By Casey Chalk.

But first a note: Only one day until Elizabeth Mitchell's course on St. Edith Stein and St. John of the Cross! Do yourself a great spiritual favor this Fall and enroll right away. And spend some high-quality time in the presence of two great saints with much to say to us about the riches of the Catholic mystical tradition.

Now for today's column...

Consider this: "In those early times of our American grandfathers and great-grandfathers, two prevailing visions dwelled above their lives. One was the spiritual design of national union which in the Civil War took so much bravery and sacrifice to secure. The other was the continental destiny of the United States which in the conquest and settlement of the West took so much work and love to fulfill."

Bravery, sacrifice, work, love: these are not words one hears very often when it comes to contemporary accounts of American history, and certainly not of westward expansion. One is far more likely to hear about theft, exploitation, racism, and violence.

Yet this is how two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Catholic author Paul Horgan begins his epic 1960 best-selling western A Distant Trumpet, a novel that traces the stories of U.S. army soldiers and their wives, as well as the Apache warriors they encountered in the final days of the American frontier. It's a captivating saga, one that in its honest brutality rivals the greatest westerns of the American imagination, while in its optimistic portrayal of its protagonists offers a welcome (and implicitly Catholic) counter to a genre too often defined by nihilistic cynicism.

In his postscript, Horgan - who was made a papal knight by Pope Pius XII - cites a massive amount of primary and secondary source material for his story, including memoirs, U.S. Government publications of Congressional hearings and reports on Indian affairs and frontier troubles, indemnity claims, military policy and experience, and Surgeon General's records. "This is a historical novel, which means that a period and a scene have been enriched - indeed, largely created - by general reference to known circumstances."

What were those circumstances? U.S. Army officers of varying competence and motives, leading similar enlisted men, many first-generation immigrants from across western Europe, whose first language was not English. A young, idealistic officer is told he must "learn that the army is like any other human institution - it contains all kinds and descriptions of men, capable of every error, just like men on the outside."

Enlisted men served on a dangerous and inhospitable frontier, often far from settled communities, and aware that fierce indigenous warriors freely roamed the wilderness.

Yet Horgan is also impressively knowledgeable about and sympathetic to Apache culture. He lauds their reverence for their ancestral lands and how their warriors possessed an ancient nobility and unquenchable courage. That ferocity sometimes manifested itself in horrific acts, such as torturing soldiers and settlers alike and mutilating the bodies of those they killed.

So terrible were Americans' fear of the Apache that the few women on remote military installations - usually wives of officers and laundresses - had to learn to shoot; if they were in danger of being captured, they were told to use the bullets on themselves.

Nevertheless, reflecting an underlying Catholic ethic, many of the Anglo-American characters make an effort to treat Indians as human persons rather than subhuman savages. This sometimes occurs in circumstances when everything inside such Westerners inclines them to perceive American Indians as so primitive that they lack dignity or rights. (Horgan knew quite a bit about Anglo-Indian relations, winning a Pulitzer for his biography of Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy, a 19th-century missionary to New Mexico.)

Horgan does not ignore the fact that the U.S. government and the Army often treated indigenous peoples miserably. Rather, as he explains, there w...