The Unspoken Drama

SON OF THE GAMBLIN' MAN (333 pp.)--Marl Sandoz--Clarkson N. Potter ($5).

A DISTANT TRUMPET (629 pp.)--Paul Morgan--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($5.75).

Were all U.S. fiction written by American regionalists. man's mind might often seem to have no mountains; all might appear one vast, pre-Freudian plane. There are deft, complex exceptions, such as Kentucky's unjustly forgotten Elizabeth Madox (The Time of Man) Roberts, Nevada-bred Walter Van Tilburg (The Ox-Bow Incident) Clark. But generally the regional writer is a landscape artist, pure and psychologically all too simple. What is best in his books is his sense of the soil, of the unspoken drama of work or conflict on the earth. In two new regional novels of the old West, strength again flows from the unspoken.

Gamblers & Colonizers. In half a dozen books (Old Jules, Slogum House} about settlers, cowmen and sheepherders of the 1870s, Nebraska's Mari Sandoz, 61, has tilled her own neat field well enough to become one of the better sod sisters. Her latest novel, despite its gamblin' title, is no card party. Her hero, John Jackson Cozad. was indeed a wily gentleman jackleg, but a green baize tabletop never confined his instinct for conquest. In 1872, when every faro den east of the Mississippi had barred its doors to his talent for bank breaking, Cozad made a down payment on 40,000 acres of Union Pacific land in Nebraska near the Platte River. A community there, he dreamed, would be his monument, and good farming families, lured from depression-strangled Ohio, would build it for him.

As Author Sandoz reconstructs the story from old diaries and memoirs, Cozad--man and town--prospered despite plagues of hungry insects, through dust storms and snowstorms, despite rampaging long-horn herds and quick-trigger cowprods. By 1882 he had harvested a fortune of $300,000, and raised two spunky sons. But black-tempered John Cozad was too powerful for his own good--and power tends to corrupt those who lack, as well as those who wield it. Settler jealousy festered into hatred. When Cozad, in patent self-defense, gunned down a knife-flashing enemy, he had to skip town to avoid a lynching bee.

The town went on (it now bills itself as the alfalfa-growing center of the West), but John Cozad never was the same. He toyed furtively again with faro, failed as a resort owner in Atlantic City, N.J. When he died in New York in 1906, he had reached a century he did not understand. But he earned his monument. His younger son was Painter Robert Henri, a founder of New York's famed "Ashcan School'' of realists; in a Manhattan gallery hangs Henri's stunning portrait of Gambler ohn Cozad, dark eyes brooding on a private empire whose sun had set.

The story is true, and Author Sandoz might just as well have told it straight, instead of grafting stiff-legged dialogue into striding narrative. Somehow, her Platte seems more vivid than her pioneers, and poor John Cozad looks a bit shriveled and out of focus, as if viewed from the Bottom of an empty glass of redeye.

Savages & Cavalry. Setting his story n a different locale, the Southwest, but at about the same period. New Mexico's prolific Paul Horgan runs into somewhat similar trouble with his fictional hero. Matthew Hazard, U.S. cavalry officer, is coltishly appealing, brave, leathery, and a West Pointer. By page 100 he is out n Arizona Territory looking for hostile Apaches, and he should loom larger than life, but somehow he looks smaller. The real heroes are again the landscape and the history that fills it.

In earlier books, from A Lamp on the Plains to his two-volume Great River: the Rio Grande, Author Horgan, 56, has shown his mastery of the Southwestern scene. In this novel he writes, as usual, with a fine cinematographic flair, and there are impressive wide-screen episodes: a gun fight at a water hole in the gullied, mountain-rimmed desert near Fort Delivery; the punishment of a cowardly trooper who, before the eyes of the assembled garrison, is branded on the hips with the letter D for deserter; the Indian encampment of Rainbow Son--Horgan's fictional version of Geronimo--deep in Mexico's Sierra Madre. Curiously, the battlescapes are poorly drawn, and may result from Horgan's dour knowledge that the Apaches invariably melted away when confronted with regular troops. Unfortunately for the balance of his book, the weight of a growing nation and the determination of Hazard and his cavalrymen seem excessive when they are opposed by only a handful of barbaric and ill-equipped savages.*

But U.S. history has supplied Horgan with some fine prototypes: his tall, gaunt, white-bearded General Quait brings to crotchety life the veteran U.S. Indian fighter, General George Crook; and his hero's final mission recalls the remarkable trek of Lieut. Charles Gatewood into the mountains of Mexico to talk the unpredictable Geronimo into surrendering. That surrender, as Horgan puts it, marked the end of "an Indian war that has raged since the days of Cortez." Matthew Hazard's Arizona was made safe for supermarkets and swimming pools, just as John Cozad's Platte River country was plowed into fields of immense fertility. Yet, as these books serve to recall, the land that challenged colonizer and cavalryman is still the same--still a measure of man's significant victories and defeats, still a source of unspoken strength.

* In 1886 some 5,000 U.S. soldiers and 500 Indian allies spent a spring and summer chasing Geronimo and his Apache band, which numbered 35 men, 8 boys and 101 women. The Apache losses: 13 killed, none by direct U.S. action.

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