THE RIVER VOYAGE upon which Odie O’Banion and his fellow Vagabonds embark in the summer of 1932 is a mythic journey. The reality of the Great Depression landscape that serves as its backdrop, however, was etched into the memory of my parents and the parents of those children who, like me, were born in a time of plenty following World War II. My father was a native of Oklahoma. I grew up listening to his stories of the Dust Bowl years, of foraging for wild greens to supplement meals, of watching mud rain from the skies. My mother was born in Ellendale, North Dakota, to a struggling family who could not afford to feed another mouth. At the age of four, she was sent to live with relatives in Wyoming, who eventually adopted and raised her.
The Great Depression was hard on almost everyone, but it was particularly devastating to families. In 1932, the United States Children’s Bureau reported that there were at least 25,000 families wandering the country. During the height of the Great Depression, an estimated 250,000 teenagers had left home, willingly or not, and had become itinerant.
When I began to consider the story I wanted to write, which, quite honestly, I envisioned as an update of Huckleberry Finn, the Great Depression appealed to me as the perfect, challenging setting. It was a time of desperation in our nation, with the best and the worst of human nature broadly on display. To create this setting as realistically as possible, I read countless first-person narratives, pored over reams of microfilmed newspapers from the day, and studied the vast photographic records of the time. As much as possible, I tried to hold to the economic and social truths of the period.
Particularly important to both that historic era and the story I created were the shantytowns that sprang up in cities across the nation. They were called Hoovervilles, a derisive jab at Herbert Hoover, president in the early years of the Depression. (A Hoover shoe was one with a hole in its sole; Hoover leather was the cardboard inserted to cover that hole.) These makeshift communities were built of scraps and were populated by those dispossessed as a result of the worldwide financial collapse. The people who lived there were the objects not only of charitable relief efforts but also of concerted efforts at eradication. The Hooverville in Saint Louis, which I included in the story, was the largest in the country, with a population of more than 5,000. The federal government cleared out this encampment in 1936, but small clusters of shacks endured until well into the 1960s.
I love the works of Charles Dickens, and in part, my decision to open This Tender Land in a fictional institution called the Lincoln Indian Training School was a nod to his powerful novels of social inequity. The history of our nation’s treatment of Native Americans is one of the saddest litanies of human cruelty imaginable. Among the many attempts at cultural genocide was a horribly ill-conceived program of off-reservation boarding schools initiated by Richard Henry Pratt, who famously declared that its purpose was to “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Beginning in the 1870s and continuing until the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Native children were forcibly removed from their families and sent to live in boarding schools far from their reservation homes. In 1925, more than 60,000 children were being housed in 357 of these institutions in thirty states. Life in an Indian boarding school wasn’t just harsh, it was soul-crushing. Children were stripped of their native clothing, hair, and personal belongings. They were punished for speaking their native language. They were emotionally, physically, and sexually abused. Although touted as a way to assimilate children into the white culture and teach them a productive trade, in truth, many of these schools functioned as a pipeline for free labor, offering up the children as field hands or domestic help for local citizens.
For This Tender Land, I read dozens of personal narratives of life in these institutions, but I relied heavily on Pipestone: My Life in an Indian Boarding School, a memoir by Adam Fortunate Eagle, which recounts his days as a resident of the Pipestone Indian Training School in southwestern Minnesota. For some, Adam Fortunate Eagle may be a familiar name. He was one of the leaders of the Indian occupation of Alacatraz, which began in November 1969 and lasted for nineteen months, galvanizing Native activism across the nation.
In the early part of the twentieth century, a wave of Protestant revivalism swept the country, promulgated by the likes of William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival, the evangelist Billy Sunday, and the charismatic faith healer Amy Semple McPherson. Although by the 1930s, much of the religious fervor had died down, revival tent crusades, like the Sword of Gideon Healing Crusade in my story, continued to be popular in the South and Midwest. In truth, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Sinclair Lewis and his novel Elmer Gantry, a scathing look at the religious hypocrisy he saw in his day. I have always been fascinated by Sharon Falconer, the story’s tent evangelist, a woman of deep and honest religious passion but also of worldly experience. My own Sister Eve is largely constructed on the framework of Lewis’s intriguing character.
Though much of my research was conducted in libraries and museums—hours in the Gale Family Library at the Minnesota History Center and in the Blue Earth County Historical Society’s History Center and Museum—I spent a great deal of time personally exploring the actual landscape of the story. I kayaked and canoed the waterways that Odie and his companions follow in the novel, and I walked much of the same ground they would have walked. I stood at the confluence of the Blue Earth and Minnesota Rivers, where the citizens of the fictional Hopersville erect their makeshift shelters, and I sat on the rock where Odie and Maybeth Scofield share a kiss. I roamed the streets of the West Side Flats in Saint Paul, and despite all the remarkable changes in the landscape since the days in which the Vagabonds sought respite there, I was still able to see in my mind’s eye just where Gertie’s restaurant would have been and the boat works and the home where John Kelly’s baby brother might have been born.
In the end, here’s the truth behind the writing of my novel: Although I tried to be true to the spirit of the time and to use as much as possible the factual guideposts from my research, This Tender Land is simply a story. As the narrator, Odie O’Banion, freely admits near the novel’s end, “Some of what I’ve told you is true. The rest . . . well, let’s just call it the bloom on the rosebush.”