My mother gave me this book, the content was most unexpected!
I'm a big fan of Cormac McCarthy, so it is with the highest regard when i say it is very similar to some of his work, most notably Blood Meridian, though the prose here, while brilliantly situated in the tumult of 19th century America, is easier to follow.
There is a sumptuous blend of the beautiful and the brutal, tenderness and love, savagery and hate, often in the same passage, occasionally in the same sentence. Poetic and philosophical writing.
There is a lot packed into a short work, a tale spanning the continent and through the 'Indian' and civil wars, peace, and the aftermath of both in 300 pages.
There is a very surprising and original (as far as i know!) love story that threads through the book, it leads to moments of great compassion and great hilarity!
First rate reading, a few quotes below - like the book not for the faint heated!
"Guess were just another family heading somewhere. it's a kinda of happiness. Then we pass into a district of bigger farms and fences going away over a turmoil of hills. Fences with the queer aspect of white grave markers. Sure enough coming down by a stately line of trees we see hanging there by the roadside about thirty blacks. Two girls among them. We ride past while the swollen faces look down on us. Every corpse has a note pinned to it and the note says Free. Someone wrote that in charcoal."
"Seeems like it were all the devil that day. Kill them all. Leave nothing alive. Everything was killed. Nothing left to tell the tale. Four hundred and seventy. And when the men were done killing they started to cut. They cut out the cunts of the women and stretched them over their hats. They took the little ball sacks of the boys to be dried into baccy pouches...Drenched in a slaughterhouse of glory. Never heard such strange laughter...Delight and life perfected"