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A review by exurbanis
The Homesman by Glendon Swarthout
5.0
Sleeper hit of my reading year. Who would have expected my #1 book to be a western?
Winner of the Spur Award (long novel) from the Western Writers of America and the Western Heritage Association’s Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, making it indisputably the best western novel of 1988.
After 4 women, including her good friend Theoline Belknap, go insane in the Oklahoma Territory in the 1850s, Mary Bee Cuddy volunteers to take them back to family and/or asylums in Iowa. Realizing she can’t do it alone, she recruits claim jumper George Briggs whom she rescues from a lynching.
They face Indians, prejudice from outgoing wagon trains, and a vicious ice storm. Briggs knows how to handle the mules & the wagon repairs better than she does. Eventually as they near Iowa, Cuddy proposes to Briggs who refuses her, then comes to him in the night, naked. By the morning, she has hanged herself. Briggs continues on because there is $300 in it for him but once he reaches his destination, he finds that the bank on which the $50 notes are drawn is bankrupt.
Winner of the Spur Award (long novel) from the Western Writers of America and the Western Heritage Association’s Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, making it indisputably the best western novel of 1988.
After 4 women, including her good friend Theoline Belknap, go insane in the Oklahoma Territory in the 1850s, Mary Bee Cuddy volunteers to take them back to family and/or asylums in Iowa. Realizing she can’t do it alone, she recruits claim jumper George Briggs whom she rescues from a lynching.
They face Indians, prejudice from outgoing wagon trains, and a vicious ice storm. Briggs knows how to handle the mules & the wagon repairs better than she does. Eventually as they near Iowa, Cuddy proposes to Briggs who refuses her, then comes to him in the night, naked. By the morning, she has hanged herself. Briggs continues on because there is $300 in it for him but once he reaches his destination, he finds that the bank on which the $50 notes are drawn is bankrupt.