A COUNTRY OF STRANGERS
Contents ( 17)
by CONRAD RICHTER
Early Americana (SHORT STORIES) (1936)
The Sea of Grass (1937)
Tacey Cromwell (1942)
The Free Man (1943)
The Trees (1940) WHICH IS CONTINUED IN
The Fields (1946) AND
The Town (1950)
Always Young and Fair (1947)
The Light in the Forest (1953)
The Mountain on the Desert (1955)
The Lady (1957)
The Waters of Kronos (1960)
A Simple Honorable Man (1962)
The Grandfathers (1964)
A Country of Strangers (1966)
The Awakening Land (WHICH CONTAINS THE TREES, THE FIELDS, AND THE TOWN) (1966)
The Aristocrat (1968)
THESE ARE BORZOI BOOKS, PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK BY
Alfred A. Knopf
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Published May 16, 1966
Fifth Printing, June, 1969
© Copyright 1966 by Conrad Richter
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Distributed by Random House, Inc.
Published in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada Limited.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-14921
eISBN: 978-0-8041-5018-7
v3.1
For Alfred
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Foreword
Chapter i
Chapter ii
Chapter iii
Chapter iv
Chapter v
Chapter vi
Chapter vii
Chapter viii
Chapter ix
Chapter x
Chapter xi
Chapter xii
Chapter xiii
Chapter xiv
A Note About the Author
Oft it befalls by the grace of God
That into this world woman and man
Bring child to birth. They dress it in colors,
Love it and train it till time shall come
When its limbs are sturdy and strong with life.
Father and mother carry and lead it,
Feed it and clothe it but God alone knows
What the years may give for the growing child!
Fates of Men,
Exeter Book, Old English,
8th or 9th Century
Charles W. Kennedy’s translation into alliterative verse of Fates of Men from the Exeter Book is from An Anthology of Old English Poetry, © 1960 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Foreword
LIKE its earlier companion novel, The Light in the Forest, this tale concerns the fortunes of one of many white captives taken prisoner as children and adopted into families of the early Indians. When later forcibly returned to their white homes, no small number of these tried desperately to run away and return to the free wild life of the forest and to their Indian fathers and mothers whom they admired and considered their real parents.
In The Trees and The Town I have written of the Indian from the white man’s point of view. Here I would like to continue the design of The Light in the Forest, which observes the white man from the viewpoint of that not ignoble race which once called this continent home but whose people were deprived, often rooked, of their rights and lands; their native conceptions of primitive justice and national defense cried out against; their very presence hated and despised; their reduced numbers, never large in the first place, driven from exile to exile; their solemn treaties with us repeatedly broken by their “white fathers”; their poetic, generally honorable and childlike savage nature corrupted by the white man’s perfidy, liquor, and disease until their fate today remains a blot on our national conscience.