The Adventures of Elizabeth Fortune

...Karyn Follis Cheatham has had a lifelong fascination with history and its treatment of western women. In 1986, while driving from her home in Nashville to a writers' conference in San Diego, she let her mind wander, wondering what the land was like in the 1860s and '70s, and about the challenges traveling back then would have posed to a woman.

She thought of her own family and friends, of her African American and Native American heritage, and the seed for The Adventures of Elizabeth Fortune were planted.

Now, 14 years later, Cheatham's novel about a disenfranchised young woman in search of her father in the 1870s is being distributed by Blue Heron Publishing of Portland, Ore...

...with her knowledge of African American and Native American history and her research on the Southwest of the 1800s [this book] provides a glimpse into what might have happened to a young woman of mixed race traveling alone...

If you're in the mood for a rip-roarin' Western, one with action and adventure, bad guys so rotten you want to boo out loud, gunplay and getaways, reach for The Adventures of Elizabeth Fortune.

While it's a classic Western in many ways, it's a "nouveau Western" because of the differences that make it a welcome break from the cowboy yarn about a taciturn man and his faithful horse.

The heroine is a young woman, intelligent, spirited and handy with the gun her brother gave her. Elizabeth is also a woman of mixed race, with Black and Indian blood in her veins as well as white.

When the book opens, she's a college student, but her fortunes take a sudden turn and she heads West to try and find her father, a soldier stationed on the frontier. As her adventures begin, Elizabeth writes, "It shouldn't take too long to find Daddy."

We all know that won't prove to be true, or the book wouldn't be any fun, and fun it is. Elizabeth is forced to fend for herself and live by her wits as she faces a collection of frontier folk both good and bad, some determined to help her and others just as determined to take whatever she has for themselves. Along the way, she meets a good man to balance all the bad ones who cross her path.

At the end of the story, Elizabeth writes, "I know that once I find Daddy, it shouldn't take too long to clear our family name." That hints of more adventures to come - yippee!...

Feeling that Old West urge to ride off into the sunset? Here's a perfect book to take with you on vacation. Set in the 1870s, it tells the story of Elizabeth Fortune, a resourceful woman of mixed Native American, African American, and European American ancestry. After quitting school, she heads west and eventually takes a job as a teamster. Seeking her father who is missing somewhere on the frontier, she forges ahead doubly disguised as a young man and a white person. Her essential nature shines through nonetheless--and that includes not only the strength of her womanhood but the ineffable complexity of her mixed heritage. Skillful application of local color and dialect makes this novel, billed on the cover as a "Nouveau Western," a pleasure to read. Sure to appeal to Western fans in general, The Adventures of Elizabeth Fortune has extra interest for anyone into ethnic fiction. Recommended.

A mixture of white Negro and Cherokee blood ran in Elizabeth Fortune's veins, enough that her skin, unlike that of her brothers Scott and Houston, was dusky and her eyes were brown.

"I'm not like you," her brother Scott once told her when they were younger; and apparently her white grandfather agrees because he casts Elizabeth out of the family when her grandmother dies. Grieving but stubborn, Elizabeth sets out to find her father, Samuel Fortune, a buffalo soldier whose last known posting was to Fort Union.

Disguised as a white boy, Elizabeth signs on with a freight company heading for New Mexico. She can drive a mule team--she knows she can. She can do whatever she has to do if it gets her to Fort Union and her father. But life on the Santa Fe Trail is anything but pleasant: "I could find this amusing if it weren't so dreadful. It surely would be nice to come upon an outhouse in this particular terrain. I have bites in the most impossible places."

One man, Casey Pritchard, sees through Elizaeth's disguise but agrees to keep her secret. Elizabeth sometimes gives herself away when she hears racial slurs against blacks or Indians. "She had see it before. People being nice to her and openly declaring their prejudice, then having to either eat those words of claim she was some sort of exception when they found out she wasn't white."

Worse than the hurtful words about race was the message brought by soldiers. The Army identifies her father as a deserter.

An exciting, carefully researched historical novel with one of the most likable and well-drawn characters of recent years, The Adventures of Elizabeth Fortune is a delight to read, and since it ends with a cliffhanger, we can hope for a sequel. Very soon, I hope.

Karyn Cheatham of Helena, Mont., has been writing excellent historical novels for a good while and is the author of a fine biography of Indian activist Dennis Banks for young readers. Elizabeth Fortune is about a pretty, young Ohio woman of mixed Indian, black and Anglo heritage who is disowned by her grandparents and disguises herself as a white boy to work as a teamster while she hunts for her Buffalo Soldier father on the 1870s western frontier. Cheatham handles a saloon shootout as deftly as she does the backdrop of Kansas and Colorado in the days of the Dalton and Younger outlaw bands, and the vicissitudes of her mixed-blood heroine--a matter Cheatham knows firsthand. She is, she says, "Pleased (and relieved) to be of Afro-American and Native American heritage."

Readers looking for a hard-to-find good western yarn will discover it right here. This novel has it all, the lonesome western landscape, the good guys, bad guys, suspense, intrigue, brawls, gunfights, an ambush, a showdown, romance. There are cowboys and Indians, with some twists. The cowboy is part Indian, and part black, part white. And the cowboy is a girl.

This is Nouveau Western, as the author calls it--a traditional western with contemporary overtones. The main strengths of this book are in its main character and in the stark and lonesome landscape of the Santa Fe Trail that she travels with a bunch of sweaty, raunchy, shit-kicking and sometimes companionable men.

In The Adventures of Elizabeth Fortune, author K. Follis Cheatham has created a woman who has the unique breadth of wisdom born to her multicultural heritage and her experience as a woman in the then--separate worlds of women and men. Turn this woman loose on her trail journey, and what happens is at once a page-turner and a series of insights into the gender and cultural conditioning that yet remain.