Faraway Blue
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
First published in 1999, Faraway Blue is based on the real-life exploits of Sergeant Moses Williams, former slave, Civil War veteran, and Buffalo Soldier in the Ninth Cavalry Regiment. Included in Moses's story are four women and two men representing the ethnic groups and economic levels found in the late 1800s American Southwest.
At the story's opening, Williams's cavalry unit has one assignment: kill Apaches in the "faraway blue" mountains of southwestern New Mexico Territory, also known as the Black Range. As a fighter in the white man's campaign to obliterate the Indians and take over their lands, Williams finds a nemesis in Nana, an old Warm Springs Apache warrior who is a tactical genius. Nana leads his small band of followers to repeatedly strike area mining camps and settlements. Both men know they must meet before the end of the war and a maddening cat-and-mouse pursuit ensues.
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Williams is sustained by his love for Sheela Jones, a mulatto whom he wants to marry when the army will allow it. But Sheela's love for him guides her to take an immense risk just as Williams and Nana ride out to settle their score.
"Evans paints marvelous word pictures of a land and people he knows extremely well." - Booklist
"As always with Evans, written with a good sense of the times and place." - Kirkus
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Plenty of blood is spilled in this adventure story, as the Ninth Cavalry battles the Apaches in the mountain country of old New Mexico, circa 1880. Civil War veteran and ex-slave Sgt. Moses Williams leads the charge against Nana, the distinguished, aging Apache leader and brother-in-law of the more well-known Geronimo, in a struggle to claim the ancient Indian tribal lands. With each new skirmish Nana and Williams become convinced that they are destined to face each other in hand-to-hand combat in a battle to the finish. Their fates are bound together so ominously that Sheela, Williams's bride-to-be (she is an educated, beautiful and virginal mulatta whom Williams rescued from a brothel) has a premonition that her man will die at Nana's hand. Sheela comes to rescue him, but it's all a buildup to a letdown finish. Evans (Hi-Lo Country) writes sensitively when describing Nana and his relationship with his family, especially his grandchildren. Far too often he moves away from those tender scenes to graphic, bloody descriptions of battle verging on the gratuitous. It is unconvincing that this story (based on a real-life character, decorated buffalo soldier Moses Williams) should dodge virtually all the racial issues one would think central in this setting. Evans has written an old-fashioned Western novel, where the love element heightens the drama of war and vice versa, settling comfortably into a genre of well-worn conventions and leaving the reader with few surprises. FYI: A film version of Evans's Hi-Lo Country is in production from Martin Scorsese, starring Woody Harrelson and Patricia Arquette.
