Book Review: The Great Western Divide by John Spivey - Page 2

John has some stories he wants to tell us, and some of them are stories about the dark outside of the circle of light he has created. But his stories about the dark aren't meant to scare us away from its inky blackness; they are to help us penetrate the darkness lying inside of us that dictates our behaviour.

He has histories to tell us that span over 150 years of life in the Great Western Divide where his family settled in the 1800's. Some of them are personal, some are of the land, and some are of people who lived out their lives here a century before most of us were born. Each one of the stories is designed as an example for the point he is making at the time.

We listen as he tells us of the exploration, development, and rape of the land surrounding the southern Sierra Nevada. Years of government policy that gradually leached the water out of the ground by diverting and damming rivers and draining marshland, combined with the practice of growing only oranges, has turned a once lush land arid.

Loggers and settlers seeing the Giant Sequoias dreamed of money and ravaged the forests. But unlike her redwood cousin, she was so brittle that the act of felling her splintered the wood so badly she was only good for fence posts.

As the environment around them changed, so did the people. Not just the native population was affected by the changes, although they were the first to vanish, so too did the white population with the replacement of personal farms with agribusiness. But before that happened the first peoples as always were the first affected. John offers Hale Tharp's first hand observation of what happened and as an example of what it must be like to be intimately connected to the land you live in.

By the spring of 1862, quite a number of whites had settled in the Three Rivers area…the Indians has contracted contagious diseases from the whites…and they died off by the hundreds. I helped to buy twenty-seven in one day…Chief Chappo …came to see me and asked me to try to stop the whites from coming…When I said it was impossible, they all sat down and cried…their people loved this country, did not want to leave it, and knew not where to go…I think that by the summer of 1863 the Indians had left the district…I don't know what has become of them now. John Spivey, The Great Western Divide, Crows Cry Press, 2006, p.120-121

Article Author: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of the forthcoming book What Will Happen In Eragon IV? and has had his work published in print and on line all over the world. The not so long-haired Canadian iconoclast writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees …

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