7 Books Like The Lost Journals of Sacajewea

Crow Mary feels very authentic - the setting, characters, Indian language , culture and customs - the history is interesting, compelling and at times exciting and terrifying.

Kathleen Grissom, the author, relies on her extraordinary author's ear to actually receive communications from real people long-gone from this world. She authenticates her writing with extensive research so that the reader quickly becomes a part of the story. Her characters are real, full of human emotions every reader can connect and sympathize with.

Crow Mary did not change my outlook on the oftentimes sad history of the Native American people and how they were exploited and cheated by whites, but it did corroborate what I have learned about this ugly time for all Americans.

Crow Mary is the kind of book readers will think about long after reading it.

I came across this book while researching the Black experience in late 19th century Montana for my historical short story collection featuring "Stagecoach" Mary Fields. Johnson gives us a highly readable mix of historical fact and analysis blended with stories about the Gordon family and Rose in particular, and the important role they played in one small Montana town from the 1880s to the 1960s. By telling Rose’s story, he’s able to tell us the larger story of the Black community in the state, one not known for racial diversity, and it’s fascinating!

Every discussion about the evolution of writing in ‘the West’ has to start with Willa Cather, who was the first writer from the west to be awarded a major literary award when she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, which isn’t even one of her five best novels. Cather wrote openly about alcoholism, domestic violence, and other painful topics, transforming western writing from cardboard cutout characters to real people. My Ántonia has become an American classic, not just in western literature but in all literature. My Ántonia is told from the point of view of a young farm boy who falls in love with the enchanting Ántonia, and it’s beautifully written, taking us into the emotional heart of youth and idealism in the West.

I’ve read and deeply admired nearly everything Erdrich has written, from Love Medicine to The Roundhouse. Erdrich’s language is always incantatory, and her stories are full of magic, landscape, and history. But this one is my absolute favorite. Even the title is amazing!

The story moves back and forth across the decades, and characters shift and transform before your eyes. Erdrich reminds me of Faulkner or even Homer; though deeply rooted in the lives and experiences of the Ojibwe communities of eastern North Dakota, Erdrich’s novels have a timeless, mythic feel. 

The atmosphere and voice created by Robinson in this timeless and widely beloved novel, which is potent in a way that’s difficult to quantify, has endured in my memory since I first read it as a teenager. In prose rich with imagery and allusion, narrator Ruth tells the story of how she and her sister, Lucille—orphaned after their mother’s suicide—came to be cared for by their aunt, Sylvie, an eccentric drifter, who moves into their rural Idaho home and alters the tenor of their lives.

This is written with the precision of poetry, containing such sentences as, “When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.” A novel to re-read and savor.

Winter Wheat, published in 1944, tells the story of Ellen Webb, a young woman coming of age on a farm in Montana. Walker moved from back east to Great Falls, Montana in 1933, and she is one of many writers who adopted Montana as their home state and wrote very eloquently about the unique challenges of growing up in such isolation, living a life so focused on hard work and basic survival. Walker published several excellent novels, but Winter Wheat was her tour de force. 

And another Montana writer, Debra Magpie Earling grew up in Spokane, and is a member of the Salish tribe. Her 2002 debut novel, Perma Red, became an immediate classic. It’s the story of Louise White Elk, a young woman living on the reservation in the 1940s who is determined to avoid the trap of becoming the possession of a man. A challenge for any woman during that time period, but especially for a native woman living in a place with few options. Earling’s prose is elegant but tough, and that would be a pretty apt description of her main character as well as Louise makes a valiant effort to fight off the powerful men trying to take control of her life.