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The Confederate War Bonnet: A Novel of the Civil War in Indian Territory

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Jack Shakely, in his debut novel "The Confederate War Bonnet," sets a very, very high standard for writers of historical fiction--and that is a very, very good thing!

As a professional historian I tend to cringe when I hear the words "historical fiction," as so many fiction writers are wont to alter the factual historical record in order to make it conform to their story, rather than face the challenge of making their story conform to history (Joseph Heller and W.E.B. Griffin notoriously come to mind in this regard). Shakely instead ingeniously combines meticulous research with surprisingly good story telling to shape a entertaining tale of a little-known but fascinating aspect of American history: the Civil War as fought in the Indian Territory (the future state of Oklahoma.)

Shakely writes surprisingly well for a first time author; he is, by all accounts, a very articulate individual in person, but that talent doesn't always translate into the written word. However, Shakely is, as the moment requires, witty, compassionate, or dramatic. His characters seem real and accessible--and that, along with his exacting homework, is Shakely's greatest strength in this novel. Nowhere do any of the players feel contrived, or simply produced fill a role in a specific scene. By the time a reader is a quarter of the way into this novel, he or she will genuinely care about the characters, because they will already have become very real.

The protagonist, Jack Gaston, Harvard educated, half Indian, half white, is called back to the Indian Territory to take up a position of leadership in the Creek Nation. When he does so, he learns that the American Civil War has become a Native American Civil War as well, with tribes turning against each other, and sometimes fighting within themselves. The picture Shakely paints of this sad fraternal struggle is memorable, though not always pleasant; one of Shakely's strengths is his honesty about the actions of the Indian nations during the war.

I must confess that the character of Jack Gaston reminded me in some ways of the character Davey Elk (played by Perry Lopez) in the movie "McLintock!"--one of favorite characters in one of my favorite films--as he is intelligent, talented, and witty.

The role Native Americans played in the Civil War has long been obscure and overlooked. "The Confederate War Bonnet" goes a long way toward redressing that balance. It's unfortunate that a major publishing house has not picked up this novel and given it the prominence it deserves. I hope it becomes successful enough to encourage Shakely to produce a work (or works) of nonfiction telling the history of the Indian Nations in the Civil War--I believe he would do them proud.

The Confederate War Bonnet by Jack Shakely was a thoroughly enjoyable historical novel on many levels, not the least of which was that it taught me I still have a lot to learn about American history.

I knew, of course, that the central character of the novel was a half-breed Creek Indian who was to serve as a Confederate officer in the Civil War. Still, that did not prepare me to meet the intellectual and reflective Jack Gaston walking across Harvard campus with a book of Shakespearean sonnets in the opening chapter. I learned much about my pre-conceived notions regarding Indians in the mid-19th century, and I empathized with the astonishment of the Harvard dean who hadn't realized that he had an honest-to-goodness Indian in his school. (Our embarrassment for this gentle and bumbling professor turns to warmth when he proves his friendship to Jack later in the novel.)

Within a few chapters, Jack Gaston is traveling across the country (by train) in the company of his giant, banjo-playing Creek friend Jim Tom Nokose. Along the way they visit Jack's grandmother, wealthy widow of a prominent St. Louis doctor, enjoy dinner at the home of a Union Colonel, and serenade bluecoat soldiers on a riverboat with an impromptu banjo performance.

When Jack finally reaches home, I learned that the Creek Nation is nothing like I expected. They own the only printing press in Indian Territory and Jack's father published the only newspaper there before his death. The Creeks are mostly Christian at this point, and they not only celebrate their uniquely Creek Green Corn Ceremony, but Christmas as well. Jack is one of many well-educated men among the Civilized Tribes of Indian Territory, but their traditional ways are also alive enough for Jim Tom to take two wives - devoted cousins and the only surviving members of their family - rather than "break up the set."

I learned as well that the Confederate army had many Indian officers, and some, like General Stand Watie, were fiercely devoted to the cause and just as hard-headed as the white officers. The Confederates appear to be spiraling down into a slow and lingering defeat, despite the assistance of Indian allies and mercenary soldiers such as the flamboyantly attired Major Stephen Toland and his Bright Light Boys. Jack, however, comes to see that no matter the victor in the American Civil War, the Indian nations are bound to be the losers. Captain Jack Gaston is willing to do his duty - especially to lead the war away from his home - but comes to realize that when two great beasts wrestle, the grass always loses. His home is the grass. His goal in the end is to preserve his people and their land, rather than see it become yet another casualty of the war.

I highly recommend The Confederate War Bonnet to readers of historical fiction and to anyone interested in the Civil War or American history. Filled with rich characters and warm humor, it is a novel that will enhance your appreciation of this melting pot we call America and your understanding of how we came to be the nation we are now.

It's seldom that you find a book that not only engages you with the characters and plot, but gives you information that you never dreamed existed. The Confederate War Bonnet is so true to its time and place that you feel that you're there. And the raw emotions ring true. A really good read.

Although Jack Gaston, the son of a white mother and a Creek Indian, is as comfortable in the white world of Harvard University and St. Louis as he is in his father's print shop in the Creek Nation, his heart is Creek. While attending Harvard, Jack learns that he has been elected to the House of Warriors. The honor comes in the third year of the Civil War when the Northern Creeks fight for the Union and the Southern Creeks, Jack's people, fight for the Confederacy. As Jack makes his way home, he tells his friend Jim Tom that, "When two elephants fight, regardless of which wins, the grass loses."

Jack serves as an officer in the Confederate Army before being seriously wounded. Back in the Creek Nation, Jack and Jim Tom print a news sheet which contains the usual wartime propaganda. Because there is actually very little good news to report, Jack fills the empty space with the exploits of a Creek/Confederate warrior in the story of "The Confederate War Bonnet" which is modeled after the dime novels of the time. "The Confederate War Bonnet" is read by both armies, and the imaginary hero becomes real in the eyes of the Union soldiers and ends up with a price on his head.

This book explains why many Indians, including Jack Gaston, chose to fight for the Confederacy. Twenty years earlier, Federal soldiers had forcibly removed the Five Civilized Tribes from their homes in the South. Thousands died on the Trail of Tears while walking to their new home in Oklahoma. Throughout the story, Jack Gaston maintains his dignity while fighting for a lost cause, provides for his people who are on the verge of starvation, and writes letters to leaders in Washington to recognize his people as a sovereign nation. This last service landed him in a Federal prison on Governor's Island in New York.

Jack Shakely, who is of Creek descent, has no axe to grind, and his portrayal of Jack Gaston shows that. The story is a positive one told with grace and humor, but it also strikes the right chord when the hardships of war descend upon the Creek Nation. This book is an important re-creation of events which occurred in a theater of war that few people know or care about. But they should care because this is where the grass lost.

The Confederate War Bonnet, A Novel of the Civil War in Indian Territory, by Jack Shakely should be required reading in America's public schools. Not only is War Bonnet entertaining; it is educational as well. The reader gets a peek into the dark side of greed and corruption with American Indians as the not-so-helpless victims.

I've always been interested in history (including the Civil War), not the dry kind that puts you to sleep in the classroom, but the kind that keeps you riveted because the characters ride off the page shooting and shouting..

Jack Gaston, the main, real-life character of War Bonnet is in his third year at Harvard University when the Civil War starts. His closest friend and blood brother arrives with bad news. Jack's father has been murdered, and the Creek Tribal Council has elected Jack as a chief in the House of Warriors. Half of the Creek nation has decided to join the Confederacy in the War Between the States, and Jack is to become a Captain in the Southern Army.

Not only does Jack go to war but he falls in love with a half Apache nurse tending to the Creek people and warriors wounded in battles. War Bonnet helps reveal a little-known part of the Civil War where American Indians sided with the Confederacy because of the way the tribes had been treated by corrupt Union politicians and bureaucrats full of false promises. The Indian leaders are tired of being lied to and cheated. The Confederacy has promised to treat them as equals and with respect.

The Creek nation divides between the South and the North. Near the end of the Civil War, Jack is called before the Principal Chief of the tribes that sided with the North.

"All of our destinies may be in the dust, unless we do something now," Micco Hutke said in the same soothing voice he had used earlier. "To heal our wounds and bring us together as one people is something we must strive to achieve, and we give you our thanks for offering your hand in peace. But are we to become a Nation without a nation, like the poor Sac and Fox? The (northern) government tells us that even though we remained loyal, we are now `renegades' and all of our treaties must be rewritten."

I spent thirty years as a teacher in the public schools teaching English literature, and if we are to continue to be a great nation, at least the kind of nation many of us will be proud of, we have to know about the darker chapters in our history. The Confederate War Bonnet is more than a story about the trials and tribulations of war and love. War Bonnet delves into the war between the forces of evil and good.

To find out if good prevails, I recommend that you buy and read The Confederate War Bonnet. If you are a student of the Civil war and the American west, this is a novel that will not disappoint.. Jack Shakely is a fourth-generation Oklahoman of Creek descent. In The Confederate War Bonnet, Shakely has done a service to two nations.

Any time I read a book written by a first-time author, I worry that no matter how interesting the subject matter may be, the writing style will be so amateurish that it will turn me off immediately. I must say, right out of the box Jack Shakely has an excellent writing style--his words flow smoothly and he provides a wealth of detail, from clothing to scenery, from historical information to cultural events.

One word of warning to the prospective reader--although this is a book about the Civil War, it is not a war story. Shakely focuses on the people behind the scenes, not on the battles. I'm an action junkie, so I was a little disappointed that the book didn't have more battle scenes, but it was otherwise extremely entertaining.

The main character, Jack Gaston, is a half-breed Creek Indian who was educated at Harvard. As the War Between the States heats up, Gaston decides to go back home to fight with his tribe. Even though he has acclimated himself to a Northern school, and even though he does not believe in slavery, he becomes a Confederate soldier. The Federal government had committed so many horrible wrongs to the various Indian tribes that there was no way they could fight for the Union. Unable to stay neutral, and following the old adage "The enemy of my enemy is my friend", the Creeks wound up as part of the Confederacy.

When Jack Gaston travels west to return home, we are treated to an aspect of the Civil war that has received relatively little attention: the role of Indian tribes (some of whom served with the Union forces, by the way), and the toll the War took on the "civilians" who wanted nothing more than to be left alone by both sides.

I've been interested in Native American culture ever since I first heard the song "Trail of Tears" by Eric Johnson, and I'm a huge fan of stories from the Wild West era, so this book was right up my alley. The Confederate War Bonnet is a novel that is interesting and entertaining, a work of historical fiction with much basis in fact. Jack Shakely does an excellent job of transporting the reader back in time and placing him or her smack dab in the middle of life during the Civil War.

The Prologue of Jack Shakely's The Confederate War Bonnet poses an intriguing question about an elaborate Pawnee war bonnet donated by the Ford Foundation to the University of Oklahoma. Why, in its intricate beadwork, should there be the repeated motif of the Confederate flag? Was it a hoax, or a joke, or a political statement?
Why indeed? That war bonnet, now in the Smithsonian Institution, was not a hoax. It is real, and mentioning it at the outset of the book brilliantly and concisely illuminated to me how I, despite being a reasonably educated person and not unfamiliar with the Civil War, knew nothing at all about the war's effects on American Indians.
The author, a fourth-generation Oklahoman of Creek descent, is a former journalist whose family owned newspapers in four small Oklahoman towns. His novel is an expertly fictionalized account of the plight, and the fate, of a number of Indian tribes during the unpleasantess between the states. The average person might expect that the Indians would not come to the defense of the Union, which after all had forced most of them off their ancestral lands and relegated them to strange lands, breaking treaty after treaty and dealing with them shabbily at best. And that would be true, for many Indians. But others did indeed cleave to the Union, and this difference often divided individual tribes. Unfortunately, many of those tribes were at odds with other tribes in the first place. The Civil War only served to subdivide them even further.
It was a very complex situation, and beyond the scope of this review to explain. Suffice it to say that the general reader will gain an appreciation of the complexity, sadness, and eventual glimmers of hope that emerged from this national disaster. The student of history will find a good deal more.
All readers will enjoy the highly readable narrative the author has laid over the historical record--the book is worth reading simply as a tale of the American west. Long term, however, it adds to our understanding of who we are as Americans, and what we have done and failed to do as a nation. To that end, readers will appreciate the author's note at the end: all but a couple of the characters in the story are real. The battles and so forth are described as accurately as can be known.
That war bonnet figures into the story, beginning, middle, and end. I hope I visit the Smithsonian some day and see it, or stumble across a photograph. It will inevitably recall a flood of impressions made by The Confederate War Bonnet. How many books can you say that about?

Jack Shakely makes history come alive. This historical novel is full of vivid detail and marvelous characters. I was stunned by the perspective of the Indian's role in the civil war. Anyone interested in Oklahoma or America would thoroughly enjoy reading this thought-provoking book!

This tale of the Civil War, as it was fought in the Oklahoma Indian Territory, where it drew in and divided the native peoples who had been exiled there from the eastern parts of the U.S. as a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 (pushed through Congress by then President Andrew Jackson), is well crafted and professional in the telling. It's also especially rich with detail of the era and peoples of the region, though it's not entirely compelling nor as fully realized in its characters as one might hope.

The story meanders at times, covering a series of episodic events without apparent organic unity, while spending a great deal of its time on the trivia of daily life. This hurts the narrative engine though it presumably reflects the author's aim of recreating actual events rather than producing a tauter, and less real, piece of fiction that is merely set in an historic period. Given the book's apparent purpose, the looser, more episodic approach does its job.

The narrative style, though, sometimes drifts out of its time to give us events and personalities as viewed from our present era, thereby sapping some of the immediacy of the events portrayed and, while the details of the lives of these people mostly ring true, the characters don't fully engage us, often seeming too good (or too bad) and overly stereotypical by turns. I was a little surprised, as well, to note the apparent absence of slavery in the Territory since the Creek, before the Civil War, were well known to have adopted the white system of chattel slavery. This probably contributed as much to the alliance of some of them with the South as any other factor. Given that slavery was a proximate cause of the Civil War and that it played a major role in the conflicts among the tribes in Indian Territory in the pre-Civil War years (e.g., between the Creek and the Seminole), it seems a glaring, and perhaps overly politically correct, omission.

The book's hero, half-Creek Harvard man Jack Gaston, is conveniently opposed to slavery and there is no evidence of that institution in the Territory when he returns, despite the Creek participation in that "peculiar institution." Nevertheless, the story of Gaston's return to his home and country, and his efforts on behalf of the Confederacy and those of his people who have aligned themselves with the Rebels, is well told. I especially liked the way Shakely does his dialogue and handles his chapters, always knowing just where to cut for the shift to the next phase of the narrative. The end did seem a bit rushed and I was disappointed Shakely didn't make more of the crooked Indian agent and the corrupt officials in Washington, when the war finally winds down, but I was delighted to see how the five "civilized tribes" may have actually lived in a hybrid culture that was as much "white" as Indian by the time of the War between the States, roughly 30 years after the exile of these tribes to lands beyond the Mississippi.

I only wished there was a bit more dimension to some of the intrinsically interesting characters including the Pawnee chief and the harsh and unredeemed leader of the "pin Indians", among others. But the book's message that war inevitably destroys those it touches, while enobling little, though itself something of a post-modern perspective (very much a moral of our own time and experience), came through loud and clear. The Confederate War Bonnet proved to be a very credible and intriguing addition to the Western fiction we have about some forgotten Americans who once lived and roamed freely throughout this land.

SWM

Here is out a fresh aspect of a war that everyone probably thinks they already knew about; contravening the notion that just about everything that could be worked into a novel set during the Civil War had been beaten into the ground by writers of popular novels round about the time that Margaret Mitchell received her first royalty check for `Gone With the Wind'.

That particular conflict and the passions that led up to it engaged every part of America - state, territory, settled or wide-open wilderness, not just that little part of it along the eastern seaboard. There was, as a casual reader may be startled to discover, quite a lot of Civil War action happening out west. (The very last battle of it actually took place in Texas, a month after Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House.) "The Confederate War Bonnet" focuses on the war as it was fought in the Indian Territories of Oklahoma, where the Civilized Tribes were as split by the question of slavery and abolition, of old hatreds and regional loyalties as anywhere else during those war years. Curiously, their leadership and people were also tied closely to the white cultural and political establishment. One of the leading characters in "The Confederate War Bonnet" is Jack Gaston; half white and half Creek Indian, a Harvard undergraduate and completely astounded to discover that he has been commissioned as an officer in the Confederate Army and his father, the owner of the only printing press in the Territory has been killed. His best friend, Jim Tom Nokose comes to Boston to bring him home to the Territory, to fight for his people and to take up publishing his father's newspaper.

One of the most curiously satisfying aspects of this novel lies in the description of the ordinary lives of the Gaston family and their friends; melding Indian and white customs. They are literate and cultured, poised between two cultures and fairly comfortable with both. Jim Tom Nokose loves playing the banjo and the songs of Stephen Foster; Jack's younger sister Sarah names the farm animals after European intellectuals and musicians, and wears a beaded buckskin gown to be married in. This is not the society depicted in the B-movie, John Wayne westerns; it is something a little more nuanced, a little more complicated - and a great deal more interesting - than the simple red man versus white man narrative. The personalities are vividly drawn; interesting and quirky people all - and with the benefit of being based upon real and historic people, since some of them might have sounded otherwise rather contrived.

The narrative is slightly marred by the occasional jarringly anachronism; describing the size of a meadow where Jack and his neighbors play an break-neck Indian ball game as being the size of a football field, or morning glories growing like kudzu, when such things would not have been known at all at that point in the 19th century. And the author stepped outside of period now and again, in explaining such matters as railway track gages, 19th century minstrel theater troupes, and the inter-tribal politics of the Indian Territory. Otherwise, it is a very interesting and readable account of a relative backwater of our Civil War.