By Paul Carrier
In 1702, France established a thinly populated settlement on the Mobile River known as Fort Louis, to serve as the first capital of the French colony of Louisiana, which was far larger than the current state of that name. Two years later, the French ship Pélican brought 23 single women to “la Louisiane,” to provide wives for soldiers and settlers whom the women had never met.
It is against this backdrop that Savage Lands unfolds its tale of love, betrayal, ambition, regret and longing as Elisabeth Savaret, a literate and independent-minded young women who sailed aboard the Pélican, marries Jean-Claude Babelon, a charming and ambitious ensign in the French garrison.
The colony also houses a boy named Auguste Guichard, whom the governor, the real-life Canadian Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, sends to live among the Indians to learn their language, customs and activities. That brings Guichard into contact with Babelon, who visits the tribes on trading and diplomatic missions.
Over time, Guichard becomes a young man skilled in Native American languages, with one foot in the French world and another in that of the Indians. He befriends both Babelon and his wife and their relationships evolve, as Babelon is consumed by greed and Guichard’s fondness for Savaret blossoms into something more than friendship.
Clare Clark explores these tangled interactions, as well as the exotic setting of her novel, with elegance and poetic imagery.
When Guichard finds himself living among the Ouma (Houma) Indians, for example, we learn that the Indians have renamed him because they are unable to pronounce his name: “Though he repeated it many times, the French sounds were slippery in the savages’ mouths and they could not keep hold of them.”
Similarly, when Guichard recalls a forest at dawn, the reader learns that it is a time of day “when the early sun caught in the spiders’ webs, and butterflies hung in the air like colored thoughts . . . .”
(As an aside, French settlers in North America in the 17th and 18th centuries did refer to native peoples as savages (les sauvages). But the French used the term to describe people who lived in the forest, not in the pejorative sense that we use the word in English today.)
Such lyrical passages are juxtaposed against others that lapse into excess, as if Clark is striving mightily for a literary flourish. Overwriting weighs down the narrative at times, but Savage Lands tells such a compelling story that patient readers will be rewarded for hanging on.
Clearly well-researched, Savage Lands captures the differences in language and attitude between French-born settlers and French-Canadian transplants, as well as the dynamics of the settlement, the complex relationships among the region’s native tribes and the attitudinal gulf between natives and Europeans.
At one point, for example, an Indian warrior asks Guichard why the white man is never content. When Guichard asks the Indian why he believes such a thing, Guichard recalls later, “he said the white man is always frowning and his eyes bulge from his head as though he seeks something he can never find.”
Clark offers a welcome look at a time and place long overshadowed by other aspects of American history. There is a reason why the early histories of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi are replete with French names, and Savage Lands explores those roots through haunted characters whose lives are the stuff of memorable fiction.
