LAUGHING WHITEFISH

Young maverick lawyer William Poe sets up practice in a Michigan mining town during the late nineteenth century and takes as his first client a beautiful Chippewa Indian girl called Laughing Whitefish, or simply Charlotte. Charlotte is the school-teaching daughter of the late, hard drinking Marjo Kawdawgan who guided the fore-runners of a company, Cap Jackson Ore, to the prodigious mines which set them up in business. They got rich. Marjo, being an Indian, was bilked even out of the pittance they promised him. Now Charlotte intends to sue and to help her people with the money she receives as Marjo's rightful heir and legatee. But the legal problems are sundry and sticky. "What did Marjo and Blue Heron do?" the slick company lawyer asks a third party, who was there, "when they spent the night together in the same wigwam?" On that answer and questions of Indian marital law (should our courts recognize their customs?) hangs the fiduciary future of Charlotte Kawdawgan and the Chippewas.... Travers has disinterred some rather musty historic-legal documents. Around them he's built a rather tinny and hollow court case novel. He's done a lot better in the past.