When The Elk-Dog Heritage was first published in 1982, its story was unique. A novel told largely from the American Indian point of view, with one white man as the minority character?
The great Jack Schaefer, whose Shane had already become a classic, once commented on the reaction to his book The Canyon, which had had no whites at all: “The public just wasn’t ready to read about Indians yet.”
The three finalists for the Western Writers’ Golden Spur Award for Best Novel of 1982 were Fred Grove’s Match Race, a story of early quarter horse racing; Terry C. Johnston’s Carry the Wind, a fur trade story with strong Indian characters; and this book, The Elk-Dog Heritage. The Spur went to Grove’s novel, a little closer to the “Western” of tradition, but it is worth noting that one of his strong characters was a half-blood Indian jockey.
“That was the year,” Johnston pointed out years later, “that it became okay to write about Indians.”
I think that’s true. This was only my third novel, but all had carried the Indian theme. They were not even in proper sequence yet, and were merely stories of a soldier from Coronado’s 1541 expedition to the Great Plains, left behind when they turned back. Later, these tales were rearranged in a series as the “Spanish Bit Saga,” now more than thirty books long, as we follow the descendants of Juan Garcia, the lost Spaniard.
This book is one of a few which helped to demonstrate in
1983 that the public was now “ … ready to read about Indians.” It is a special pleasure to see it re-introduced.