If you are like me and insist on reading through the fine print at the beginning of a book, you’ll find that my novel The Secret History was published by a company called Dog Soldier Publishing. (Of which I am the owner.)
Which prompts a question: Who are the “dog soldiers?”
Dog Soldiers, for one, is the title of a favorite novel by Robert Stone. It also used to be a slang term for infantrymen. Do you remember the blues several soldiers were writing in From Here To Eternity?
Got paid out on Monday
Not a dog soldier no more.
They gimme all that money
So much my pockets is sore
More dough than I can use.
Re-enlistment Blues.
And, of course, there’s the reference in that great John Ford western, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, read by a narrator at the beginning of the film:
“…the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals… riding the outposts of a nation. From Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Startle – they were all the same…”
But to get to the point, the original Dog Soldiers were one of the Cheyenne fighting societies and undoubtedly the most famous, obstinate and savage.
They got their start in the 1830s and eventually came to lead the resistance to the westward expansion of the United States, particularly in what are now the states of Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming, a region where the Cheyenne had settled, many, many decades before. (What I also like about the Dog Soldiers is that they painted themselves and their horses and wore feathered war bonnets.)
Anyway, I think what originally drew me to the Dog Soldiers was the notion that in battle they would stake themselves to a chosen piece of ground by driving a pin into the turf and then attaching themselves to it with a short length of rawhide rope, often decorated with porcupines quills. (I love porcupines, BTW.) In this way they announced their intention to never retreat.
I took that as a metaphor: Just never give up.
Which applies, I think, to many (if not most) instances in life.
