Books: Ugh for Uncas

HOLDFAST GAINES (647 pp.)—Odell Shepard and Willard Shepard—Macmillan ($3).

A mass of Indian brawn and “wild masculine beauty,” young Holdfast Uncas Gaines just bent over, tore the 400-lb. cannon from its carriage on the deck. He’d teach old George Ill’s British redcoats to mess with a Connecticut Yankee ship.

As the muscles of his “bronzed back writhed like snakes,” he heaved the cannon overboard. It landed spang in the British boat below. The boat split wide open; King George’s minions gasped and gurgled. “Great God o’ the Mountain,” cried Holdfast, “what a glorious fight!” “Ugh!” grunted one of Holdfast’s Mohegan warriors, proudly eyeing the mighty torso of his chief.

Odell Shepard, Connecticut scholar, politico and Pulitzer Prize biographer (Pedlar’s Progress: The Life of Bronson Al-cott), has collaborated with his son Willard Shepard on this outsized (250,000 words) chunk of historical fiction, in which almost everything happens except the storming of the Alamo and the rape of Lucrece. Holdfast Gaines, despite his name, is a Mohegan Indian, in the direct line of the great King Uncas himself. He is a nephew of Samson Occum—whom Dartmouth men will remember as an Indian protege of Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth’s pious founder. Nathan Hale is Holdfast’s tutor. Among his friends and acquaintances: Daniel Boone, Tecumseh, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark.

Holdfast roams all over the map during the years 1780-1815, getting nowhere in particular but affording Authors Shepard a gaudy chance to goall-out on sea fights, land fights, Indian massacres, pirates, poisoned daggers and messages scrawled in invisible ink.

Readers who look patiently will find authentic U.S. history in Holdfast Gaines, hidden under a growth of dialect as thick as dog hair and the most unabashedly bogus hard-luck love story since the days of J. Fenimore Cooper.