1942: THE MATCHLOCK GUN, by Walter D. Edmonds, with illustrations by Paul Lantz
Edward watched intently as his father struggled into the blue uniform coat that he had had made when he was elected captain of the Guilderland militia.
Jesus Christ. Okay, well, let's start with a funny video to try and put you in a good mood, here's the Muppet Swedish Chef making popcorn, my daughters and I love this one:
That was fun, right? Here’s everything that happens in The Matchlock Gun, which is fifty pages long. It’s 1756, during the French and Indian war. We’re in upstate New York, which is still a British colony caught in a turf war against the French, who are being assisted by the indigenous Americans. Teunis Van Alstyne, the patriarch of a family of Dutch settlers, joins up with the British-controlled militia to keep watch for “marauding Indians”, and leaves his wife and kids to sit tight at home. Teunis takes his musket with him and leaves behind a giant, clunky, largely ornamental “matchlock” Spanish-made, family heirloom gun at home. Why a Spanish-made family-heirloom gun in a Dutch immigrant household? In his foreword to the novel, author Walter D. Edmonds wrote that:
“It was not unusual to find Spanish guns in Holland, for the Spaniards had once invaded that country and believed they had conquered it. That is something no one should believe, for the Dutch are never good at staying beaten. In fact when you say ‘Doesn’t that beat the Dutch?’ you mean, ‘Isn’t that just about incredible?’”
I had never heard the phrase “Doesn’t that just beat the Dutch?” before, and realized later that Edmonds made this comment two years before the Dutch were under full military occupation by the Nazis. I’m getting sidetracked: Edward, Teunis’ ten-year-old son, unofficially becomes the man of the house while his father goes off on an injun-killin’ raid, and it’s a good thing he does, because the Indians, as it turns out, will break through the militia lines and start raiding homes. Mama and Edward hatch a plan to scare the Indians away and keep themselves and the other children safe: Mama will go out and scout for bloodthirsty savages, and Edward will figure out how to load and fire the gun into the air on her signal so that the loud blast will scare the invaders away. The Indians start approaching:
“There were five of them, dark shapes on the road, coming from the brick house. They hardly looked like men, the way they moved. They were trotting, stooped over, first one and then another coming up, like dogs sifting up to the scent of food.”
Author, librarian, Cree tribe member, and American Library Association Equity Award winner Doris Seale, who did not attend her own 2001 ceremony to receive the ALA Equity Award because she would have had to cross a picket line to do so, described the above passage as “one of the worst descriptions of Native people in children’s literature, certainly in the 20th Century.”
Sorry, I’m getting sidetracked again. But rest assured the picture that follows this passage is also very bad:
The savages chase after Mama and eventually throw a tomahawk into her shoulder. She shouts out her signal, Edward lights the gun, and there’s a massive blast which knocks him off of his feet. The blast ends up killing three of the Indians, and the other two are frightened away. Mama survives.
When the militiamen come home, they find Edward sitting with his sister “between their mother and the dead Indians, watching the house burn, and kept warm by its heat. Trudy [the sister] grew sleepy, after a while, and lost her interest in the dead Indians. She was no longer afraid of them.” Edward reflects on the gun that saved his life, and how his great grandfather brought it across the Atlantic, and how “he was glad he had remembered to save it. Such a wonderful gun to show his grandchildren, maybe.” The militiamen rejoice at Edward’s courage and ingenuity, pointing out that “you’ve killed more than all the rest of us put together!” Hooray, the Indians were killed by a child with a giant gun, roll the credits.
In the jacket copy of the edition of the book I picked up from my library, which appears to be a 1969 printing, I found a quote from the author, who says:
“I want my readers to get out of my books a sense of the relation of history to the present day. History is often taught as a study of dead things and people; or else, and worse, from the debunking angle. What I want to show are the qualities of mind and spirit of plain, ordinary people, who after all carry the burden of human progress. I want to know about people, how they lived, what they hoped for, what they feared. I want to know what it was like to be born into this time or that, and what a man left behind when he died.”
This quote is immediately followed by the sentence “So Walter Edmonds shows American boys and girls the brave heritage which young Edward Van Alstyne left behind for them to carry on.” Here’s what Doris Seale said when writing about the novel:
“This book was bad enough for 1941. Now it has been chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities, in cooperation with the American Library Association, for its “We the People Bookshelf on Courage,” in order “to encourage young people to read and understand great literature while exploring themes in American history.” These brooks chosen are said to be expressions of themes “that are integral parts of American culture, and to represent the rich texture of the American heritage.” The Matchlock Gun is a perfect choice for this list, but perhaps not exactly in the way the NEH intended, because it eulogizes an American past in which the indigenous populations were regarded as sub-human, and every effort made to exterminate them. That this book has been consistently in print for 63 years and is now on a recommended list says something about American culture that some might not care to look at more closely.”
I don’t think I’ll shock you when I say that I’m going to side with Seale on this one. But she’s making a good point here: The Matchlock Gun is horrifying and appalling (and mercifully short), but it is in no way an outlier. And the thing is, Edmonds’ statement is technically correct, too: this book absolutely does show what was important to Americans at the time it was written, and what continued to be important for decades after, and is still pretty important to a lot of people and how they view the world and their history. And all of that is the bigger horror story than the actual book itself.
The Matchlock Gun isn’t one of the better-known Newbery medalists in my generation, but this is not an obscure book. It was continuously in print for at least 63 years - so was A Wrinkle In Time - and that, combined with the fact that it has a Newbery on the cover, combined with the fact that the National Endowment for the Humanities and the ALA honored it further, suggest that it sold a whole bunch of copies, was read by a whole bunch of people, and got taught in a whole bunch of classrooms. It may not be one of the more famous Newbery winners now, but Caddie Woodlawn is, and it also depicts indigenous Americans as bloodthirsty savages (albeit, incredibly, more charitably than Edmonds did). The best-case scenario you can hope for in children’s literature, apparently, is a more paternalistic depiction of indigenous Americans that hearkens back to a simpler time when they were still alive, and elides the reasons that they’re not alive anymore. For that, you could turn to Island Of The Blue Dolphins or Waterless Mountain. And those are just the books that won the medal, became famous, and sold a bunch of copies. Countless more were written, and that they were written at all reveals what we valued, what stories we taught our children in school, what lessons we wanted to teach about who Americans were supposed to be. So when I talk about The Matchlock Gun - or when a much more qualified person like Seale criticizes it - I’m not talking about extrapolating some sort of deeper meaning from some book nobody’s heard of. I’m talking about what I’ve seen after reading eighty-some books that we decided were the absolute best that we could pass on to our children so they can learn about what we valued.
Well, what we valued was violence and conquest. We valued people who stood their ground and were unafraid to shoot to kill when a stranger was running towards them. We valued going out and taking more and more and more from the people who were already there, claiming it for ourselves just because it was easy and our side was the one with the guns. That’s in a children’s book from the forties. And the thirties. And the twenties. And the sixties. And you already know where I’m going with this: it’s still what we value today, what too many of us care about, more so than our collective responsibility to one another. In recent years, the Newbery has gone to a wider range of stories from a wider range of authors with a wider range of personal and professional experience, and maybe the children growing up today will hear better stories that teach them better lessons about who we can be. I pray that this is the case, because things in this world feel like they’re getting more dire by the day, and we all need to learn some new stories, fast. But as for this story, well, The Matchlock Gun is a dark story, a dark book, a dark literary tradition from a dark country that will leave your soul in a dark place.
Sorry that things got so bleak. In conclusion, here is another Swedish Chef video:
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1956 medalist, Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham.