Ten Thousand Acres
 Preston L. Gorbett
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2002 PublishAmerica
 ISBN: 1591298059
  Paperback Amazon's price: $19.95
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Flora McAndrews buries her husband on the American Plains & continues on to Colorado where a ranch & destiny await.

It's 1784 & Flora, the granddaughter of a Baltimore sea captain, is alone somewhere in the vast uncharted plains west of the Mississippi (before the Louisiana Purchase, before Colorado was even named!). She must decide between returning to Baltimore or going on alone to the ranch which her husband had bought a year ago & had never seen.

After weeks of trial & error, she reaches a stone cabin in which the skeleton of a man lies covered in a cot. There she buries it & decides to stay.

The ranch is only roughly marked out, & the deed & the map she found in William's papers don't help. Nonetheless she begins the huge task of fencing it in, fighting off cougar, preparing for winter, taking trips to the nearest town, reveling in her new life even as she yearns for someone to talk to & love.

Chester, the grandson of Ghuntumba who was brought over from Africa in a slave ship & sold, pregnant, to a Southern plantation, grew to manhood as a loved & trusted companion of his master's son. On a hunting & exploring trip, a rifle accidently discharges killing Jefferson. Chester can only think of fleeing, & he heads west.

He has little trouble caring for himself on the run, until he is captured by a band of Creeks who teach him the “Indian Way.” Earning his freedom, Chester drifts into the mountains & finds Flora's ranch just in time to save her from some brothers bent on perpetrating evil.

Chester wants to stay on & work the ranch & Flora wants him to, however, men are coming to settle the country & they will not tolerate a black man living alone with a white woman.

Ten Thousand Acres is an interesting if improbable read, at once hopeful & forthright. Sparsely written it tells two stories: of a white woman trekking alone across unexplored terrain to a homestead in a wild & lovely part of this continent; & an educated black man fleeing slavery. By today's lights, it all sounds reasonable & yet...being a novel & an adventure story, naive Flora will prevail & wise Chester will find her, according to the author's determination.

It is light on the realities of both what land had been discovered before our Constitution had been ratified & frontier life--how did city-dweller Flora know how to work firearms? Take care of horses & cattle? Determine that the cabin she stumbled upon was the one on the map? & heavy on the leaden morality of the times, with a depressing, & given our racist history, inevitable ending.

What did I learn from Ten Thousand Acres? That's a helluva lot of land to handle, alone or otherwise; that bare-bones writing can tell a good if impractical yarn; dialects are not worth recording if they're incomprehensible, & the improbable remains so when the mechanics of how things are done are glossed over.

If historical details (accurate or otherwise) interest you, & you don't object to anachronisms, you will probably enjoy the adventure of Ten Thousand Acres.
(07/13/03)

Rebecca