David Allen Cates | Freeman Walker

Published: March 9, 2009

When he was seven years old, Jimmy Gates was freed by his white slave-owning father, and sent across the Atlantic to an English boarding school “with a rolled up copy of the Declaration of Independence that I could not read.” He spends the rest of this spirited, sprawling novel trying to make sense of his father’s parting wisdom:

“We all suffer, we are all going to die, we are not in control, we do not live for ourselves, and we are free.”

His search for his slave mother takes him back to America at age 18 and into the heart of the Civil War, where he’s both fighter and – when stripped of his “free” papers – slave. Burdened by the terrible choice he made to buy his own freedom, Gates takes a new name, Freeman Walker, and heads West, to “the breathing, cackling stink” of Last Best Chance City, where he joins a throng of miners hunting for gold.

But freedom still proves illusive when he’s unsuccessfully lynched and stripped of his newfound wealth. His savior arrives in the unlikely form of Colonel Cornelius O’Keefe – an Irish rebel and Union Army officer named acting governor of the territory. (Cates tips his hat in the Author’s Note to Thomas Francis Meagher – the Irish revolutionary who served as acting governor of Montana Territory – as inspiration for O’Keefe.)

Together, O’Keefe, Walker and the half-breed trapper Belly embark upon a quixotic quest for justice in a land where the omnipotent Committee decides who lives or dies and natives are scalped for bounty.

“Freeman Walker is embedded in American history and brilliantly told in a voice which is idiomatic, articulate and profoundly straightforward. David Allan Cates gives us a vivid story about complex characters, a novel of gripping consequence,” writes author William Kittredge.

Cates, the executive director of Missoula Medical Aid, also wrote X out of Wonderland and Hunger in America. His new novel is riveting and sad, satisfying and eccentric.

– Kristi Niemeyer