Cimarron by Edna Ferber

Read the full post at - Cimarron by Edna Ferber I picked up Cimarron by Edna Ferber from Standard Ebooks, mostly because it’s free and I wanted something to speed read. It’s a western published in 1929, and it covers the settlement of Oklahoma – which was one of the very last pieces of the old frontier to be opened up. The book starts with the Land Run of 1889, when the federal government opened Indian Territory to white settlement after having pushed the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole onto that land in the first place during the Trail of Tears. So the “last frontier” was actually land that had already been promised to somebody else, taken away, and re-opened. Ferber does not let you forget that. The characters are all over the top. But they’re over the top in a way that feels exactly right for the tail end of the American frontier – everybody is performing a role they read about somewhere. And that’s really what the book is about. The Myth Was Never True, and Even…