From Kirkus Reviews
A young Indian boy coming of age in the late-19th-century Oklahoma Territory and Arkansas is depicted in this sensitive but often plodding and listless novel by the author of The Assemblers (1986). As a teenager, Tom Freshour, a mixed-blood Choctaw Indian, is brought by the orphanage where he has been raised to Fort Smith, Arkansas, to witness, along with other foundlings, one of the last executions ordered by Isaac Parker, the famed ``hanging judge.'' Spotted by a local merchant in need of young boys to serve as couriers, Tom and two of his friends are hired, and the headmaster of the orphanage is just as glad to be rid of three mouths to feed. Attached to a traveling hardware drummer named W.W. ``Jake'' Jaycox, Tom travels between the new Oklahoma Territory, the Indian Nations, and Fort Smith to help sell hardware and collect debts. Like any hero of a coming-of-age tale, Tom discovers the size of the world, the allure and incomprehensibility of the other sex, and, eventually, something about the nature of good and evil. He finds in the old salesman the only friend he's ever really known. Only gradually does the deep cruelty of the church-run orphanage where he was brought up emerge. Stripes on his back testify to the accuracy of the book's title. A freak accident brings the mysterious and alluring Samantha ``Sam'' King into the lives of Tom and his mentor. Despite its sometimes grim subject matter and Morgan's attempt to evoke a sense of historical gravity in his portrait of the American West on the cusp of modernity, this is a surprisingly inconsequential novel. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From the Author
"With the Whipping Boy, Speer Morgan delivers a rollicking page-turner. I read it once with a fierce compulsion to find out what would happen, a second time for the pleasure of the language and craft. --Wally Lamb
From the Inside Flap
The Oklahoma Territory was a bleak, brutal place in 1894, and Speer Morgan's compelling novel begins, appropriately enough, with a botched public hanging. Witnessing this unsettling ritual is Tom Freshour, a striking half-Indian who knows nothing of the world beyond the orphanage where he's been raised by a sadistic minister. But Tom is about to get a bracing education, thanks especially to two people: Jake Jaycox, an aging hardware salesman who takes Tom under his wing, and Samantha King, a beautiful, mysterious woman who attaches herself to the two men and promptly seduces Tom. The wild and bawdy adventures of this colorful trio begin with a horrific flood, but the story turns darker when Tom and his companions run afoul of a scheme to steal thousands of acres from depression-ravaged farmers. Before long, they are being chased by a hired killer; meanwhile, Tom's searing memories of his childhood drive him back to the orphanage and a violent confrontation with the man who made him a whipping boy. Ultimately, Tom learns that the real villains in this unforgiving territory are not the outlaws with six-guns but the heartless businessmen who will do anything to amass wealth and property. In the tradition of Pete Dexter's Deadwood, this is a richly imagined yarn about frontier life by a superb storyteller. Remarkable for its suspense, rich characterization, and seamless prose, the Whipping Boy is both a hugely entertaining tale and an utterly fresh evocation of a legendary American landscape.
From the Back Cover
Here is the real West in its lurid twilight--the Oklahoma Indian Territory when the last land grab was under way. Here too is a good mystery, a bawdy romance, and characters with blood, not ink, in their veins. Every vignette of frontier life--flood, train wreck, blizzard, bank, brother, or church--is authentic. Forget L'Amour; what really happened is so much better, and done here by a better hand. ----Will Baker, author of Hell, West, and Crooked
About the Author
Born and raised in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Speer Morgan is the author of five books. His first novel, published in 1979, was set in Arkansas and the Indian Territory during the late 1800s. Among his other four novels, three have been set in Arkansas and Oklahoma - one in 1894, another in 1934, and another in the 1980s. His first novel, Belle Starr, is currently under option for movie production. The Whipping Boy (1994) was aided by an NEA Individual Fellowship in fiction. His novel The Freshour Cylinders (1998), won Foreword Magazine's Silver Award for the best book of the year. It also won an American Book Award in 1999. Morgan teaches in the English Department at the University of Missouri where he has edited The Missouri Review for 30 years.
