My Heart Grows Wide Within Me

Book excerpt: Northern Cheyenne Dog Soldier Standing Cloud fights against the white man’s expansion into his people’s homeland. Well bred young Army wife Anah Hoffman Moore is fascinated by a language and culture far different from her own. How they meet and fall in love is set in a troubling time in the western territories of America, when Manifest Destiny rapidly encroached upon the culture of the native inhabitants. Anah turns to laudanum in the wake of a violent attack on herself, and the deaths of her husband and their young child, and is subsequently led, by an old army scout who has befrended her, to the winter camp of a small band of Cheyenne, where she finds solace for a season. She leaves there and becomes a translator for Red River War prisoners being taken to Ft. Marion on Florida’s Northern Atlantic coast. It is there Standing Cloud first becomes aquainted with Anah, whom he and his fellow prisoners call “the Sweet Grass Woman” for her story-telling abilities. While on a supervised outing of prisoners they become caught up in a hurricane, and find themselves cast up on a Sea Isle off the coast of Georgia, where they are sheltered by a community of emancipated slaves. Apart from their respective cultures they begin a romantic idyll. Their bond strengthens, but as the summer turns to autumn Cloud becomes restive, haunted by his brothers still imprisoned, so they return to the fort. Back at Ft. Marion they continue a relationship, of necessity clandestine. When the notice comes for the men’s release, remanding them to their respective reservations, Cloud chooses a different path. Anah finds that he has left in the night with only a note and a promise that he will return for her. She expects his imminent return, but a few months pass with no word. An unexpected discovery changes Anah’s life, and she eventually heads West, determined to start her own Indian School, one that respects and embraces their native customs. Despite success, she yearns for Standing Cloud’s return. My Heart Grows Wide Within Me, set in the 1870’s, tells of shattered lives on the western frontier during the Indian Wars. The historical novel contains visions, dreams, stories, legends, vignettes, journal entries and well-known figures from the era, achieving emotional truths that transcend place and time.