Review: 'The Lost Wife,' by Susanna Moore

It's easy to see why Susanna Moore, who has written both fiction and nonfiction, was drawn to novelize the true story of Sarah Wakefield, a white woman who arrived in the Minnesota Territory in the mid-1850s and famously spent six weeks as a captive of Indians during the 1862 Dakota Conflict.

After the war, Wakefield was denounced for a book she wrote ("Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees") that sympathized with her captors, including a warrior named Chaska, who saved the lives of her and her children and briefly counted Sarah as his wife.

The story has it all: the bloody hell of war, racism, sexism, true grit, culture clash, revenge, corruption, injustice. Even some romance. Is that Netflix calling?

Moore's undertaking, as a white woman writing about Native Americans, is fraught, to say the least.

While she succeeds in creating a vivid tale of frontier adventure and peril, her book is best seen as a portal to more reading (including the Wakefield book, still widely available) aimed at a fuller understanding of a watershed in Minnesota history.

In "The Lost Wife" Moore changes some but not all the names of historical figures. She has "added facts that I've discovered along the way, alongside much from my imagination."

Moore's Sarah, 25, flees an abusive husband in Providence, R.I., and travels alone to Shakopee, Minn.

A fearful and exhilarated Sarah describes her newfound freedom: "I don't know what to do with so much feeling. My life will now be one of improvisation. I hadn't known how easily a new life may be made." The frontier, for her, is both geographical and emotional.

She soon marries a thoughtful, laudanum-drinking frontier physician whose patients include whites and Indians. They have two children and move west to an Indian agency near present-day Granite Falls, Minn.

The prosperous couple share food and belongings with their Indian neighbors, employ them at their house and learn their language.

Any semblance of peaceful relations between whites and Indians had evaporated by the early 1860s. Treaties signed in previous years were proving advantageous mainly to whites, with Indians crowded onto reservations. Food was scarce. So was money. In 1862, government annuities pledged to Indians for their ceded lands were delayed. This sparked isolated raids by Indians against settlers that quickly escalated into war, with hundreds of white settlers killed.

The Dakota Conflict is known for heavy loss of life on both sides, and for hasty trials that led to the hanging in Mankato of 38 Indians just after Christmas in 1862. Forced relocations decimated Native populations in southern Minnesota.

When war breaks out, Sarah and her two small children are captured and held hostage at the encampment of Chief Little Crow.

Moore paints the chaotic scene there: "There were feather beds, some of them ripped apart, their feathers floating in the thick air, and a child's painted rocker. Barrels of whiskey, and bushels of potatoes and corn, and rashers of bacon, and sides of venison, and live cows stumbling in fear. Women fought over sacks of flour and sugar. There was death now, but there was food."

Released after the war, Sarah argues, in vain, for Chaska to be spared from hanging at Mankato alongside others deemed to have committed atrocities.

Reflecting on the war, she believes that for Native chiefs and braves, "victory was never the point. It was their burning, unquenchable rage and the honor that revenge would bring them. … They were always going to be driven from the prairie, bad Indians and good Indians, too, as the whites would say. But it will be easy now."

Claude Peck (www.claudepeck.com) was an editor at the Star Tribune. He lives in Minneapolis and Palm Springs, Calif.

The Lost Wife

By: Susanna Moore.

Publisher: Knopf. 172 pages, $27.