Panther in the Sky (116 page)

Although I have carefully sought the ascertainable truth, sometimes I have had to choose one unprovable version over another in order to proceed with the story; I hope that readers will not cite my work as an authority on one side or the other of any of the perennial quibbles. Too many readers have been led astray already by authors who claimed to have found the last word. I have not broken much new ground; this field has already been plowed over too often. I have instead tried to understand and interpret, to make my reader walk in the Shawnees’ moccasins, to help him appreciate what they once had and comprehend the devastation they were suffering.

One element of my story that might raise still another dispute is the relationship between Tecumseh and Rebekah Galloway. The idyllic account given by the Galloway family historian, verified nowhere else and repeated uncritically by scores of book, magazine, and newspaper writers ever since, I have long found suspect. I could not believe that this exemplary red leader would mock and jeopardize the holy cause of his life by proposing to marry a white teenage girl.

My research showed me that the attitude of the red man toward his homeland was never obvious to Anglo-Americans, even when explained by Tecumseh and many other eloquent chiefs.

It still isn’t, as I learned one evening beside a campfire. Two talkers, a compassionate, liberal-minded white man and a Shawnee veteran of Viet Nam, had been conversing earnestly for hours about matters close to their hearts. Now my fellow white man shook his head and blurted something I had almost known he would say:

“But, my God! How can you go and fight a war for a country that’s treated your people the way it has?”

The Shawnee smiled and wagged his head slowly. He put his fist against the man’s knee, chuckled, and said, “You palefaces still can’t understand that this is our country, can you?”

J
AMES
A
LEXANDER
T
HOM
lives in the Indiana hill country near Bloomington with his wife, Dark Rain of the Shawnee Nation, United Remnant Band. He has been a U.S. Marine, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a member of the faculty at the Indiana University Journalism School. Thom’s historical novels are
Long Knife, Follow the River, From Sea to Shining Sea, The Children of First Man,
and
Panther in the Sky,
for which he won the prestigious Western Writers of America award for best historical novel.

Three hundred years before Columbus, a Welsh Prince named Madoc—an invincible blond Giant of a man—crossed the Atlantic with a fleet of wooden boats to plant a colony in the paradise he called Iarghal. For countless generations Prince Madoc’s blue-eyed descendants migrated along the great waterways of the primeval New World, mingling their blood, their legends, and their dreams with the native peoples. And as epidemics raged, love and marriage flourished, and savage wars erupted, Prince Madoc’s vision of peace with the natives of Iarghal was forgotten. But his spirit of chivalry lived on in the people who called themselves the Mandans.…

Published by The Random House Publishing Group