Book Review: Heirs of Montana Series

The Heirs of Montana series by Tracie Peterson is reading that I highly recommend. Reading these books, it makes me hopeful for the future of those with "disabilities" today, as a big theme in these books is how perspectives and thoughts change through generations. In the first book in the series "Land of my Heart" it's 1864 Missouri and the Civil War is raging. When soldiers get into a skirmish in the streets, Ephraim Chadwick, a shopkeeper, is caught in the crossfire and killed. His distraught wife, brought up in a wealthy southern family, blames his death on the Yankees, while his daughter, Dianne, a mere sixteen years old, is determined to have the family move away from the war-especially to protect her two older twin brothers-who she knows will probably be approached to enlist any day, and no one in her family wants anything to do with the war! Locating an uncle living in Montana, Dianne arranges for the family to travel west on a wagon train to meet up with him. Joining up with a wagon train heading to Virginia City, Montana, Dianne meets a myriad of characters. Despite the fact that her mother is a hardened racist, she befriends Faith, a freed black slave. I get a huge kick out of Faith explaining how she learned to read and write as a child. Although it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, her masters, believing that blacks lacked the intelligence to learn anything, sent Faith to sit at the feet of their own children while they had their lessons-and the black slave girl learned right along with her master's children! When Dianne's mother finds out that her daughter has befriended a black woman, she's furious. She views blacks as inferior, good only as footstools for whites, and she views her family as above associating with blacks. But that's not the worst of it. Finally arriving in Virginia City, Montana, Susannah Chadwick, expecting a baby and depressed due to the deaths of her two younger daughters on the trail, she's now dependent on laudanum (very addictive and highly toxic if taken in large doses). Her children repeatedly attempt to send for their mother's brother, who they've been told to live in the area, but fail to hear from him. Until one day he arrives, but regrets to tell them that he can't take them in...for a reason that he seems to be hiding from his sister, now confined to bed and in a paranoid, drunken state due to the laudanum. He does, however, finally find a house for his family to live. When they arrive at the new house, his wife is cleaning it...and suddenly everything makes sense. Why he didn't want his own sister and her children living with him. He knows how prejudiced she is...and his wife is a Native American. He knows that his sister would never agree to live under the same roof as a Native American. His sister screams at him for abandoning his own family for a "heathen squaw"-right in front of the wife, as if she wasn't in the room. Susannah continues to decline until she is finally truly out of her mind, and runs out of the house one day in the middle of a blizzard. She's found frozen to death later, and Dianne and her brothers must learn to cope on their own. The entire four-book series is amazing. Racist as though her mother was, Dianne is open minded and accepting. She eventually marries her assistant wagon train boss, and they run a successful ranch together, where they work and live along blacks (including Faith, her husband Malachi, and their children) and native Americans (including her aunt Koko, and her children Jamie and Susannah.) Tracie Peterson obviously did her research-these books are a sobering picture of how blacks and Native Americans once were viewed (and still are viewed unfortunately by some.) On the wagon train, as a matter of fact, the trail boss told everyone "if an Injun comes up to you give them something and they'll go away-they're like children their entire lives." However, thoughts and perspectives do change through time and generations, and I think that's what the author was trying to get across-with the prejudiced, racist mother and her accepting daughter who views blacks and Native Americans as her equals. I hope that one day, we'll be seeing the same in the way individuals with disabilities are looked at.