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SUMMER READING CORNER

Mustang Fever, by Stephen B. Gladish

Order: www.kobocapublishing.com
www.amazon.com

Excerpts from an interview with Mustang Fever author Stephen B. Gladish (www.stephenbgladish.com), which can be found in its entirety in the back of Mustang Fever.

Q: While we’ve followed Chance and Luke through two books—Moonlight, Missiles and Moana and now Mustang Fever—Cheyenne is the most mysterious character you’ve created thus far. She’s a pre-feminist proponent of social power, but she conveys it in a natural, heartfelt way. Can you talk about the inspiration for Cheyenne?

A: Many of Cheyenne’s character traits of courage, loyalty, devotion to family, and ability to reach out with love come from Beautiful Wife Betsy. Cheyenne’s innocence, her spirituality, her physical toughness, her creativity, her ability to naturally evolve into a teacher and a leader all come from Beautiful Betsy as well.
Primarily, however, Cheyenne’s childhood stories, images, and memories came quite directly from my oldest daughter, Dawn, whose name reflects that of a Native American. She was an avid listener, and delighted in bedtime stories of nature, and animals, heroes and heroines, storing them away in her memory. As a young girl, and teenager, Dawn adored horses, and had drawings all over her bedroom walls, and on her stationery.

I got to know many Native American students personally, because of Northern Arizona University’s proximity and desire to reach out and serve those students on the surrounding Indian Reservations—the huge Navajo Reservation, the Hopi, Hualapai, Kaibab Paiute, Ute, Fort Apache, Southern Moapa Paiute, the Winnemucca Indian Colony, the Northern Paiute in Utah…

Cheyenne Autumn also sprang from the examples and models of two or three tall, black-haired Native American college girls with exceptional names and a desire for privacy, despite their unusual determination to become their own person. For that very reason, they made a vivid impression over the years.
Both Dawn and Cheyenne naturally admired the exceptional combination of both strength and beauty in horses, fiercely identifying with the horse and the horse totem. The wilder the horses, the better. They loved hearing about the courage and the intelligence of mares and fillies. They had keen intelligence and pursued academic excellence. They both determined to make a mark in the world.

Inspirations for Cheyenne also come from Native American heroines, beginning with Sarah Winnemucca of Nevada, continuing with other female heroines of the Cherokee Nation, such as Chief Wilma P. Mankiller and Nancy (Nan’yehi) Ward, and concluding with the Native American Saint known as Lily of the Mohawk tribe, Kateri Tekakwitha. We cannot leave out Sacagawea, the Shoshone guide who helped Lewis and Clark discover the Golden West.

But Sarah Winnnemucca captured both Cheyenne’s and my heart. One hundred years before most women found their voices, she once cried out, “For shame! For shame! You dare to cry out Liberty, when you hold us in places against our will, driving us from place to place as if we were beasts!” Another time, she said, “I would place all the Indians of Nevada on ships in our harbor, take them to New York and land them there as immigrants, that they might be received with open arms.” Later she cast eloquent hope: “And by-and-by the dark children grew into a large nation; we believe it is the one we belong to, and that the nation that sprung from the white children will sometime send someone to meet us and heal all the old trouble.”

• Mustang Fever Lead
• Excerpt from Chapter One
• To order Moonlight, Missiles & Moana