The Characters
Bull, the son of Enemy Horse, is the patriarch of his tribe. He is used to represent stalwart Native Americans who dare to resist acculturation and maintain traditional values. He lives in a changing world, but he clings tenaciously to his heritage. Although he seeks accord with the whites officially representing the dominant culture, he refuses to knuckle under to them. He is a thorn in the flesh of those who think that a good Native American is one who forsakes tribal traditions and enters the mainstream of American life.
Henry Jim, Bull’s elder brother, has joined the white world. He cooperates with government officials. He has built a wooden house in which his daughter-in-law, a member of a tribe to the south, has gone so far as to cover the floors and windows with cloth—much to the dismay of his Native American relatives, most of whom will not enter his house, preferring to stay outside on their horses when they need to see him. Henry Jim has fenced his land as the whites do. He cannot, however, shake his Native American roots. As death approaches, he moves from his house into a tepee outside it, reverting to his tribal customs as his life runs out.
Two Sleeps, not originally a member of the tribe, appeared in the tribal village one day, beaten, exhausted, and hungry. The elders were about to expel him when he collapsed. Of necessity, they ministered to him. He then shared with them a vision that he had about a herd of buffalo he sensed was grazing nearby. When this vision proved to have substance and the Indians had killed enough buffalo to feed themselves for the foreseeable future, they accepted Two Sleeps as their holy man, their seer. They took him into their community and venerated him, by that act reflecting their mystical orientation.
Antoine represents the Native American who, although snatched from his culture, refuses to forget it and ultimately returns to it. He is, basically, a moderate young man in whom one sees some of the charisma that characterizes Bull, his grandfather, whom he might one day succeed.
Pock Face, on the other hand, is an angry youth who has bolted from the government school. He is outraged that the dominant society is robbing his people of the very resources they need to survive. The symbol of this theft is the dam Adam Pell has built on tribal land to collect the river water that Pock Face’s tribe, living downstream from the dam, requires for its sustenance. Pock Face, in his own view, commits a moral act of vengeance by randomly killing Jim Cooke.
Toby Rafferty wants genuinely to help the Native Americans whose welfare and control are his official responsibility. He represents the well-meaning “new-settlement-house humanist,” as McNickle calls him. His intentions are indisputably excellent, but they are building blocks that pave the road to hell.
Doc Edwards, Rafferty’s close friend, is the official physician of the Little Elk Agency and has refused advantageous transfers because he believes in what he is doing. He is sensitive to his Native American charges but is never able to surmount the barriers that separate the two cultures.
Adam Pell, the builder of the dam, considers himself a true champion of Native Americans, both in the United States and in Peru. He has a utopian vision of what technological progress can mean to the Little Elk, but he cannot communicate this vision to them, nor has he sought their counsel in developing it.
Characters Discussed
Bull
Bull, the chief of the fictional Little Elk...
(This entire section contains 768 words.)
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tribe. He has kept his band in the mountains, isolated from the white men who have invaded the land below. At the novel’s beginning, Bull takes his grandson to see a hydroelectric dam that has been constructed in a meadow that was sacred to the Little Elk people. When he realizes that the white men have “killed the water,” he shoots, ineffectually, at the dam. Bull knows that talking to the white men is of no use—the two cultures cannot understand each another, even when they know the meaning of the individual words.
Henry Jim
Henry Jim, Bull’s brother, who decided to live among the white men thirty years earlier. He believed that assimilating into their culture was the way to survive. In an effort to lead the people away from the old ways, he gives the Featherboy bundle, the Little Elks’ most sacred object, to a “dog-faced” minister who sells it to a museum. As a result, he and Bull have not talked to one another for three decades. By the novel’s end, he has moved out of the nice house the white men had built for their “prize Indian” and is living in a tipi on his farm. He has even forgotten the English language, an indication of his total rejection of the white culture.
Louis
Louis, Bull’s other brother, who has stayed in the mountain camp with Bull. He distrusts white men completely, although he can tolerate Rafferty, whom The Boy says “talks pretty good,” which means that he listens as well as speaking, a quality Louis appreciates.
Antoine
Antoine, Bull’s grandson, who has just returned from the Indian boarding school in Oregon. In coming back to the mountains, he is returning to his traditional heritage, but he comes back knowing the English language. This means that he will become an interpreter, allowing interaction between his grandfather’s people and the white people below, an important element in the novel. At the novel’s end, only Antoine holds any hope for a future, but it is a future his grandfather would not have wished.
Adam Pell
Adam Pell, the man who designed the dam. He has made a “hobby” of Indians and has traveled the world “helping” Indian people. For example, he went to Peru to help descendants of the Incas, who he says were the world’s greatest engineers, build a dam. He also is the director of the Americana Institute, the museum that purchased the Featherboy bundle and allowed it to be chewed to pieces in the museum’s basement. He thinks he knows “these people,” but he eventually is stunned by his own lack of understanding. When Pock Face kills Pell’s nephew, Pell begins to understand the enormity of his own actions, but he still does not understand all that he believes he does. He attempts to give Bull and his people a sacred object from another culture, one made of “valuable” gold, in lieu of the destroyed Featherboy bundle. Later, when Bull shoots him, he dies with a surprised look on his face.
Rafferty
Rafferty, the Indian agent, the one white man in the novel for whom the Indians have any regard. He tries to help them and to understand them, and he tries to let Pell and his nephew know why the Indians are upset by the desecration of their sacred objects and the land. When the meeting he arranged turns into a fiasco as a result of Pell’s ignorance, Rafferty, along with Pell, is shot by Bull.
The Boy
The Boy, whose Indian name is Son Child, the tribal police for the area. He is torn between worlds. He loves and respects Bull and his people, but he lives in a white man’s world and is a cog in the machinery of the white world. His Indian name was translated into English as The Boy, a significant change. He is a strong, understanding man, not a “boy,” as the white world would have it. When Bull shoots Pell and Rafferty, Son Child does his duty and shoots the chief. He says, “Brother! I have to do this!” before putting a bullet into Bull’s heart, a bullet Bull does nothing to resist.
Pock Face
Pock Face, an angry young man caught between worlds. He wears cowboy boots and “can talk about horses like a white man.” He listens to what the elders say, but without hearing. His shooting of Pell’s nephew is the result of a misunderstanding on both sides.
