1958. A horrific road death on the edge of a small reservation in central Wyoming sets into motion years of pent-up recrimination by the people of nearby Suncreek. Its sheriff threatens to use the event to make an example of the teenage driver, Nelson Antelope. Agent Tim Hubbard of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a Korean War vet who came here as a retreat from harder realities, decides to thwart that effort.
Hubbard begins the difficult search for Nelson Antelope but can only get there through understanding the century of friction that has boiled in this remote and arid place. The white residents of Suncreek deeply resent the Towhoc tribe’s windfall – oil deposits that have turned the desolate reservation into something of sudden value. But the tribe struggles with its newfound money, which has brought them a modicum of wealth for which they have been swindled and abused.
Hubbard journeys deep into a reservation he has never truly known. In its recesses, he has moments that are dreamlike in their dark truths and gothic in their grim lessons. Despised by the tribe and the whites alike, Hubbard must understand how he came to be a stranger in this strange place, hiding in a uniform without knowing what he has become. In his pang of duty, he sets into motion conflict and violence. His marriage is crumbling and he has lost faith in himself. He begins to push back against the judgment, greed, resentment, and emptiness he sees all around him, but also sees what lies deep within himself.
A batch of dusty reports from a long-ago agent named Dorrance tell a parallel story and inform Hubbard’s own. Dorrance exits the Civil War wounded and discharged and finds work as a correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. Post-war, Greeley recruits Dorrance to lead an ambitious, if naïve, effort at Utopianism. He works in Colorado and then Wyoming, reluctantly stewarding a small tribe adjusting to the first shocks of internment.
Hard Margins is about captive people and their desire to escape their fates, and of the captors who desire equally to escape theirs.
