Frank B. Linderman – författare

Trickster and transformer, powerful and vulnerable, Coyote is a complex figure in Indian legend. He was often the ultimate example of how not to be: foolish, proud, self-important. The tales in Old Man Coyote were told by the Crow Indians of present-day southeastern Montana. During long winter evenings by the lodge fire, they enjoyed hearing about the only warrior ever to visit the Bird Country, the Little-people who adopted a lost boy, the two-faced tribe that gambled for keeps, the marriage of Worm-face, and the origin of the buffalo. Wandering through these well-spun tales is the irrepressible Old Man Coyote, sometimes scoring a coup, sometimes getting his comeuppance.

Frank B. Linderman knew the frontier types who appear in these robust stories and sketches. A trapper in Montana during his youth, he stayed on as a publisher, politician, and businessman, beginning to write in middle age. The Montana Stories of Frank B. Linderman, originally published in 1920, still crackles with the freshness of arctic wind, the pungency of aged whiskey, the impact of a whip. "In the Name of Friendship" sets up a deadly bluff with ironic results. "Was Chet Smalley Honest?" shows a good deed in danger of punishment. "Jake Hoover's Pig" describes a hungry man's sentimental attachment to a fat porker. "Cranks" is a frontier precursor of the Odd Couple. "What Followed a Sermon" testifies to the sobering effect of preaching in a saloon. These and other stories are filled with rustlers and hustlers, Mounties and tenderfeet, Crows and Blackfeet, mountain men, prospectors, bartenders, lawyers, townspeople, and assorted dogs, cats, and horses.

While trapping in Montana during the 1880s, young Frank B. Linderman befriended the Kootenai Indians. At their campfires he heard about Skinkoots the coyote, Co-pee the owl, Frog Chief, and the other animal people. The telling impressed him, and in 1926 he was able, from long familiarity, to translate the tales for Kootenai Why Stories. Old-Man appears as the flawed undergod known by different names to other tribes, a figure provoking more hilarity than reverence. The frog is another prominent character in this northwestern Indian lore. Also recognizable for their distinctive attributes are the grizzly bear, deer, rabbit, and skunk. Making sense of nature, the stories explain why the coyote has thin legs, why the moose has a moose's nose, why the deer carries a black mark on the underjaw, and how the animals stole the springtime and put an end to winter. Linderman's retelling captures the mystery and spirit of a forested world.

Sheriff and outlaw Henry Plummer needed no introduction to the citizens of Montana Territory in the mid-nineteenth century. And well into the twentieth century, Frank Bird Linderman sought out the stories of the people who knew Plummer—and ultimately hanged him. In 1920 Linderman completed a novel about Plummer's life, but it was rejected by publisher after publisher. They felt that it showed too much fidelity to historical truth for a public increasingly enamored of western dime novels. Eighty years later, Linderman's lively interpretation of one of Montana's most enduring legends is being published for the first time. Plummer scarcely resembled the model sheriffs of movie and television westerns. Coolly calculating, he used his position as sheriff of Bannack during Montana Territory's first gold rush to organize a band of road agents who systematically robbed and murdered miners in remote areas. The highwaymen became so brazen that the miners felt compelled to band together and wage a vigorous lynch-law campaign to restore order. In 1864 these vigilantes caught up with Plummer and delivered their own brand of justice.

The Indians of the northwestern plains always laughed at the tales about Old-man, heard around the lodge fire in the wintertime after sunset. For a powerful character, he was comically flawed. Old-man made the world but sometimes forgot the names of things. Victim and victimizer, he seemed closer to common experience than the awesome god Manitou. Frank B. Linderman thought Old-man was, under different names, a god for many Indian communities. These stories—collected from Chippewa and Cree elders and first published in 1920—are full of wonder at the way things are. Why children lose their teeth, why eyesight fails with age, why dogs howl at night, why some animals wear camouflage—these and other mysteries, large and small, are made vividly sensible.

"An exciting account by one of the last great chiefs."―Los Angeles TimesIn his old age, Plenty-coups (1848–1932), the last hereditary chief of the Crow Indians, told the moving story of his life to Frank B. Linderman, the well-known western writer who had befriended him. Plenty-coups is a classic account of the nomadic, spiritual, and warring life of Plains Indians before they were forced onto reservations. Plenty-coups tells of the great triumphs and struggles of his own life: his powerful medicine dreams, marriage, raiding and counting coups against the Lakotas, fighting alongside the U.S. Army, and the death of General Custer.This new edition allows readers to appreciate more fully the accomplishments and rich legacy of Plenty-coups:A previously unpublished essay by Linderman tells of his meeting and working with the chief.An introduction by Phenocia Bauerle and Barney Old Coyote Jr., both members of the Crow Nation, speaks to the enduring importance of Plenty-coups for the Crow people in the twenty-first century.An afterword by Timothy P. McCleary, also of the Crow Nation, highlights the pivotal role Plenty-coups played during the early reservation years after the buffalo had gone.An essay by Celeste River examines the special relationship between the old chief and Linderman.A map of Plenty-coups's world highlights places named in the storyA glossary of Crow words and concepts found in the story draws upon the latest orthographic standards and contemporary translation.A photo gallery showcases both Plenty-coups at different stages of his life and unforgettable scenes of his world.

Old-man, or Napa, as he was called by the Blackfeet, is an extraordinary character in Indian stories. Both powerful and fallible, he appears in different guises: god or creator, fool, thief, clown. The world he made is marvelous but filled with mistakes. As a result, tensions between the haves and have-nots explode with cosmic consequences in Indian Why Stories. Elders of the Blackfeet, Cree, and Chippewa (Ojibwa) people shared these wonderful tales with Frank B. Linderman in the late nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century. War Eagle (the fictional name of Linderman's friend and Chippewa medicine man Pah-nah-to, or Full-of-dew), tells these stories to attentive youngsters after the first frost in the fall. He speaks of animal people, including a deer and an antelope in a footrace, a dancing fox who convulses a buffalo with laughter, a white beaver and ghost people, a huge snake in love with the moon, a sparrow hawk of conscience, and many others. These sparkling tales reveal a reverence for life, honesty, and the unity of creation.This expanded edition features thirteen previously unpublished verse stories along with an introduction to those stories by Sarah Waller Hatfield, granddaughter of Linderman.

In 1822 Elijah Mounts, barely eighteen, shoulders his rifle and walks from his uncle's Missouri farm to Saint Louis to seek his fortune in the fur trade. Frank B. Linderman's 1922 novel is a first-person account, based on a true story and his own trapping experience, of a young man's coming of age among the trappers and Indians in remote Montana, on the upper reaches of the wild Missouri River. Befriended by Wash Lamkin, "Dad" to all who know him, "Lige" learns to live on the trail, trap the beaver, hunt the buffalo, speak the Cree language, and observe the customs of the country and its people. Enamored of the freedom, wildness, and beauty of the high plains and tied to the people at whose hands he has experienced kindness, welcome, and acceptance, he must ultimately decide whether he will return to civilization or choose the life of a plainsman.

"Bears are commonly misquoted." That's what Frank B. Linderman concluded after spending most of his life in the wild. In Big Jinny Linderman lets a little grizzly cub speak for herself, and Jinny has plenty to say. This is Jinny's story about growing up in the Montana wilderness, where every day promises adventure, mischief—and danger. She and her brother cub, Jim, learn from their mother about eating, playing, avoiding certain animals—and, most important of all, minding their own business. But when Jinny wakes up from her first hibernation, curiosity tempts her to ignore this most important lesson and travel far from home, minding everybody else's business while learning a few new lessons about what it is to be a grizzly bear. Big Jinny's story, steeped in nature lore and illustrated with Elizabeth Lochrie's lush watercolors, leads readers young and old on an enchanting adventure through the wilds of western America even as they learn, with Jinny, how grizzlies really live.