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    Six-Gun Snow White
    Six-Gun Snow White
    Six-Gun Snow White
    Ebook136 pages1 hour

    Six-Gun Snow White

    By Catherynne M. Valente and Charlie Bowater

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    A New York Times bestselling author offers a brilliant reinvention of one of the best-known fairy tales of all time with Snow White as a gunslinger in the mythical Wild West.

    Forget the dark, enchanted forest. Picture instead a masterfully evoked Old West where you are more likely to find coyotes as the seven dwarves. Insert into this scene a plain-spoken, appealing narrator who relates the history of our heroine’s parents—a Nevada silver baron who forced the Crow people to give up one of their most beautiful daughters, Gun That Sings, in marriage to him. Although her mother’s life ended as hers began, so begins a remarkable tale: equal parts heartbreak and strength. This girl has been born into a world with no place for a half-native, half-white child. After being hidden for years, a very wicked stepmother finally gifts her with the name Snow White, referring to the pale skin she will never have. Filled with fascinating glimpses through the fabled looking glass and a close-up look at hard living in the gritty gun-slinging West, this is an utterly enchanting story…at once familiar and entirely new.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateNov 10, 2015
    ISBN9781481444743
    Author

    Catherynne M. Valente

    Catherynne M. Valente began September’s adventures in installments on the Web; the project won legions of fans and also the CultureGeek Best Web Fiction of the Decade award. She lives with her husband on an island off the coast of Maine. She has written many novels for adults, but this is her children’s book debut.

    Read more from Catherynne M. Valente

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    Reviews for Six-Gun Snow White

    4/5

    219 ratings27 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this. I liked the mythologies of it, both the nods to her Native American heritage and the European fairy tales. I liked that Snow White and her stepmother were so many fairy tale girls, because aren't each of us more than one girl? I also liked how it was made clear that Snow White wasn't accepted by Whites or Native Americans, because she was both and neither. A very cool story. Possibly my #1 for the 2014 Hugos
    • 4/5
      Beautiful and lyrical. What it lacks in plot structure, it makes up for with poetry.
    • 4/5
      This was a fun and creative take on Snow White. I love Valente's writing style, loose and flowing and full of metaphors with a punch. I was of course hoping for more happiness after she left home, but she did get adventures aplenty.Trigger warning for both absent and abusive parenting.
    • 5/5
      My Review: 9 - Couldn't Put It DownSo I was halfway through the Gladstone when my Kindle died and I had no immediate means of recharging. The next book in the pile was Valente's fairy-tale re-telling of Snow White, so I decided I'd read it until my Kindle was charged and then go back to the Gladstone. Except, of course I couldn't stop reading this once I started: I don't know what the appeal is with Snow White as a fairy tale heroine: she features in Bill Willingham's Fables, is the main princess in Once Upon a Time, and there were not just one, but TWO films re-telling that tale last year: Snow White and the Hunstman and Mirror, Mirror. You'd think there'd be nothing new anyone could do with poor Snow, but you'd be wrong. Valente adaptation of the fairy tale to a western is utterly fantastic and strangely and wonderfully fitting and imaginative. Valente even adapts her normally luscious writing style to a very fitting Wild West-esque voice, something I really appreciated, because it better suited the tale she was telling. If I have any quibbles, it's the very end. I just don't know what to make of it, or how I should let it shape the way I view the novella. No matter: it's something I'll be happy to re-read, and something I'll be happy to nominate for a Hugo (next year).
    • 4/5
      This is quite different to Valente's other work in some ways, and very much of a piece with it in others. All good ways, I think. Her talent with words is very much apparent, but in some ways this is moderated a bit from the super-rich, super-intense poetic language in her other work. Every bit of it feels targeted: bang, bang, bang. The narrative voice is, to me, similar to that in Charles Portis' True Grit: how well it compares in general with the rest of that genre, I wouldn't know.For me, this version of the story works surprisingly well. I'm not especially precious about retellings (aside from King Arthur retellings, and only then when I think someone is completely ignoring the cultural background), so I wasn't bothered by the changes, and I loved what Valente did with this. It's both something new and something truer to the "original" story than a lot of other versions I've seen.
    • 4/5
      A half Crow/half white Snow White headed west told in the voice of Old Coyote/Trickster stories. I really enjoyed the way Valente played with the fairy tale and legends.
    • 4/5
      Like everything of Cat Valente's I've read, this is gorgeous. (The physical book is gorgeous, too, I might add. Those endpapers!) The imagery is stunning, and some of the angles on the fairy tale (particularly the business with the deer's heart) are brilliant. It's grim as hell, of course. Fairy tales almost always are, and any serious look at race and gender in the Old West can't be anything else.

      The only thing I wasn't totally satisfied with was the ending. It's a clever use of the glass case to get to what is more or less a happy ending, but it just felt a little too distant for me - there were too many relationships that didn't get any closure at all for there to be any satisfaction in it. The move from first to third person halfway through the book was slightly odd, but it mostly worked for me - the character of the huntsman was delightful to spend time with - but I think it removed too much impact from the ending for it to be perfect.

      So no, it's not perfect. It is, however, damned good.
    • 4/5
      This is probably the most interesting retelling of Snow White I have ever read. It’s almost hard to call it a fantasy. And aren’t most fairy tales fantasy? The fantasy is there, but it’s small. It’s still important to the story. But wow!If you do not know the general basis for Snow White fairy tale, read no further, because that beloved fairy tale will be spoiled. This Snow White takes place in the US during the gold rush period. Gun That Sings is a beautiful Crow woman, who draws the unwanted eye of Mr. H. Mr. H. is a mining magnet. Gold, diamonds, rubies, etc, if it can be mined it can be his. And so can Gun That Sings. Her marriage was something that she never wanted. It was just a way to save her people, and from it a little girl was born. From that a little girl, who became known as Snow White was born. Snow was hidden from society. Mr. H. wanted no one to know of his little half bread. Not even his new wife and her magic mirror.Mrs H. makes it her mission to wash the brown and turn a little girl something she can never be: Snow White. Something is off with Mrs. H, but all Snow has really wanted was a mother, but this mother’s love is rotten to the core. The magic mirror is something of a mystery. It reflects the moon and births children, but is it magic, or is it a figment of imagination? No matter what it is, for sure it is scary.Snow eventually runs away from home. And true to the original story, a killer and a deer heart are soon to follow. A group of ragtag woman creating their own town safe from men and the wrecked desires of the world make up the “dwarves” of this story. The glass coffin is still the same, but does true love’s kiss wake Snow White? I’ll never tell. To find out read the book.While this book is short (153 pages) it packs a big story. The language used may be hard to follow for some. It’s wordy in the best of ways. It uses language in such a way to call it literary YA instead of just YA. There is lots of metaphor, and lots of thought process. It’s a perfect story to practice ACT vocabulary prep because the great words that are rarely read anymore are used in perfect harmony. It’s almost like Shakespeare was reborn and this is his take. You have to take the words and chew on them to taste their full meaning. It no “she ran away” it is “she chases the porcupine”. This aspect makes the wild west setting come to vivid color life.One intriguing thing the author does is change narrators half way through. Until Snow White runs away, she is the narrator telling us the story of the people around her. Telling us her want for love, and learning that love is pain, brown is bad, white is good, and girls have no power. Part three of this book begins “Snow White Stops Speaking - This is where Snow White gets off. Where she stops telling a story about other folk and starts being a story other folk tell.” Then the narrator becomes omnipresent. It’s well done and works so well with the story.I have thoroughly enjoyed this story, and I could find so many things to talk about with a book club, or even a language/english class. I think of being made to study the Scarlet Letter and Death of a Salesman, and want to beg modern teachers to teach this book instead. Please. A fairy tale, not cleaned up by Disney, and modernized in such a way to feel completely at home in the original Brothers Grimm collection.
    • 4/5
      Not sure yet how I feel about the ending, but overall I really enjoyed this. Lyrical, beautiful writing and an excellent retelling.
    • 4/5
      I liked it more than three stars would usually indicate, but it's a very short book and while that is sometimes a great thing, in this case for me, it was too short to create any real emotional connection with the characters or their situations.It's basically elements of the Snow White story placed in a neatly hazy magical realism Old West setting. I'm never sure how to use magical realism as an adjective. Magically realistic? That sounds like Lucky Charms. ANYWAY, there were these great threads that were spot-on in terms of evoking the original fairy tale but with a really unique and creative twist. The whole set-up was terrific. And then it seemed like it was over before I could get into it. The one aspect that I felt somewhat perplexing was the role of the father. He's very absent, very remote, and yet creates this idealistic play world for his daughter. I was never really clear on how those things were intended to go together.Again I notice that I first saw this reviewed in the SLJ Adult Books 4 Teens feature, which is starting to make me wonder why they are thinking these titles are not YA to begin with.
    • 4/5
      I am a huge Valente fan and was excited to read this retelling of Snow White by her. This was a stark, yet well done retelling of Snow White set in the Wild West. I ended up enjoying it.The whole story is set in Nevada in the gold-rush era. Initially Snow is pretty much left to her own devices and pampered by her much absent father. Everything is all good until he remarries and Snow’s new stepmom is determined to wash the sin off Snow and turn her into a real lady. Of course our free-spirited Snow can’t tolerate this and ends up flying off to have adventures of her own.This is a gritty and stark retelling of the Snow White tale and is told in a beautiful yet simple style. Snow comes across as both naive and extremely wise in the ways of man as the story progresses. I loved Snow’s voice and the way the story was told. It was poetic in its own way.Overall I would recommend to those who enjoy fairy tale retellings. This is a unique retelling of Snow White in a Wild West setting. The writing is somewhat poetic in its starkness and is a bit ambiguous at times. I really enjoyed it and thought the way it was written really conveyed Snow’s personality and environment well.
    • 4/5
      A fantastic retelling of Snow White, set in the Old West and with Snow White being strong, gun-toting, whiskey drinking, female. While I'm sure the original story is much darker than the movie counterparts, Six-Gun Snow White carries its own dark aspects with racism and misogyny being very present. Its an incredibly well-written story with a perfect length that keeps every moment impactful and a steady flow.
    • 5/5
      Valente takes the classic fairy tale of Snow White and transports it to the Old West. Snow White, mockingly named by a cruel stepmother for the half-Crow skin that will never be white, leaves her home, her gun Rose Red on her hip, after spending too many years under the hateful gaze of her stepmother and her unsettling mirror. Snow White is a lonely, hard, tough, and bitter young woman who enjoys drinking whiskey and fighting with the men who are foolish enough to try to cop a feel. Eventually she comes upon a village populated by independent women of various ill repute (including the 7 who run it). This story follows the basics of the fairy tale, but there is a very dark and angry addition that comes from the racism, misogyny, and fear that was prevalent in the Old West. The Western dirt, blood, and gold mixes with the stepmother's East coast mud and magic to create a haunting retelling. There are so many beautiful sentences and paragraphs, they need to be read to be believed. Valente writes like she cut out her heart and dripped words on the page.
    • 4/5
      Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente is a re-envisioning of the tale of Snow White. Only there are no medieval knights here. No troop of dwarves and no enchanted forest. Instead there is the wild west and the mining towns and the Crow Indians and the half-breed child that grows into a young woman called Snow White.In this tale of the old west a Nevada Silver baron falls for a beautiful Crow girl by the name of Gun That Sings. But the girl will have nothing to do with him. Using his influence and threats of violence, he forces the Crow to give up the girl and takes her into his home as his bride. Gun That Sings relents to his will but only to protect her people and as she gives birth her life ends. But the world she leaves behind is no place for a half-native, half-white little girl. The child is hidden away in the great home, taught to read some, but mostly left to the servants to raise. She learns to survive and to shoot. Shooting being one of the things she loves best. Alas life must change and for the young child it does when her father re-marries. Her new Stepmother calls the child Snow White and through beatings and verbal abuse, tries to transform her into a young white girl. But the new Stepmother has secrets of her own. Secrets she keeps hidden behind a great cloth. Underneath which is a mirror to another world. Snow White knows that her stepmother will eventually kill her so she runs. With her guns and her horse she sets out. But on heels, pursuing rapidly are the bounty hunters that reach out with her Stepmother's hand.Familiar but creatively original, Six-Gun Snow White is told in small chapters that more readily resemble journal entries than a plotted story. With her guns at her hip, Snow White is easily a match for any man but it is the rejection of her father and her own people that she finds difficult to deal with. She finds solace in the dust of the west and the coyotes that track her. While retelling a well known fairy tale, Six-Gun Snow White also delves into the plight of women in the old west as well as that of the native people. More so even that of a native woman.But mainly it is a really good tale. A story of loss and pain. A tale of survival and the discovery of self-worth. This rendition of Snow White will stay long with you.
    • 4/5
      One of the many things I love about Valente is how she handles fairy tales. A lot of times, the fairy tale tone gets lost in the retelling. Valente takes that tone and makes it thrive with her rich, lyrical writing style. Six-Gun Snow White not only keeps the original fairy tale alive in unique and surprising ways, but weaves it in with the styling of western dime novels and American folklore. Snow White is an great character, able to shoot straighter and drink harder than any man around. She’s sharp and frowning and bitter. She rides hard and lives hard and asks for no grace or kindness from anyone. The novel explores the complex weaving of mother and daughter relationships, with the absence of her biological mother, the cruel, bitter love with nails and beatings of her stepmother, and the hard, honest love of her seven adoptive mother-friends she meets in the woods, each an outcaste and just as stone hard as Snow herself.Six-Gun Snow White is short and a quick read with vignette-like chapters, making the overall plotting sparse as a fairtale would be. My one complaint would be that I wish this was a bit longer, as I’m not entirely satisfied with the ending, which is unexpected and both ambiguous and not. I’m not really sure how I feel about it, as I’m not sure if the final tone actually fits with the overall novel.
    • 4/5
      An interesting take, but kind of just dragged on a bit too long. The final chapter was a nice touch.
    • 5/5
      Astonishingly, achingly good writing in this. One excellent fairy tale reworking.
    • 4/5
      Well, it's Valente....what can I say? I have a few more of her more difficult-to-find works to read and then our reader-author relationship will finally be caught up. *swoon* (The last little chapter REALLY MADE THIS EVEN BETTER)
    • 4/5
      It starts out as a coming of age story with fantastic elements and devolves a bit into episodic stories with nothing in common but the main character. To me, these are Alice in Wonderland rip offs and they bother me. The writing is nice but the plot suffers more as the story nears it's end. I have read one previous book by Valente - the first book in the Fairyland series. It had the exact same problem and I refuse to keep reading the series. I do however have 5-6 more of her books on my reading list, but I think if they all end up like this, I may not finish many more.
    • 3/5
      What a strange book. I've actually never read a western before but this was quite good. I love the idea of a mixed race snow white who's name is actually the opposite of what she is, given to her maliciously instead of with love.

      This story hurts your heart. Snow White's journey is filled with hate and pain. However, you feel a bit detached from it even as she's being sexually assaulted. This is a fairy tail but I felt I could have been more connected. That said, the story was very interesting and a red it quickly without becoming bored.

      It's a sold read but it leaves you wanting a bit more from it.
    • 5/5
      This is a hard review to write. It took me a long time to read the book--which is really just a novella--because every few pages I had to set it aside for Feelings reasons. Valente has so much to say about so many important things, and she says them all so beautifully. Snow White suffers as a minority, as a woman, and as a helpless child, and in each of these roles, perhaps the most painful thing for her is that she is always caught between two worlds, never belonging in either; she is claimed by neither whites nor her mother's Crow family, she is not particularly feminine or interested in men, and her father abandons her first to a series of governesses and later to a literal witch of a stepmother.

      Everything in this world requires a heart in trade. There's no such thing as a good bargain.

      The events of Snow White's life are really the fault of her father. He forces a Crow woman (who despises him) to marry him, and when he learns she is pregnant, he prays, "let this child have hair like hot coal, and lips bright and dark as blood, but oh Lord, if you're listening, skin as white as mine." And of course she isn't born white, so when her father finds a new wife, he shuts Snow White up in the house and claims she is his ward, not his daughter. And then he leaves town for work and never bothers to return.

      You may not know it but the keeping of a large house by one girl is the hardest work going on earth. I heard there's fire in hell but I'll bet the Devil just hands you a bucket and tells you to get moving, this place ain't gonna clean itself.

      Which is when Snow White's stepmother takes over. It is she who re-names Snow White, who is just a child, so cruelly, and who tells her she could (being an Indian) never be mistaken for human, and who later abuses her physically in some truly horrifying ways. But even as the stepmother behaves like a monster, we're given some insight into her tortured past, and when Snow White accuses her of being a witch and performing magic, she says, "Magic is just a word for what's left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill." It's pretty sobering to see, in flashbacks, the similarities between how she was treated and what she's doing to her stepdaughter.

      Your past's a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in a box where it can't hurt anyone.

      When Snow White leaves her father's house, the book switches to third person, and it really opens up and starts to breathe in these pages. All the essential pieces of the classic story are here, but there's also a full life added in, and it all feels real and immediate and honest. The characters' actions--such as the huntsman's giving the stepmother the heart of a deer rather than that of Snow White--have strange, disturbing consequences.

      Listen, girl, I came to tell you that life is stupid. It just pulls the same shit over and over. Sometimes you think you can make it come out different, but you can't. You're in a story and the body writing it is an asshole.

      Toward the end of the book, Snow White finds a community of seven outlaw women and moves in with them, finally fitting in and experiencing a bit of normal life, but she's scarred, and she's sad, and she's done. She's just done with all of it. I love how she interacts with these people who essentially function as the only real family Snow White has ever had.

      You can't kiss a girl into anything.

      I think your enjoyment of this version of Snow White will largely depend on how you feel about the politics of classic fairy tales. If you're not particularly bothered by the typical characterizations of the benevolent father, the evil crone, the innocent beauty, and the handsome prince charming, you may roll your eyes a bit here. I don't know. I crave stories that look at abuse and race and patriarchal values with honesty and compassion for the people involved, so it's hard for me to step back and be objective. And really, why should I be? This is a beautiful novella that touched me emotionally, and I hope more people give it a chance, because it's really something special.

      Also posted at Finding Bliss in Books
    • 4/5
      This short novel (at 167 pages, it's a bit long to be a novella) is Valente in her fairy-tale mode, retelling the Snow White story as a Western. Snow White is the out-of-wedlock daughter of a rich silver-mine owner and a Native American woman-thus, by ancient American usage, definitely not white. Her mother dies soon after Snow's birth, and is later supplanted by an abusive stepmother.Of course Valente makes the story her own. The seven dwarves are seven women who have slipped the bonds of 19th century American womanhood in various ways. The huntsman is a Pinkerton agent, and Snow escapes him not because he takes pity on her, but because she's the better, quicker shot.Besides the well-known story told once again, the pleasures of the book lie in Valente's voicing of the Western idiom:"By now I expect you are shaking your head and tallying up on your fingers the obvious and ungraceful lies of my story...A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know. Its blood which is its history.""Mrs. H called me something new...She named me a thing I could aspire to but never become, the one thing I was not and could never be: Snow White."Valente switches from first to third person partway through:"She needs distance, the generosity of miles. Maybe there's no gone that's far enough, but if there is, she aims to find it.""Snow White does not know it when she crosses over into the Crow Nation. It looks just like the country which is not the Crow Nation. Trees, river, rocks, clouds hunkering down low like they're just as fugitive as she is.""Snow White does what she knows to do. She brings in meat. All day and night blood and gristle. Goes into the forest and kills what will let her kill it."Valente is all about the lush language. You like this sort of writing or you don't, I guess. For me it works perfectly at this length.
    • 2/5
      I LOVED the beginning and middle of this book. The writing was excellent and the story engaging. But the ending was very strange. Didn't seem to fit the rest of the story and was incredibly disappointing. I still feel like I never heard the real ending.
    • 3/5
      Trigger warning for sexual assault, suicide, and abuse.Six-Gun Snow White is a dark, adult fairy tale novella from the masterful Catherynne M. Valente. While I enjoyed Valente’s prose, I ultimately found the book too strange for my taste.Snow White is the daughter of a Nevada silver baron and a Crow woman he forced into marriage with him who dies in childbirth. When her father remarries, the stepmother, a socialite from the East Coast, renames the girl Snow White in reference to the pale skin she doesn’t have.The early chapters are told from Snow White’s perspective, but the narrative switches to third person partway through. I really wish it hadn’t done this. Switching to third person only increased the dreamlike feeling of watching the events unfold but not having a connection to anyone involved. This effect might have been what Valente was going for, but I think it contributed to my dissatisfaction with the novella.I liked the voice of the narration a lot. Valente’s using an “old timey West” feel to relate her retold fairy tale. While I did like the voice, I wonder if it was actually accurate to Snow White’s character. Snow White was the daughter of a rich white man and brought up with governesses. Would she really have a country dialect?A lot of the book is about Snow White being mixed race. She endures awful abuse at the hands of her stepmother, who’s trying to make her into a white woman. Example – she makes Snow White bath in freezing cold milk and hold ice cubes inside her bodily crevices. Snow White faces racism from a lot of different quarters, and it definitely plays into a scene where a man tries to rape her. When reading a book by a white author about a protagonist of another race, I try to find reviews by people of that race. The two reviews I found by Native American women had less than positive things to say about this facet of the book.Additionally, you don’t see much of the Crow people or Native American culture. In part, I think this may be because all characters outside of Snow White are resolutely two dimensional. Possibly this was another conscious choice on Valente’s part, but it’s another decision that didn’t work for me.Maybe it was the experimental and disjointed nature of Six-Gun Snow White that left me cold. The ending in particular was bizarre. For whatever reason, I just didn’t like this book as much as everyone else seems to.As a positive, Six-Gun Snow White includes illustrations from Charlie Bowater, which is actually how I heard about the book in the first place. The illustrations where black and white digital paintings with a soft, dreamlike feel.I have no idea if I would recommend Six-Gun Snow White. I think you’re appreciation for it will depend on you’re tolerance for experimental literature. I might get more out of it if I read it a second time to analyze for themes, but it’s too dark for me to want to go through it again.Originally posted on The Illustrated Page.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Yes, yes, another men-are-evil-or-ignorant book. Eugh. No nuance.
    • 4/5
      An interesting and odd mix of western and fairy tale. Snow White retold set in the west. Snow White has a white father and a native American mother. Her step-mother call her Snow White to mock her for not being able to have white skin. Beautiful magical descriptions and imagery.
    • 5/5
      Oh, oh, oh. I, seriously, never know what to say about Cat's book. It's like all my million words fall out of my head and I just want to flap my arms at people and tell them to go read it. To start now, to stop looking at me and wasting the air on waiting for me to understand and just start reading the first two or three chapters already. Because that is what will tell you if you are one of her reader's or not.

      I love everything Cat's written, never regret my mailbox subscription to her monthly short stories, or every post on her her journal, and this new publication is no exception.

      This is gorgeous, magical, and bloody-sharp all at once. The words are luscious and bite to the bone in spinning turns, at the chime of a hand crank in saloon room. I love the background given to 'Snow White,' to her mother, her father, her brother. I love the descriptions of growing up, and the descriptions about what is to become a woman and a wife and a mother. What it costs. The price you pay. The involvements of magic, and what that costs, what price that takes.

      I love the pinkerton detective as "the huntsman" and what that all means in the end for her brother. How they are all linked. How the challenges of Snow White facing her mother take place at that door, and with all those other women. The power of repetition. I, even, sort of loved the jaded dozy, just going forward ending. There are so many quotes in so many chapters that I highlighted in this novel on my kindle, but always remember ---


      You can't kiss a girl into anything.

    Book preview

    Six-Gun Snow White - Catherynne M. Valente

    PART I

    HOW SNOW WHITE GOT HER CUNNING

    THE CREATION OF SNOW WHITE

    I accept with equanimity that you will not credit me when I tell you Mr. H married a Crow woman and had a baby with her round about the time he struck his fortune in the good blue, which is how folk used to designate Nevada silver. It don’t trouble me none if any soul calls me a liar.

    The biography of Mr. H is well known: He had one wife and one son and that was the beginning and the end of his capacity for love, excepting of course the copper lode in Peru, gold prospects in the Dakota Territories, the Idaho opal mine, and other pursuits I cannot tell you about as they are beyond my ken. Most everyone grants he was a kingly fellow, else the blue would not have showed itself to him. That is a wholly peculiar way of thinking, but it is very common.

    This is the truth of it:

    Flush and jangle with silver and possessed of a powerful tooth for both spending and procuring more of whatever glittered under the ground, Mr. H traveled to the Montana Territory on a horse so new and fine, her tail squeaked. He disliked to travel in company, being a secretive man by nature. Mr. H had a witch’s own knack for sniffing out what the earth had to give up. The notion of a sapphire rush brewing in the Beartooth Range pricked up the north of that Comstock-compass stuck in his heart. All the way out in San Francisco he felt the rumble of the shine. However, upon his arrival in Billings and establishment at the Bear Gulch Hotel, the whiskeytalk leaned another way: black diamonds. That is how coal miners appellate their livelihood. In my experience, folk find it nigh on impossible to call a thing what it is.

    It never mattered much to Mr. H whether silver or sapphires or coal or copper weighed his pockets just so long as he never walked empty. He made his arrangements to accompany a pair of Cornishmen into the range the next morning. He strode out into the bone-cracking cold to survey the town, though Billings in those days could barely be called more than a camp. Horseshit outnumbered honest men by a margin.

    Mr. H encountered the woman who would be his first wife by chance alone. She turned up like an ace of spades in the general store, trading elk meat for cotton cloth and buttons. Her brother, who had shot the beast, escorted her. But the girl did the bargaining. She had good English and did not like the owner of the general store.

    The terrible covetous heart of Mr. H immediately conceived a starvation for the girl not lesser in might than his thirst for sapphires or gold. In the lamplight her hair had the very color of coal, plaited in two long braids and swept up at the brow into what I have heard called a pompadour. Her dark mouth was a cut garnet, her skin rich copper, her eyes black diamonds for true. She looked over her shoulder at him and her body hardened to run if such became necessary. Mr. H took this slight stiffening as a sign that his feeling was returned. He saw no reason any person should fear him, being well dressed and pleasant enough in his features. He had loved women already in his time, though never married, all of them of good though not old family. Square-shouldered, sunburned freckles and kisses like milk and hair brushed a hundred times before bed. He savored a rich seam of shame over his lust for the Crow woman, and this shame made him only more needful.

    Mr. H purposed himself to have her. He inquired after her name, her family, how often she visited the town to trade, where she and hers might make their camp. The Beartooth coal ran thick and deep, but he did his business by rote. Mr. H had sung his song many times. It sang itself. His true occupation was now the striking of the Crow woman, whose name was Gun That Sings. At first, his imagination wakened only to the possibility of bedding her. He saw no reason this should not be possible and right quick. Silver speaks louder than sin. But when Gun That Sings returned to town with her relations and Mr. H had opportunity to clap eyes on her again, he knew he could not be satisfied except to own her entirely. A man don’t rent a silver mine. He buys it right out.

    He attired himself in a fine new suit sent by coach from San Francisco along with jewelry, gowns, and other items indicating his affection, for he was prepared to make her a civilized woman. He would put silk on her body and emerald combs in her hair. He would teach her to read Shakespeare and encourage her to play out the part of wild Titania in his parlor at home, naked save for a belt of violets. He would instruct her in the saying of the Lord’s Prayer and the keeping of the Sabbath; he would deliver to heaven a sterling modest maid. The anticipation of transforming her inspired a pleasure so sharp that Mr. H necessitated an entire afternoon to recover from it.

    When Mr. H deemed the great moment of his matrimonials to have drawn close, he rode out on his combed and curried horse across the Bighorn River to the village of Gun That Sings’s people. Mr. H had often purchased meat and horses from Indians at what he considered a fair price and foresaw no trouble. The card-men at the Bear Gulch Hotel had informed him that the Crow allow their women to rule like heathen Cleopatras, and so Mr. H addressed himself to an old and august lady he spied leading a horse to pasture, requesting the presence of his bride-to-be.

    When Gun That Sings was produced, Mr. H suffered some disappointment. She would not look at him, but kept her eyes fixed on the dirt. Her braids caught the winter light and seemed now not only as rich as coal but veined with liquid silver. Mr. H felt a powerful need. He behaved himself as though to a white woman. He presented his prospects to the maiden’s mother, his silver mine, his hopes for Dakota, his colleagues in Sacramento, his friends in Washington. As he described himself, the resolve of Mr. H hardened along with his impression of his own endowments, and he lost any doubt that he would be married before the night. Only an addled woman would despise the ring of such an excellent example of frontiersman quality.

    I do not know what Gun That Sings said to him. If I had my rather, I would put words in her like bullets. I know she spurned him. That I do know.

    Mr. H recovered his pride on the quick. Sometimes a man finds it necessary to work a claim for a space before it gives up the blue. He returned to his rooms to collect the bride gifts that would ensure her. Mr. H chose a gown like the sun to represent him. It sported a high bustle as was the fashion in the city, with sharp pleating at the skirt-hem and a neckline I would not wear if it were stitched in paper money. But the color did not recall the wholesome sun of spring. Its model was instead the terrible inferno of the sun itself, hanging in black space like a Utah ruby, erupting into eternity, pocked with lava.

    Once again, Mr. H rode out past the river and presented the baleful dress to Gun That Sings. She looked on it and began to shake in her shoes. Mr. H pressed the gown upon her, but she wept bitterly into the cloth and said to her mother: These are white woman’s clothes. Put them in the river; I will burn up inside them.

    Mr. H brought next a gown like the moon. This one presented a wasp waist and high lace collar. So much fabric in that skirt, it bent a back to lift it over its skeleton hoop of leather and wire. The shimmer of it took after the moon itself, hard and without poetry, stuck in the orbit of the thoughtless earth like a California pearl. Mr. H laid the dress across the flank of his horse like a stolen girl and forded the Bighorn to lay it out for Gun That Sings. She trembled something fearful and tore the brocade wrestling herself free. She said to her mother: "These are clothes for a

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