COYOTE MOON

A young woman braves war, murder, and a failed marriage in the 19th-century American West.

In the 1850s and 1860s, young Emma Thompson travels with her parents across the western United States and into the Utah Territory, where they fall under the sway of a self-declared prophet known as Joseph Morris, who’s left Mormonism to found his own sect, known as the Morrisites. Hailed as the “Lord of the Earth” and the Messiah, Morris encourages his followers to abandon their vocations and prepare for the imminent physical return of Jesus. His boasts draw the attention of the territorial government, which dispatches Deputy Marshal Robert Burton to restore order. In a bloody skirmish later known as the Morrisite War, Burton’s men besiege the Morrisites’ fort. A cannonball strikes Emma’s friend Mary Christofferson, shattering her chin. Emma watches in horror as a man she identifies as Burton fires upon Joseph Morris and Isabella Bowman, killing them instantly. Outraged by this apparent miscarriage of justice, Emma awaits the day their killer will be apprehended. After the war ends, still in her teens, Emma marries a soldier named George Waldron—although, as his lies and gambling debts accumulate, she’ll come to wonder if that’s actually his real name. When George is jailed for horse theft, Emma meets personally with a general and secures his release. When their marriage flounders, Emma divorces George and marries Nels Just, for reasons more pragmatic than romantic.

Just’s narrative is drawn from the journals of Emma Just, a blood relation, and memories shared orally with her daughter Agnes. At times in the journals, Emma alludes only vaguely to events of which we have no further knowledge; reading between the gaps in the text, Just has attempted to reconstruct what might have taken place, based on informed speculation. (While the real George was arrested for horse theft, how he escaped the jail remains a mystery; the answer Just offers is both persuasive and lends the fictional Emma some much-needed agency.) Where Just excels is in portraying the minutiae of daily life in the West during this era: the drying of stirring spoons, the making of soap and candles from tallow, the price of cows, the effects of frost on crops and gardens. He skillfully renders Emma’s relationship with George; her naïveté and youthful eagerness to be seduced by a man of low character may remind readers of the title character in Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter (1929), who also acquires wisdom in a failed marriage. In one of the book’s more compelling scenes, Emma, slightly crazed by isolation on the frontier, attempts to drown her sons in a river to save them from being murdered by Native Americans. Psychologically, the scene is perhaps the most believable moment in the book: small wonder that it’s taken from the real Emma’s diaries. The love of literature displayed by Emma’s sons—who, without formal schooling, grow up reading classic novels—sounds a plangent note for the vanished mass literacy of a previous century.

An engaging but twistingly tangent-prone narrative of an overlooked corner of American frontier history.