M.M.B. "Marnie" Walsh When M.M.B. Walsh died in late 1996, the children of the South Dakotan poet and novelist discovered manuscripts for two unpublished novels in their mother's effects. The first novel, Grass Heart, had been completed but had been set aside when the author's husband became gravely ill. For reasons of health, the Walshes moved to Arizona. There, and following the death of her husband, Walsh began YellowKnife, laboring on final drafts of what would be her last work until incapacitated by emphysema. Grass Heart and YellowKnife begin and end, respectively, Walsh's epic fictional cycle of the American West. The saga of Grass Heart, Mandan princess and protagonist, encompasses over a half-century of Plains Native American history (approximately 1800-1860), history hitherto undocumented in fiction. Walsh's previously published novels, Dolly Purdo (Putnam, 1975) and Four-Colored Hoop (Putnam, 1976), chronicle Western American life from the 1870s into the 1900s. YellowKnife, titled after Walsh's fictional reservation, an amalgam of the Dakota's Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations, concludes in the 1960s with the story of Walter Blackburn, white heir to a century and a half of destruction and degradation. Walsh's coda to these prose recountings is found in her one published volume of poetry, A Taste of the Knife (now in its fourth printing from Ahsahta Press). This collection's title comes from a Sioux ceremony. The Sioux test a messenger's truthfulness by placing a knife in the messenger's mouth. If the messenger's tongue is uncut while the message is spoken the messenger speaks the truth. The brutal but unbloodied message of Walsh's collection? Of contemporary reservation life. "Good Plume and the Pesthouse" is the episode—not chapter—from Grass Heart published in The Idaho Review. Grass Heart is chapter-less, in the traditional white, European literary sense. Influenced by Native American oral tradition, Walsh fashioned an epic narrative history written in episodes. These are signified by italicized opening words and extra spacing between episodes. In "Good Plume & the Pesthouse," Walsh depicts the fate of Grass Heart's father, Good Plume, and other Native Americans and whites stricken with smallpox in and surrounding Fort St. Catherine on the Missouri River in Mandan territory. While the World Health Organization now reports smallpox eradicated (the last known case of smallpox occurred in 1978). this disease, accidentally introduced by whites, decimated Mandan and other Plains tribes in the 1830s. from The Idaho Review (1999)