How Can You Stop a Country from Happening?

Billy J. Stratton examines Stephen Graham Jones’s “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.”

By Billy J. StrattonJune 15, 2025

• Fiction

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES’S latest novel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025), is his most ambitious to date. It follows the extraordinary life of a Blackfeet-turned-vampire whose life is evocatively traced through a variety of names—Weasel Plume, Good Stab, Takes No Scalps, The Fullblood—from the 19th century to the present. Spanning a period marked by the upheavals of westward expansion driven by Manifest Destiny, which brought with it warfare and displacement, as well as the senselessness of buffalo extermination, it’s a harrowing story of loss and vengeance, confession and absolution. Within this traumatic historical framing, Jones provides his own unique take on the story of an iconic monster’s insatiable taste for blood as an uncanny portal to the haunting specter of American genocide.

Related through the narrative form of the epistolary—the same format Bram Stoker utilized for Dracula (1897)—Jones’s rendition is presented as an account of a series of conversations Good Stab has with an aging Lutheran minister, Arthur Beaucarne, in 1912. He preserves the account in his journals because he “feel[s] it [his] duty as an American to attempt to capture these last exhalations of a people who won’t be seen again in the world,” evoking the trope of the “Vanishing Indian.” Adding a religious dynamic, he exalts Good Stab’s account of Blackfeet life as “The Gospel of Good Stab,” sanctifying his transgression of the boundaries between living and the undead. Within the accumulating swell of interrelated texts, the reader is confronted with the simple yet ineffable question that haunts the bloody history of the American West: “Why?”

The anguished query Good Stab poses to this man of God centers specifically on the massacre carried out by the 2nd US Cavalry against a peaceful encampment of the Pikuni (Southern Piegan Blackfeet) led by Chief Heavy Runner on January 23, 1870. This atrocity occurred along the banks of the Bear River—renamed Maria’s River by Meriwether Lewis in honor of his cousin during the Lewis and Clark Expedition—within the traditional boundaries of Nittowsinan, or Blackfeet country, in what is now the state of Montana. Carried out by Major Eugene Baker, this ruthless assault resulted in the deaths of approximately 200 Blackfeet people—the majority of them women, children, and elders. Numerous additional members of the band who had survived Baker’s initial onslaught would perish in the massacre’s aftermath from exposure and starvation.

While large-scale massacres such as those occurring at Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado, the Washita River in Oklahoma, and Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota stand as the most infamous among the scores of similarly monstrous acts directed against native peoples that defile our nation’s past, the Marias Massacre has largely remained in the shadows of history. [NB: In accordance with Gerald Vizenor’s conventions on the use of italics and capitalization in reference to the terms indian and native, but more importantly what this intervention signifies in terms of colonial representation and simulation, “native” and “indigenous” are rendered in lowercase throughout this essay.] This is due not only to the historical “amnesia” Simon J. Ortiz calls out in his preface to from Sand Creek (1981) but also to acts of historical deception and intentional erasure.

The assaults on truth and historical memory evident in the actions and directives of current government officials reveal that such threats to knowledge and a fuller understanding of the past are not relics of a less enlightened day. Instead, they are merely the latest visitation of those forces determined to hamper a collective historical understanding while perverting the core principles of justice and democracy.

In Blackfeet memory, the Marias Massacre and the systematic extermination of buffalo merge into a single apocalyptic moment, representing a catastrophe that continues to reverberate through the generations. As an incident within a larger context of American colonialism, the Marias Massacre recalls a litany of brutal strikes on which the mythological story of the “winning of the West” was built, at a time of renewed expansionist ambitions. Such as they are, the abhorrent historical realities Jones raises through his treatment of this event in this searing new novel aren’t specific to the Blackfeet people but encapsulate the experiences of native and indigenous peoples across the Americas.

Yet, the impacts of these events should not be viewed as instances of mere survival that recall associations with the desperation so often tinged with tragedy and victimry. Instead, the experiences we gain insight to through Good Stab’s indomitable defense of the Blackfeet homeland centered in the Rocky Mountains, which the people refer to as the Backbone of the World, typify an “active sense of presence,” enduring spirit of resistance, and historical agency, which Gerald Vizenor defines as the core constituents of native cultural survivance.

The pivotal question of “why” posed by Good Stab carries within it an expression of utter disbelief at the inhumanity, or what Hannah Arendt diagnosed as the “banality of evil,” to which seemingly normal people all too often seem disposed. It’s a realization that leads inescapably to aporia’s dead end. This is a word the ancient Greeks used to describe an irresolvable impasse in human understanding, or what we might conceive as that place where meaning collapses. Despite its esoteric ring, the notion of aporia supplies a keen vision of actions and behaviors that are the essence of savagery and barbarism performed in the service of “civilization.”

Beyond its unique melding of native cultural history and horror tropes, along with a cast of well-wrought characters, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter succeeds as a meticulously plotted story that brings the traumatic resonances of the Marias Massacre to his readers’ consciousness. Jones accomplishes this in a more explicit and comprehensive way than he has done in previous works, such as his 2008 novel Ledfeather.

In Ledfeather’s unflinching meditation on the ways trauma moves through the generations, the massacre’s abjection is evoked through the memory of a survivor who supplies an agonizing context to the story’s broader exposition of loss and despair: “[T]hen he was running through the sound, the impossible screaming of the spinning gun, the distinct sound of lead impacting flesh, and in the air there was gunpowder smoke, yes, but there was misted blood and bone too. His family’s.”

References to Marias resurface in Jones’s subsequent novel The Only Good Indians (2020). In this tale of violation, vengeance, and redemption, a character named Lewis—an ironic reference to the aforementioned explorer—grapples with guilt after participating in the slaughter of a herd of elk. Through his reckoning with retribution, Lewis is forced to face how his own actions echo this heinous atrocity while continuing to exert its destructive force in the present:

[I]t was probably what it was like a century and more ago, when soldiers gathered up on ridges above Blackfeet encampments to turn the cranks on their big guns, terraform this new land for their occupation. Fertilize it with blood. Harvest the potatoes that would grow there, turn them into baskets of fries, and sell those crunchy cubes of grease back at powwows.

Though the Marias Massacre functions as the gravitational center of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter—influencing our understanding of practically every relationship and incident across the narrative—Jones devotes only a handful of scattered pages to firsthand descriptions of the massacre itself. The stark brevity reflects the restraint demanded by the enormity of a crime that endures in Blackfeet memory, a burden so profound that the horror genre itself becomes the most fitting vessel for its retelling.

One of the inherent challenges with such a build is how, then, to deliver this story to the reader. Enter the found manuscript and the conceit of an aspiring female academic named Etsy, who doesn’t simply supply the contemporary frame for the story but also provides the emotional core. As Jones reveals in his acknowledgments, “she wasn’t just a story-deliverer, she was the story.”

Burdened with the curse of the monstrous undead through a chance encounter with another vampire, Good Stab is made into “a four-legged, but with a man’s memories, as punishment.” From there, Jones crafts a vivid narrative by placing this character in dialogue with a frontier minister, which elevates scenes of terror and grotesqueness beyond the possibilities usually afforded to genre fiction, bestowing the story with a crisp emotional resonance that flows naturally from his characters’ fateful connection.

Furthering Jones’s ongoing formulation of the indigenous gothic, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter traverses some of the same blood-slaked wastes upon which Cormac McCarthy’s gang of historic scalp-hunters plied their fiendish trade in Blood Meridian (1985). Through Jones’s masterful fusion of what Beaucarne reformulates as “the nachzehrer’s dark gospel,” detailing a story that he hopes will reveal “the rocky soil of the human soul,” an intricate literary account centered on historical catastrophe is produced.

Jones’s centering of the story within a native perspective, voicing the impossible promise “that not even one more blackhorn could die,” raises the stakes of the dreadful terror evoked by his vampire’s tortured bloodlust. That it is directed against buffalo hunters and settlers alike elevates Jones’s narrative above McCarthy’s detached and nihilistic viewpoint.

The obscene nature of Baker’s crimes, and their acceptance as a right response within the context of dominant colonial history, leaves Good Stab with no recourse but to vengeance. Given the enormity of loss to which he bears witness, he is driven to desperation at the Blackfeet’s ongoing loss of land and culture, along with the erasure of their very past: “I don’t even know what to fight anymore […] The Backbone is a playground now, for napikwan to come look at. The Pikuni live in lodges at the gates and the Bear isn’t the Bear anymore, so even Heavy Runner is being forgotten.”

Aside from the violence Good Stab inflicts in his futile struggle against invading settlers, whom James Welch refers to as “seizers” in his novel Fools Crow (1986), a vital intertext for Jones’s story, he proves to be much more than a mere monster. Although condemned to an existence worse than that of a “Person-Eater like the Pikuni have always known about,” Good Stab never loses his humanity. Indeed, through it all, he retains the capacity to mourn deeply, as he screams thunderously and cries tears of blood in anguish at the unending abuses he seems helpless to stop.

For much of the story, Good Stab directs his vampiric powers against this strain of monsters spawned by the greed, fear, and hatred inherent to Manifest Destiny, which he plaintively affirms “tore out the heart of [his] people.” Beaucarne listens but seems unable to truly understand his perspective, as he states in response that “you can’t stop a country from happening.” The cold indifference apparent in Beaucarne’s belief that native people could not coexist with Euro-American settlers reinforces the logic of colonialism and the genocidal policies it spawned.

This realization leads us inexorably to the chilling final meeting between Good Stab and Beaucarne, conveying a powerful lesson about the possibilities for justice and forgiveness in a world that can appear so lacking in both. Given the hostility and violence currently being directed at people of color, the marginalized, and the poor in today’s divisive social and political climate, Jones’s message is one we can’t afford to dismiss.

As Good Stab, Beaucarne, and Etsy bring readers to a reckoning with these truths through their individual responses to the enormity of the cruelties and crimes committed against native peoples, while also visited upon each other, the deeper message Jones brings to the surface through his story of inhumanity, monstrosity, and redemption becomes visible. With The Buffalo Hunter Hunter being hailed as “a remarkably well-wrought work of historical horror” and “Jones’ horror masterpiece,” readers are sure to revel and gasp in awe at this powerful and haunting tale of loss and survival, of the entanglements of memory, history, and truth.

What’s more, it’s a heartening reminder that the books and stories that give meaning to our lives and memories, endowing our identities with the vital inheritance of diverse experience, never exist in isolation, and neither do we.