Mixed Blood: Last Winter in America

by Tim Warren McGlue

Raised in a canoe and cabin, William Warren is a child of the frontier. A man who grows to witness firsthand the injustices of the US government and its corrupt officials as they remove the Ojibwe people from their lands.

As an interpreter, Warren fights from within, until the tragedy of Sandy Lake forces him to realize that there is no stopping progress; he must preserve the oral histories at any cost.

With manuscript in hand, he collects the tales of the elders, and risks his life on a dangerous cross-country journey to New York in the midst of winter.

Fighting ailing lungs, the effects of laudanum, and bigotry, this is the story of how William Warren lived, and how his book, History of the Ojibway People, was lost, rediscovered, and published, becoming a first-of-its-kind history of a Native American people taken directly from the words of his grandfathers, and still printed to this day.

508 pages, Paperback

Published September 2, 2022

Reviews

[Tim Warren]

Reviewing my own book is a questionable practice, but I must say that it was a pleasure and privilege to carry through my first foray into historical fiction. Hopefully many will read this book, enjoy it and learn from Warren's story. It may help to open our minds to the story of Native American peoples, the Ojibwe in particular, and change the way we see and teach the "manifest destiny" of white Europeans in America and the world. I knew of the main character for years, and had read his history of his mother's people (my ancestor, a family hero), but never his entire life story. The research trips I took to the upper Great Lakes, Minnesota, Madeline Island, the time spent tracking down his route, his desperate trek across the country...plus the countless boooks I read on the historical background, expanded my mind and heart enormously and returned me to my own roots. Warren's life, his trip, his mission, propelled me. Then I had to invent and dramatize the events, fit it into his time, and be true to history. A fascinating challenge, which in a way mirrors what William Warren chose to do: preserve the memory of his ancestors.

[Gerald]

McGlue has thoroughly researched the life and work of his nineteenth-century forebear, William W. Warren, who grew up on the edge of the western frontier, son of an Ojibwe mother and a white trader father. As historical fiction, Mixed Blood: Last Winter in America is both earnest and ambitious - coming in at 498 pages.

Besides coping with his mixed-race parentage, Warren’s world is colored by the U.S. government's forced removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands in 1850s Minnesota, as it had been occurring in the Midwest for decades.

Warren's learning both Ojibwe and English languages and embracing the traditions of both cultures cast him in the role of interpreter and mediator between the Ojibwe and the white settlers.

At the heart of the narrative lies the tragedy of Sandy Lake, a pivotal event that forces Warren to confront the harsh reality that progress, as defined by the U.S. government, must not be halted. Unfulfilled promises of food and annuities result in hundreds of Ojibwe deaths from starvation, disease, and exposure. This crisis prompts Warren to believe that safeguarding the oral traditions of his community must be his life’s mission.

The novel's crux is Warren's decision to embark on a perilous journey to collect and record the oral histories of the Ojibwe elders. His manuscript, History of the Ojibway People, becomes a beacon of hope in the face of cultural erasure. His journey to New York during a harsh winter becomes a symbolic struggle against failing health, his own laudanum addiction, and societal bigotry.

The novel masterfully describes Warren's challenges as he struggles to find his identity, race, culture, and history. Predictably, Warren's publishers reject his manuscript. White culture has no wish to hear versions of history as told by the vanquished.

Sound familiar?

The novel recounts Warren's untimely death in 1853, marking the end of a dedicated individual who strived to preserve his tribe's legacy. However, the recovery of his lost manuscript eventually completes his mission. Published in 1887, History of the Ojibway People became prominent by offering a unique perspective from the words of Ojibwe grandfathers.

The existence of Warren’s book is not a fiction contrived by McGlue to tell a story. It’s hardly surprising today to read its catalog descriptions, which point out that indigenous people may disagree with Warren’s account.

Let the debates continue!

Historical fiction is all about today. Contemporary minds look back on events through lenses colored by everything that has happened since. We might identify with our forebears, but we can only guess at their thoughts as if translating from some obscure tongue.

McGlue's narrative resonates with themes of courage, sacrifice, resilience, and the determination to preserve a unique and valuable culture.

[Iris Hart]

This book completely opened my eyes as to what extreme extent the Native Americans were deceived, mistreated, tortured, weakened, and massacred by the exploiting colonists. The honesty and keen sense of observation of the protagonist add to the poignancy. McGlue's masterful creation of certain colorful fictional characters and scenes adds bits of comic relief to what is a true, miraculously conserved account of an incredible individual and hard-to-face historical facts. My heart went out to William W. Warren, his precious family, his people, and similarly ruined ancestral tribes. The courage somehow found in plights of unbelievable despair makes this a must-read!

[Paul Belle]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this partly fictional account of the life of the author’s ancestor and the perilous journey he made to New York to try to get his history of the Ojibwe people published. As I read through the book, I felt as if I were there living the adventure and, at the same time, I got to understand something about the politics and the history of the period William Whipple Warren lived in and how the world was changing at great speed even then.