The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War

"This novel is about the Nez Perce War, part of the Indian Wars. Unlike my other choices, its temporal scope is quite defined: it’s by and large set in the 1870s—though it does have little flashes here and there of people in the present day looking at photographs of the 1870s. At that time, we’d just had the American Civil War—the crisis to end all crises for the United States. Although we’re in the Nez Perce War of 1877, the history of the Civil War follows the novel all the way through. The novel dramatizes two sides: the American army, who we follow through their campaigns, and the Native American people. If you look at the American army, you see the psychology of the men and of the people as a unit has utterly changed since the Civil War. When more than 600,000 of your countrymen have died—we’re still dealing with that now, and for that to have happened within a decade, the psychologies of people have been immensely affected. There’s an interesting text to look out for on this that’s really good for anyone who studies Faulkner, but really helps with this novel, too. It’s Michael Gorra’s book, The Saddest Words : William Faulkner’s Civil War. It came out in 2020 and does an excellent job of laying out the history of the Civil War and what a massive psychological cataclysm it was. In it, he discusses Ulysses S. Grant’s time in Lafayette during the Civil War. He talks about Grant’s soldiers going into civilian houses to use them as hospitals and barracks and confiscating food and other resources. We see this dramatized in Faulkner’s novels all the time with buried treasure throughout the South. Even in the 1950s, people are hunting for buried silver. This is the treasure that the southern United States tried to hide from the advancing Union army. The reason this is important for The Dying Grass is that the Civil War was the first war in which the distinction between soldier and civilian had been effaced and war had become mechanized. We’re seeing a modern American army that is completely dehumanized by having been through this brutal, bloody war. There are wonderful things that Vollmann does with his typesetting of the novel. All the American army sections are very blocky, because these aren’t people, they’re automatons. They talk like automatons and if anything comes up that’s sentimental or to do with the soldier as a person, it’s often broken off with an ellipsis. ‘We don’t want to talk about that. We want to talk about how we’re going to get this Native American leader called Chief Joseph.’ They’re chasing him, and they’re only interested in the military goal. Whereas if you go to the sections where the book deals with the Native American people, everything’s indented. There are hundreds of enjambments. It flows like a river. He’s showing us the still human aspects of the Native American people, as opposed to this army that has become completely dehumanized. Throughout the novel, you see that the soldiers who are involved in the army are still doing things like writing letters home to loved ones. One of them spends much of the novel trying to write love poems for his fiancée. But he struggles to do it because everything that surrounds him is this horrible, mechanized, dehumanizing system that is the American army that is crushing to his individuality and humanity. Writing a poem home to his lover becomes an impossible task: you see him constantly with little half-finished poems because he just can’t do it. If you’re looking for a novel that gives you historical fiction at its most minute and forensic then you should read The Dying Grass. It goes into so many details. We’ve got dentistry, as it was practiced during the Nez Perce War. We’ve got sexual practices. We’ve got love letters. We’ve got the control of supply lines and army resources. We’ve got the treatment of animals: there’s a moment in the novel where they talk about the Native American horses that they’ve caught, and they have to shoot them because they can’t transport them. Again, it’s life being effaced by this horrible mechanical process. It gives you blow-by-blows on the military strategy. It’s a real historical period that he’s writing about and one of the main protagonists is Oliver Otis Howard, a general during the Indian Wars. The novel has him talking in quite minute detail about the military strategy of the period. The novel also gives you perspectives on hunting and the decline of the indigenous way of life. All of these really accurate and minutely examined moments in history are there on the page all the way through. It’s wonderful and the book to look out for if you’re looking for a really intense historical novel. The novel could be accused of having a single note, because although it’s very long, we don’t change scene much. We’re following the United States Army on a quite laborious march after the Native Americans. They’re pushing them further and further towards Canada. They want to catch them because they’re bloodthirsty but they also wouldn’t mind if they push them out beyond their jurisdiction—what the Native Americans in the novel called ‘the medicine line.’ This was a belief at the time that the Canadian border was a medicine line. So that’s what’s going on in the novel, over its 1,300 pages. There’s never a change. So those who don’t like that, won’t like this novel. But I come back to what you’re reading it for, which is the massive detail that he’s put into an exploration of that one series of events."