of her home in 1873, Jenny Dousmann heads for the Wild West. She knows that if she can find her brother, Otto, a Civil War veteran, he’ll take care of her.
When they finally reunite, Jenny is surprised to find that Otto has been working as a buffalo hunter and is struggling even to support himself. The number of hunters in the West has increased rapidly, and buffalo has become scarce. To make matters worse, the whites and the native Indians are constantly at war, putting everyone in the area in danger.
Their first winter alone in the West is devastating: Jenny is raped by two US soldiers passing through the area, while Otto is crippled during a blizzard. They are discovered, near death, by a member of a nearby Cheyenne tribe. Two Shields is an Indian buffalo skinner, and he vows to keep them safe. To do so, Two Shields asks them to become members of his tribe. He promises to teach them how to hunt like his people and to live simply on the land. Jenny and Otto must decide if they should continue to depend on only each other or if they should put their lives in the hands of a man who is supposed to be their enemy.
Skyhorse Publishing is proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction that takes place in the old West. Westerns—books about outlaws, sheriffs, chiefs and warriors, cowboys and Indians—are a genre in which we publish regularly. Our list includes international bestselling authors like Zane Gray and Louis L’Amour, and many more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It would be hard to find a more brutal and unsentimental portrait of the American West than the one offered in this bleak yet beautifully written novel, Jones's sixth (after Blood Tide, 1990). In 1873, after the suicides of her parents, German immigrants in Wisconsin whose farm was about to go into foreclosure, gutsy, sharp-shooting Jenny Dousmann takes to the Great Plains with her buffalo-hunting brother, Otto. He follows the herds with his partner, Raleigh McKay (a Confederate Civil War veteran whose bullet killed Stonewall Jackson), and two assistants, one a Cheyenne half-breed named Tom Shields. Jenny's experiences on the Plains include rape, after one of the men brings back a false report of Otto's death; an escape into a blizzard in which she's reunited with Otto and saved by a bloody buffalo carcass; and a growing respect and love for Tom, whose people she and Otto will eventually join. A climactic confrontation pits Raleigh, now a guide for foppish English game hunters, against a group of Cheyenne, accompanied by Tom, Otto and Jenny. Savagery rules the narrative: there are graphic depictions of scalpings and other mutilations, and Jones's chapters on the buffalo hunters deliver a powerful vision of greedy and wasteful government-sanctioned destruction of the natural world as white hunters litter the landscape with skinned, rotting bodies. This is elemental storytelling, populated by richly drawn characters and propelled by language that has the force and accuracy of a Cheyenne warrior's arrowhead.
