Zeke and Ned is the story of Ezekiel Proctor and Ned Christie, the last Cherokee warriors -- two proud, passionate men whose remarkable quest to carve a future out of Indian Territory east of the Arkansas River after the Civil War is not only history but legend. Played out against an American West governed by a brutal brand of frontier justice, this intensely moving saga brims with a rich cast of indomitable and utterly unforgettable characters such as Becca, Zeke's gallant Cherokee wife, and Jewel Sixkiller Proctor, whose love for Ned makes her a tragic heroine.
At once exuberant and poignant, bittersweet and brilliant, Zeke and Ned takes us deep into the hearts of two extraordinary men who were willing to go the distance for the bold vision they shared -- and for the women they loved.
Library Journal
McMurty and Ossana employ a technique they used successfully in Pretty Boy Floyd (LJ 9/1/94), in which a historical character of legendary proportions become the hero of a modern work of fiction. This work focuses on Zeke Proctor and Ned Christic, Cherokee Indians who became folk heroes in the Oklahoma Territory during the 1890s. Unforgiven wrongs that festered since the removal of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia in the 1830s become a moving force in the story of a casual love affair gone awry and the bloody feud and even bloodier legal actions that transpire when federal judges intervene. McMurty paints Zeke's courtship, murder trial, and marriage debacle with broad humor, and Ossana takes the story home with Ned's four-year standoff of armed federal marshals dispatched to take him dead or alive. A wonderfully readable historical novel that furthers the understanding of the Native-white disputes of the last century. Recommended for most collections.
--Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois University Library, Carbondale, Illinois
Susan Dodd
McMurtry and Ossana have conspired to make a novel that is…full [of] power and grace…[and] liable to break your heart.
—The Washington Post Book World
David Hendricks
This team can write. In fact, Zeke and Ned is astonishing…a literary achievement of high order for McMurtry and Ossana. May they write many more.
— San Antonio Express-News
Joyce Maynard
Part folk song, part tall tale…wonderful, richly textured storytelling.
— Los Angeles Times Book Review
Kirkus Reviews
Pulitzer Prize winner McMurtry (Dead Man's Walk, 1995, etc.) and his collaborator on Pretty Boy Floyd (1994) attempt to bestow mythic stature on a maverick American Indian in this for-want-of-a- nail yarn set in 1870s Oklahoma.
A half-breed member of the Cherokee Nation, Zeke Proctor is a hard-drinking, happy-go-lucky smallholder. Although married and the father of five, he is surreptitiously bedding the local miller's wife. When her aggrieved husband, a white man, takes revenge by shoveling weevils into Zeke's ground corn, the Civil War vet accidentally shoots and kills his paramour while gunning for the cuckold. Afraid of being hauled before a white judge and swiftly condemned, Zeke takes shelter with his Cherokee son-in-law Ned Christie, claiming the right to be judged by his own people. On the day of his trial in an Indian tribunal, the departed's vindictive brothers precipitate a massacre that leaves 12 more dead. Acquitted in a sham proceeding, Zeke is eventually granted amnesty by President Ulysses S. Grant. By contrast, Ned (unjustly blamed by white officials for the courthouse bloodbath and subsequent murder of a federal marshal) is forced to take to the hills. At the cost of an eye and his young wife's unborn child, he repulses the first posse sent to bring him in. After this violent, embittering brush with the law, the wanted man takes a warrior's vow, refuses to speak English, and digs in for a long siege. Ned holds out for years until a crew of outlaws with badges manages to blast him from his mountain redoubt, albeit not before he becomes an immortal legend among his fatalistic people and in the wider world.
A mock-heroic tale of culture shock and sudden death along our westering frontier in which the principals (whether red or white) are portrayed as simple-minded primitives.
From the Publisher
Joyce Maynard Los Angeles Times Book Review Part folk song, part tall tale...wonderful, richly textured storytelling.Susan Dodd The Washington Post Book World McMurtry and Ossana have conspired to make a novel that is...full [of] power and grace...[and] liable to break your heart.
David Hendricks San Antonio Express-News This team can write. In fact, Zeke and Ned is astonishing...a literary achievement of high order for McMurtry and Ossana.
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