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freightman (wagon driver, the pioneer equivalent of a long-haul trucker) named Britt Johnson has been paid $50 by the Indian agent at Fort Sill to deliver Johanna to her aunt and uncle in Castroville near San Antonio. Johnson’s business will take him in another direction and he persuades the Captain to take the child off his hands. (The Kiowa surrendered the girl when they realized that having a white child in tow only served to invite severe harassment and abuse from the cavalry.)
The money Johnson pays Kidd is enough to buy the wagon, another horse, and some supplies for the journey. But they will need more supplies en route, so the Captain must keep working. Any time they reach a town large enough to have a news agent, Kidd buys a collection of the most recent newspapers he canfind. When they arrive in a new town, he hires a hall (usually a church or a theatre) and prints up posters advertising that the News of the World will be presented that evening. He and Johanna spend part of the afternoon posting these leaflets before going to their hotel to have supper and prepare for the evening’s show. Kidd tries to get papers from as far away as possible: the Eastern and Northern states, and even Europe if he is lucky. Bitter experience has taught him to steer as far away from Texas politics as he could.
Because he has been doing this work for a few years, Kidd is now a minor celebrity. He keeps meeting people who have heard him perform before. Several times he is warned to avoid a certain part of town because it is full of “Hamilton People” or “Davis People”. One glaring weakness in this book is that Jiles never explains the significance of these cautions. Andrew Jackson Hamilton is the first military governor appointed by the victorious Union army after the end of the War in 1865. Edmund Jackson Davis is a Union sympathizer who served as a general in the Union army and has recently defeated Hamilton in the 1869 election for governor. He is scheduled to assume office in a few months time.
Johanna learns to function as the gatekeeper at Kidd’s presentations, making sure that everyone who enters contributes a dime to the collection can. More than once, they are forced to leave town in the middle of the night in an effort to escape people who mean them harm. This means that they have money, but have not had the chance to visit stores to buy the goods they need. On one perilous occasion, Johanna’s ingenuity saves their skins when they are pursued by three gangsters before having the opportunity to acquire ammunition for the Captain’s guns.
Jiles covers a wide range of emotions in this yarn. There are sad moments and cheerful ones, and even some very funny episodes. There are also really exciting passages. The Captain and the girl both learn a lot from each other, and not just about language. The reader will find the story both instructive and enjoyable.
Jiles was born and educated in the US, but moved to Toronto to work for the CBC in 1969. She spent several years setting up FM stations in aboriginal languages in northern Ontario and Quebec and learned to speak Ojibwe. She won the Governor-general’s prize for poetry in 1984. In 1991 she married an American and moved to Texas, where she still lives. She has published several novels, including Enemy Women (2002), which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. News of the World was a National Book Award finalist and is now available at the Lennoxville Library.