Sundown by John Joseph Mathews

First published: 1934

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1880’s to 1930

Locale: Osage Indian country, near the Oklahoma-Kansas border

Principal Characters:

• Challenge (Chal) Windzer, a mixed-blood Osage caught between cultures
• John Windzer, Chal’s optimistic father
• Chal’s mother, a traditional Osage woman
• Cousin Ellen, a stereotypically censorious white woman
• Blo Daubeney, a foolish female college student whom Chal idolizes
• Running Elk, a friend whom Chal watches degenerate
• Jep Newberg, a leading merchant
• Charlie Fancher, Chal’s supercilious university pal
• Professor Granville, Chal’s friend and, later, flight instructor

The Novel

John Joseph Mathews’s Sundown traces the disintegration of Chal Windzer’s character. Chal is a mixed-blood Osage Indian torn by conflicts within Osage tribal values and confused by both the aggressiveness and the vices of the white Americans whom he encounters. The chronicle of Chal’s life ends with his decline into boastful, passive dreaming, womanizing, and alcoholism. Chal becomes a sad caricature of the manhood exalted in the ideals of the Osage’s warrior culture.

Chal’s life of declining faith and growing insecurities unfolds through sixteen chapters. The first five of these cover his boyhood through his entrance into the university. Chal was born in the 1890’s, when the great god of the Osage still ruled the land defined by the Caney and Arkansas rivers, centered on Pawhuska, near the Oklahoma-Kansas border. He enjoys an idyllic youth as part of an animistic culture. He interacts closely with prairie nature and leads a life nicely balanced between contemplation and action.

Even in boyhood, however, Chal’s disillusionment is progressive. It is synonymous with his personal contacts with whites—merchants, teachers, Bible thumpers, government officials, and oilmen—drawn by opportunities to convert the “heathen,” to exploit Indian lands, and to profit from the discovery and swift expansion of the Oklahoma oil fields after 1897. His disenchantment stems also from familial circumstances. His father is a sanguine white man with enduring faith in “the guv’mint” and his mother is a silent Osage woman who judges her son’s character in the Osage way and sees little good in white culture.

As a mixed-blood, Chal also reflects a deep division with tribal ranks, one which had been confirmed by tribal councils in the 1860’s and which thereafter consigned mixed-bloods to inferior position relative to full-bloods. In addition, by the time Chal reaches adolescence, the undreamed-of wealth accruing to the Osage from government annuities and (to a vastly greater extent) from oil royalties is wreaking its own havoc. Chal’s youthful companions, like many Osage, lacking incentive and business acumen, become profligates. Chal’s separation from them is widened by his entrance into the university, the subject of chapters 7 through 11.

Chal’s university career has little to do with learning. Led on by his supercilious and patronizing “pal,” Charlie Fancher, he succumbs almost immediately to the age-old frivolities: fraternities, football, cars, girls, drinking, and parties. Throughout these activities, he realizes that he does not fit; he is a curiosity, and he moves among people who smile with their teeth but not with their hearts. He is ensnared in a vapid, superficial world. Only his chance encounter with Professor Granville, a wise, understanding Englishman who represents what white culture could be like—but is not— affords a contrast to the inanities to which he has lent himself.

The American entrance into World War I offers Chal a way out when Granville suggests that Chal act on his plans to participate by joining the air service. He does so and wins his commission. More significant, in flying he finds a calling to which he is well adapted. He is reunited with Granville, who, having distinguished himself in the Royal Air Force, is Chal’s flight instructor. Yet at war’s end, despite his pride in his flying ability and his enjoyment of the notoriety brought to him by his commission, Chal finds little to do and resigns from the service. His father’s death, meanwhile, has enriched him. He has no need to work, though he briefly toys with thoughts of business and investment. He watches the successful businessmen of his boyhood fail, however, and, with his own wealth in hand, he settles for a life of idleness. He spends his time driving through town in his “long, powerful red roadster,” killing time with young people in the local drugstore, occasionally dating, and—as the years pass— succumbing to alcoholism. Chapters 13 through 16 are thus the final record of his decline, epitomized by his mother’s silent judgment on his childishness and failure.

The Characters

Sundown is both a chronicle and a didactic exercise. Mathews’s characters are thereby denied some of their potential dimensions so that the author can better convey his principal message: Namely that because of their values, the Osage are victims of the dubious concept of “progress” as embodied in white American society.

Chal, Mathews’s mixed-blood protagonist, exemplifies the degradation that befell most American Indian cultures, unable as they were to maintain tribal integrity in the face of white incursions into their lands and values. Chal’s heart looks in two directions. On the one hand, he profoundly enjoys and respects the fraternity with nature taught by the Osage’s full-blooded elders; in a more specific way, he seeks to make his Osage mother proud of him within her traditional frame of reference. Yet on the other hand, he is drawn by the positive, confident, and assertive views of John Windzer, his white father, who doggedly persists in believing that the government will rectify the manifest injustices and dangers to which the Osage are exposed by the white people flooding into their midst. Chal is unsuited to function positively in either world, and he is confused by the attractions and repulsions of each.

While Chal’s boyhood reactions to several white characters—merchants such as Jep Newberg and Mr. Fancher, teachers such as Miss Hoover, Christian do-gooders such as Cousin Ellen, and oilmen such as Osage Dubois—are negative, his serious distrust of whites comes after his entrance into the university. There he is taken in tow by Charlie Fancher, a know-it-all whom Mathews has created to emphasize the inanity and insincerity of wealthy, privileged white people. Lacking the substance to be genuinely bad, Fancher exposes Chal to continuous social exploitation. Fancher’s female counterpart, the narcissistic Blo Daubeney, with whom Chal becomes infatuated, furthers his discomfiture in white university society by using him as a pawn in her dating and sexual gambits. Worse, Chal is soon abandoned to Fancher and Daubeney amid his growing disaffection with student life: Two of his boyhood Osage friends (like Chal they were recruited principally to play football) suddenly pack their trunks and depart for home.

The sole white character presented as engaging, strong, and admirable is Granville. Mathews uses him to underscore the perspective of Chal’s mother—that white civilization had its virtues, but only at its European sources, before it was corrupted in its transition to America. Granville, the Englishman, is brave, gentle, courteous, and wise. He talks and smiles with his heart. Moreover, he leads Chal into his only positive experience in the white world: flying. Nevertheless, like all of Sundown’s characters, he tends to be a two-dimensional stereotype, the bearer of a heavy thematic burden.

Critical Context

Although Sundown is a semiautobiographical novel, its author did not follow the sad route of his protagonist, Chal Windzer. Mathews, like fellow Osages Clarence Tinker, Sylvester Tinker, and Maria Tallchief, distinguished himself in several ways. He was a pilot in World War I. Early in the postwar years, he was graduated from the University of Oklahoma and pursued study at Sewanee, the University of Oxford, and the University of Geneva. After a few years in ranching and real estate, he rejoined the Oklahoma Osage, became a tribal councilman, and was soon recognized as one of the Osage’s principal spokespeople and their preeminent historian.

Publication of his Wah’Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road (1932) brought him and the Osage national attention. It was the first university press book to be chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. (A paperback edition was republished by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1981.) Appearing two years later, Sundown was a literary plea for public acknowledgment of the Osage’s fate and, by implication, of the plight of most American Indians. By the early 1930’s, the Osages, like millions of other Americans caught in the grip of the Great Depression, had fallen on hard times, though they remained far less impoverished than most American Indians. The “Great Frenzy,” the oil boom of the 1920’s, had collapsed, and royalties had diminished to a trickle. A series of related and widely publicized murders, the “Osage Reign of Terror,” deepened the pall over reservation life. However traumatic, these events posed opportunities for Mathews, since the entire nation was reexamining its traditional values.

Mathews’s literary and historical skills, joined to the talents of others such as John Collier, an American Indian whom President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and Sylvester Tinker, helped to win substantial appropriations for Indian Emergency Conservation Work. Far more important, particularly since Mathews was keenly aware of his tribe’s dissolution, were his contributions in setting the stage for passage of the Wheeler-Howard Bill, enacted in 1934 as the Indian Reorganization Act. Ostensibly repudiating past assimilationist policies, the act acknowledged the intrinsic worth of American Indian cultures and sought to reestablish tribal values and revitalize tribal life. To a considerable degree it was successful.

Meanwhile, Mathews continued with his Osage histories, which were completed in his beautiful and masterful The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (1961), perhaps the finest American Indian history produced for any tribe.

Bibliography

Hunter, Carol. “The Protagonist as a Mixed-Blood in John Joseph Mathews’ Novel: Sundown.” American Indian Quarterly 6 (Fall/Winter, 1982): 319-337. Author Hunter, herself a mixed-blood Osage, here analyzes the experiences of Mathews that encouraged him to create Chal Windzer. Hunter, a specialist in Osage mythology, brings interesting insights to bear on this aspect of Mathews’s work. A useful perspective, especially since Mathews was himself an expert on Osage myths.

Mathews, John Joseph. “John Joseph Mathews: A Conversation.” Interview by Guy Lodgson. Nimrod 16 (April, 1972): 70-75. A rare pleasure. Articulate as he was, Mathews tells little about himself on the record. This is a valuable dialogue because Lodgson interviewed Mathews after he had completed his major writings. Charming and revealing.

Mathews, John Joseph. The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961. A beautiful and masterful study. Drawing on recollections that he coaxed from tribal elders, Mathews skillfully reconstructs the ethnohistory of his people. It is therefore a history written from an Osage perspective, but a balanced and objective one. The symbolisms embodied in it allow comparisons with Joseph Campbell’s studies.

Mathews, John Joseph. Talking to the Moon: Wildlife Adventures on the Plains and Prairies of Osage Country. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945. This was Mathews’s own favorite among his writings, and it is a delight to read. It is based on memories of his boyhood among the blackjack pine, the red bank lands, and the prairie wildlife in the Oklahoma-Kansas Osage country. Reissued in paperback by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1979, the year of Mathews’s death.

Warrior, Robert Allen. Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994. Compares and contrasts the treatment of American Indian sovereignty and survival in the works of two of the most acclaimed American Indian writers, Vine Deloria, Jr., and John Joseph Mathews. This study goes far beyond the assumption that representation of myths from the oral tradition is all there is to Native American literature.

Wilson, Terry P. “Osage Oxonian: The Heritage of John Joseph Mathews.” The Chronicles of Oklahoma 59, no. 3 (1981): 264-293. This essay adduces all the reasons why Mathews, the distinguished warrior, intellectual, scholar, and tribal leader could serve as a role model for other American Indians. Not all of the Osage missed opportunities.

Wilson, Terry P. The Underground Reservation: Osage Oil. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. An academic study that is well researched and well written. Its background materials include Mathews’s contributions, but it goes beyond them. Mathews concluded his study with the opening of the twentieth century, while Wilson updates through the 1970’s. Good information on the Oklahoma land rush, the “Great Frenzy,” “the Osage Reign of Terror,” the Depression, and federal policies relevant to the Osage.