“The Removes is a stunning, vivid portrayal of captivity and freedom, and wars waged on the landscapes and peoples of the American frontier. Soli’s writing is so visceral and evocative one feels transported to that moment when history is forged. At once intimate and sweeping, unflinching and compassionate, The Removes is a magnificent read.”
— Vaddey Ratner, PEN/Hemingway Finalist, Author of In the Shadow of the Banyan
As the first wave of pioneers travel westward to settle the American frontier, two women discover their inner strength when their lives are irrevocably changed by the hardship of the wild west in The Removes, a historical novel from New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Tatjana Soli.
Spanning the years of the first great settlement of the west, The Removes tells the intertwining stories of fifteen-year-old Anne Cummins, frontierswoman Libbie Custer, and Libbie’s husband, the Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer. When Anne survives a surprise attack on her family’s homestead, she is thrust into a difficult life she never anticipated―living among the Cheyenne as both a captive and, eventually, a member of the tribe. Libbie, too, is thrown into a brutal, unexpected life when she marries Custer. They move out to the territories with the U.S. Army, where Libbie is challenged daily and her worldview expanded: the pampered daughter of a small-town judge, she transforms into a daring camp follower. But when what Anne and Libbie have come to know―self-reliance, freedom, danger―is suddenly altered through tragedy and loss, they realize how indelibly shaped they are by life on the treacherous, extraordinary American plains.
With taut, suspenseful writing, Tatjana Soli tells the exhilarating stories of Libbie and Anne, who have grown like weeds into women unwilling to be restrained by the strictures governing nineteenth-century society. The Removes is a powerful, transporting novel about the addictive intensity and freedom of the American frontier.
Praise
“Reads like a complex, historical, moving painting with gorgeous brushstrokes for sentences and paragraphs.”
— Chautauqua Prize Committee
True West names The Removes Best Fiction of 2018:
“The Removes is a bold, adventuresome novel of the post-Civil War Western Indian Wars. Told through the experiences of two female antagonists, George Armstrong Custer’s wife, Libbie Custer, and Cheyenne Indian abduction victim 15-year-old Kansas pioneer girl Anne Cummins, the dynamic and original narrative will enthrall readers.”
“Manifest Destiny meets our feminist moment as Soli conjures the layered lives of two woman.”
―O Magazine
“… vividly evokes the genocidal violence visited on Native Americans.”
—The New Yorker
“Thrilling.”
―POPSUGAR
“The novel has an agile energy to it, a forward momentum that propels us, along with its men and women. Soli is an impeccable storyteller…There is deep empathy in The Removes.”
—Santa Fe New Mexican
“[Soli] does not shy away from the gruesome historical details, and there are times that one can almost smell the blood in the prairie dust . . . Vivid and unsettling, this book is an engaging read”
— The Historical Novel Society
“Soli brings a new twist to the oft-told love story of Libbie and George Armstrong Custer . . . The Removes is more than a Custer tale”
— The Denver Post
“Soli honours the history she uses to tell her tale by the care she takes with her storytelling . . . She does not shy away from violence, but nor does she revel in it; most notably . . . the reader’s imagination has been well-schooled by the author’s art: the horror is more vivid for being created in the mind’s eye”
—The Economist
“Soli provides not only a fascinating story, but also clues to understand the battle that seems so inexplicable from our 21st-century
perspectives, along with the men and women affected by it.”
—Bookreporter
“Soli honours the history she uses to tell her tale by the care she takes with her storytelling, and by the way she laces through the book documents and photographs from the era. She does not shy away from violence, but nor does she revel in it; most notably, the climactic battle is barely described. But by that point the reader’s imagination has been well-schooled by the author’s art: the horror is more vivid for being created in the mind’s eye.”
—The Economist
“Soli’s novel is both gut-wrenchingly violent and heart-wrenching, but above all, it’s an unforgettable journey of loss and hope.”
— BookPage
“Finely crafted, this moving novel viscerally depicts the brutality of the Westward Expansion and the universal quest for freedom, while reminding readers of the human cost of greed.”
—Library Journal
“Soli’s new novel focuses on General Custer, the frontier, and the Indian wars. This is a western, but a modern one—beautifully detailed and carefully researched, completely free of the questionable mythologies that sometimes characterize the genre. A vivid, sometimes harrowing, but always gripping read.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award
“Soli unleashes a thrilling novel set in the violent Wild West . . . The clash of cultures is Soli’s grand theme, and here she drives home her message that the winners are no more worthy than the losers, and that “not even brotherhood was enough to safeguard people who had what others coveted.”
―Publishers Weekly
“Epic, enthralling… With visceral, vibrant language, Soli paints a stark portrait of the violence, hardship, and struggles that characterized the American West.”
— Booklist, Starred Review
“Tatjana Soli’s The Removes breathes new life into a story I thought I already knew inside out—the tale of George Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a century-old icon of American history, and exhaustively covered by Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star. Any writer entering these lists must be both bold and strong, and Soli proves herself all that, finding fresh blood in the strangely vexed, compelling romance between Custer and his wife Libbie, real pathos in the plight of captives both before and after “rescue,” and surprising sympathy for the man who wanted—fatally too much—to be a hero.”
—Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising, a finalist for the National Book Award
“Tatjana Soli’s The Removes is a rousing, thoroughly engrossing novel of the Indian Wars in the tradition of the best of Western fiction. Told through the actions, suffering, and inner musings of three very different characters—the demon-ridden George A. Custer, his fervid wife Libbie, and a persevering young woman captive of the Cheyennes—The Removes tells a tale of impeccable verisimilitude that is at once a tightly interwoven narrative and a kaleidoscopic picture of the Indian Wars of the American West, from which readers will emerge with a keen appreciation of this tragic American epoch.”
—Peter Cozzens, author of The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West
“Soli braids a beautiful and harrowing tale of Custer, his wife, and a fifteen-year-old girl held captive out on the western plains. Intimate and panoramic all at once, this is a novel of transformation and self-reliance, a book that powerfully questions what we know of women on the American frontier.”
—Dominic Smith, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
“Mesmerizing! Addictive! Unputdownable! … From start to finish this book is nothing less than spectacular.”—Tammy Glenn-Allen of IndiCo in Oberlin, OH
“The Removes is as beautiful a novel as I’ve read in some time. It tells of the nearly unimaginable brutality of western expansion through the stories of two women living in diverse captivities: Libbie, wife of philandering General Custer, and Anne, captured as a girl by the Cheyenne. Soli’s writing is spare, lyrical, haunting and heartbreaking, and countless images from this book will stay with me forever: the harsh majesty of the plains, the “sheer animal joy” of horses running into battle, and the bravado of Custer’s long, meandering march to his ruin.”
— Elizabeth McKenzie, Author of National Book Award long-listed The Portable Veblen
“Tatjana Soli weaves a stark western landscape, a national tragedy, and intimate portrayals of two pioneer women into a poignant and powerful tapestry of identity and belonging that will break your heart. I absolutely loved The Removes.”
—Meg Waite Clayton, Langum Prize-honored author of The Race for Paris
Q & A with Tatjana Soli on The Removes
Why are you drawn to the historical novel? The Western?
I am drawn to certain ideas, and sometimes these ideas seem to be embodied best in a particular time and setting in the past. I was struck in the writings of Richard Slotkin by his idea that the mythology of the frontier could be used as a way of “imagining and speaking truth.” He writes about the dark undercurrents of American culture through violence, both on the land and its people. This didn’t start with today’s headlines — there’s a long history that led us to the place we are today.
As far as writing a Western, it is a genre almost entirely dominated with male characters, and so it really appealed to me to focus on the female experience. It was important to me to not have the false ethical clarity usually associated with Westerns. All of the characters in the book are in a state of contradiction with themselves in a way not usually associated with the genre.
So how did you come to the story?
I was reading about the 7th Cavalry during the Vietnam War, and there was an aside that it had started in 1866 at Fort Riley, Kansas, commanded by none other than the infamous G. A. Custer. Custer became a kind of cipher for me to understand the mentality of manifest destiny at the time, the nation’s justification of expansion and conquest. We think of him now as a glory-hunter, an Indian killer, but at the time he was a national hero. I wanted to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of those two sides of his image. Of course the more I read, the more complex and flawed I found the man compared to our stereotyped images, the cartoonish versions in most portrayals.
What hooked me, though, was mention of his wife, Libbie, and their twelve-year marriage where she followed him into the field during the Civil War, and lived on military posts on the frontier during the Indian Wars. As I read about the two of them the time period became more and more compelling, and that was when I stumbled on the captivity narratives, when the whole project took shape. Although captivity narratives did exist previously in England, North American narratives had an ideological purpose. They were used to get public opinion on the side of stigmatizing the “other” culture, in this case making a case for removing Native Americans to reservations. Mine starts at that point and then continues on.
What interested me was history from a ground level viewpoint — one filled with unimaginable crime, cultural genocide, violence, and racism — from angles that we aren’t used to seeing, namely, women’s. One viewpoint from that of a white, privileged woman, who had been taught to be afraid of it all, and one from a captive, who has been forced into a foreign culture through an act of violence.
The setting in this book is distinct. Can you talk about that?
I always view setting as another character, and it is especially true in Westerns in terms of the characters’ interactions with their environment. The sheer distances and the time it took to cover them were daunting. There is no such comparable experience to be had in the world today in terms of isolation. As a country we have nostalgia for the cowboy period of the Old West, and I wanted to offer a kind of hyper-realism in its place.
Can you talk about the violence in the book?
Yes, part of the mythology of the land was the freedom it offered. Yet it was a dangerous freedom. Violence was routine, and I felt it was necessary to include it in graphic specificity because this weighed on the minds of the characters and colored their actions. It was real and everyday, banal and terrifying all at the same time.
Can you explain the meaning of the title?
I took the idea of numbered removes for chapter headings from the Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. I felt its meaning was mysterious and never explicitly told, and this was perfect for the state of mind that all the characters go through in the course of the book. Each has the props that we all depend on taken from them — family, faith, culture, the myriad comforts of civilization that make us who we are. So through time, they become this hybrid thing, one foot in each place, and that is a very modern dilemma.
This book is dissimilar to your previous ones. How do you go about picking subject matter?
Part of the joy of being a writer is letting one’s imagination roam widely. I write about what obsesses me, but of course I can only write about it from my own point of view. The similarities in my books usually center around the problem of violence, the clash of cultures, which occurs during the big movements of history, and the innocents that get hurt in the process, so those are the common elements.
Last question: What’s next?
I have one hundred pages of a novel I wrote last summer during a break. I haven’t looked at the pages since then, but I’m preparing to read and hopefully fall in love with that story again. It’s contemporary and takes place during the Iraq war. That’s all I’ll say for now. War is tending to be a recurrent theme in my work. I hadn’t really thought why until I recently read an essay of William James that helped me to understand the reason: “War… is a great revealer of what men and women are able to do and bear.” I think that’s a subject I will never get to the end of.
Discussion Questions
1. The book begins with an epigraph by Crazy Horse that says, “A very great vision is needed and the man who has it must follow it . . .” Does anyone in the novel show great vision? How does this quote set the tone for the story to come?
2. The narration moves back and forth between three characters—Anne, Libbie, and Custer. How does this affect your experience of the story? How does this affect your knowledge of that time in history?
3. Whose story do you empathize with the most? Which character do you like the most? Which one surprised you the most?
4. Libbie makes a bold decision for a young woman of her time and station, marrying a military man. Do you think it was foolish? Did she come to regret it? What were the benefits of the unusual life she ended up living?
5. George Armstrong Custer was one of the youngest Civil War heroes in the nation. Do you sympathize with his difficulty adjusting to an obscure military life postwar? What do you think of his reinvention of himself as an Indian fighter?
6. Libbie is shocked by the inhumanity she glimpses during the Civil War. The Indian tribe that Anne lives with suffers inhumanity at the hands of the U.S. military. What are the parallels between the two? What are the differences?
7. Golden Buffalo tries to help his tribe by learning the ways of the white culture that is overtaking his people’s world. On page 141, he has the following realization: “He saw his people’s futility in fighting such numbers, such rapaciousness. It was as useless as killing off coyotes. More would always come.” Do you think he was wise to try to learn the ways of his enemies? Foolish? Is there any way he could have done better to help his people?
8. When Golden Buffalo’s chief asks him what kind of a man Custer is, he answers, “He is a warrior. He has the heart of an Indian.” Were you surprised by the Indians’ respect for Custer as a warrior? Did this change your perception of him?
9. On the surface, Anne’s and Libbie’s stories are totally different. How are their experiences of the frontier similar?
10. Chief Black Kettle was attacked at the Sand Creek Massacre, but he remained on the path of peace. He was attacked again and killed at the Washita Massacre by Custer. What were his choices? After the Washita Massacre, were you surprised that public opinion began to criticize the army’s actions?
11. On the train trip to Dakota, Custer defends his black cook’s right to eat at the same table as him and his soldiers, although it is clear he does this more for expediency than conviction. What do you think of his character?
12. On page 253, during the Dakota blizzard, Libbie thinks that she “had entered the most terrible kind of dream, the kind that was real and was your life and you could not awake from.” In what ways is this true for all three main characters? Libbie overcomes her panic and takes charge, saving both soldiers’ lives and a horse’s life. Do you admire her actions? What would you do under such extreme conditions?
13. In what ways, large and small, does Neha affect Anne’s experience of captivity? How does their relationship change after being rescued?
14. Anne tells her aunt Lydia that she misses her children. Were you surprised by Lydia’s reaction and her advice?
15. At the time of the Battle of Little Bighorn, the death of Custer and his men was considered a national tragedy. Compare attitudes about Custer then and today. In what ways was Custer complicit with our government’s treatment of American Indians? In what ways was he a product of his time?
16. The Removes is filled with examples of human nature at its best and worst. How does the theme of good and evil play out in each character? In the story as a whole? In American history during the frontier period?