Jeff Bussey walked briskly up the rutted wagon road toward
Fort Leavenworth on his way to join the Union volunteers. It was
1861 in Linn County, Kansas, and Jeff was elated at the prospect of
fighting for the North at last.
In the Indian country south of Kansas there was dread in the air;
and the name, Stand Watie, was on every tongue. A hero to the
rebel, a devil to the Union man, Stand Watie led the Cherokee
Indian Na-tion fearlessly and successfully on savage raids behind
the Union lines. Jeff came to know the Watie men only too
well.
He was probably the only soldier in the West to see the Civil War
from both sides and live to tell about it. Amid the roar of cannon
and the swish of flying grape, Jeff learned what it meant to fight
in battle. He learned how it felt never to have enough to eat, to
forage for his food or starve. He saw the green fields of Kansas
and Okla-homa laid waste by Watie''s raiding parties, homes gutted,
precious corn deliberately uprooted. He marched endlessly across
parched, hot land, through mud and slash-ing rain, always hungry,
always dirty and dog-tired.
And, Jeff, plain-spoken and honest, made friends and enemies. The
friends were strong men like Noah Babbitt, the itinerant printer
who once walked from Topeka to Galveston to see the magnolias in
bloom; boys like Jimmy Lear, too young to carry a gun but old
enough to give up his life at Cane Hill; ugly, big-eared Heifer,
who made the best sourdough biscuits in the Choctaw country; and
beautiful Lucy Washbourne, rebel to the marrow and proud of it. The
enemies were men of an-other breed - hard-bitten Captain Clardy for
one, a cruel officer with hatred for Jeff in his eyes and a dark
secret on his soul.
This is a rich and sweeping novel-rich in its panorama of
history; in its details so clear that the reader never doubts for a
moment that he is there; in its dozens of different people, each
one fully realized and wholly recognizable. It is a story of a
lesser -- known part of the Civil War, the Western campaign, a part
different in its issues and its problems, and fought with a
different savagery. Inexorably it moves to a dramat-ic climax,
evoking a brilliant picture of a war and the men of both sides who
fought in it.
關於作者：
Harold Keith grew up near the Cherokee country he describes in
Rifles for Watie.A native Oklahoman, he was educated at
Northwestern State Teachers College at Alva and at the University
of Oklahoma.
While traveling in eastern Oklahoma doing research on his
master''s thesis in history, Mr. Keith found a great deal of fresh
material about the Civil War in the Indian country. Deciding he
might someday write a historical novel, he interviewed twenty--two
Civil War veterans then living in Oklahoma and Arkansas; much of
the background of Rifles for Watiecame from the note-books he
filled at that time. The actual writing of this book took five
years.
Since 1930, the author has been sports publicity director at the
University of Oklahoma. He is married and has a son and
daughter.
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