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The Horse Tamers Challenge by Gordan Aalborg
| The Horse Tamer’s Challenge is a romance set in the old west written by Gordon Aalborg. The story takes place on the great plains of North America during the time when the United States was fighting the Sioux War. The male protagonist in this romance is Luc L’Hirondelle a metis man who knows the frontier and the tribes that dwell in it. Metis is a French term for someone who has both European and American Indian ancestry. The female protagonist is Rebecca Bennett, a woman from St. Louis who is searching for her long lost sister Amy. Rebecca harbors fears of the frontier dating back to the time as a child when her father tried move the family west in an effort to claim a gold mine he had discovered. That trip had ended in disaster when American Indians raided their caravan and captured Amy Bennett and partially scalped her father. She and her mother had retreated home where they were at times visited by her father. However now he mother is dead and her father convinced her to go out west searching for Amy. The romance between these two seems impossible for t a couple of reasons. First Luc is partially Indian and Rebecca hates all aspects of American Indians because of what they did to her sister. Luc however comes manipulates things so that she finds out that neither side is right when it comes to American Indian-European relations. In part I think the author may err slightly to the side of the American Indians but overall in his description of people along the border he is fairly accurate. He also makes Luc the perfect combinations of savage and sophisticate so as to give Rebecca something to connect with. The second reason why the romance seems impossible is because of the racism which dominated that period. It was understood if frowned upon that certain European men would be forced to marry American Indian women because of the shortage of European women on the frontier. However the reverse was completely unacceptable as Europeans considered themselves better than the American Indians. Of course as is often the case in such a discriminatory situation a person was considered American Indian if they had any ancestor who had the blood in them while only ’pure’ Europeans were considered European. I find this silly as it influences our own perceptions of race even today that people are considered in the minority even if most of their ancestry is with the majority. In this story Rebecca overcomes her societies racism, can we? | |||
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