Jessamyn West has taken a little-known incident—the cold-blooded killing of four Indian children, three Indian women and two Indian men at a backwoods maple-sugar camp—and fashioned from it a rousing adventure story solidly informed with philosophical and moral content. When is killing murder? When is it war? When is it self-defense?…

["The Massacre at Fall Creek"] is a story about the dawning realization that we are one species and share a common humanity….

West is … working with the materials of her own past, frontier America and the clash of men of good will and Sunday Christians, as well as that of two mutually exclusive ways of life, Indian and white. (p. 32)

Working at the height of her powers, with wisdom and maturity, ofttimes a quiet irony, close observation and well-researched detail, West has written a novel of character and incident. Believable women and men are caught in a train of events that make the reader turn the pages, asking, in [E. M.] Forster's words, "And then what happened? And then?" Her women are strong, active and practical…. Her male characters are deftly sketched, mostly decent and human, and even the evildoers are motivated by past incident or incapacity.

Very good about the muddles of life and history, West shows the oversimplifications that keep most people going….

["The Massacre at Fall Creek"] is a fine piece of work, effective fiction and entertainment, and more besides. (p. 33)

[West has created the story of The Massacre at Fall Creek] as a CinemaScope spectacle, full of frontier humor, courtroom drama, young love, aging lust, hairbreadth escapes, and heavy doses of instruction in the ways and morals of the old-time Midwest. Readers with a taste for this sort of thing will get their money's worth, but other readers will regret that Miss West's knowledge and talent, which could have produced a searching factual book, have been applied to such heavy-handed fiction. Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect is the heroine—seventeen-year-old Hannah Cape, whose brother was a witness to the murder. Tall, redheaded, an eager novitiate in the mysteries of life …, she gives the book an inescapable air of having been intended for the very young.