The Dying Grass

Name: The Dying Grass
Rating: 4 (171 reviews)

by William T. Vollmann Book 5 in the Seven Dreams series.

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3.9(171)

In 1877, General Oliver Otis Howard is ordered to force non-treaty Nez Perce communities from their homelands onto a reduced reservation. When the crisis becomes war, families and fighters led by figures including Chief Joseph and Looking Glass begin a long retreat from northeast Oregon through Idaho, Yellowstone and Montana, hoping eventually to reach safety across the Canadian border.

Howard serves as the novel’s conflicted centre: a Union veteran, Christian reformer and former head of the Freedmen’s Bureau who now directs a campaign of dispossession. Vollmann follows military councils, frightened civilians, exhausted soldiers and divided Nez Perce leaders as pursuit becomes attrition. The large, polyphonic narrative rejects a single heroic interpretation and instead examines how treaties, bureaucracy, racial doctrine and personal conviction combined to make conquest appear inevitable to those carrying it out.