Laughing Whitefish by Robert Traver

It was one of those glorious Northern evenings I was learning to love, the tall reddish sky shot and aflame with great soaring rays and reflections from the dying sun. The Creation must have been something like this, I thought. As my rented horse plodded along the dusty ore-stained road I reflected about this elusive thing called success and material attainment. Who was ever to say with confidence that the Marjis of this world were failures? By and by I found myself thinking about the complex new legal situation in which I suddenly found myself--my first big case--thinking about it and all of its ramifications, thinking, too, about my new client, the withdrawn and aloof but strangely exciting young Indian woman, Laughing Whitefish.

Robert Traver was the pen name of John Voelker, a distinguished judge from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan who parlayed his work into a career of popular early legal fiction, including the novel Anatomy of a Murder, later turned into a film by Otto Preminger. Laughing Whitefish, like Anatomy of a Murder, is based on a real legal case that occurred in the Upper Peninsula, though in this case, in the late 19th century: an Ojibwe woman named Charlotte Kobogum sued a mining company for the shares owed to her father, Marji Kobogum, promised to him for showing the mining company the location of a vein of ore. Charlotte's claim hinged on whether or not she could be proved to be her father's legal heir: she was born of his second polygamous wife and raised, after that wife's death, by a third.

To this story, Traver adds a green young defense attorney, William Poe, who has the case fall in his lap after another attorney comes to him wishing to wash his hands of the case. Poe is eager to help the young woman, whose Ojibwe name (in the novel--I don't think in real life, but I could be wrong) is Laughing Whitefish, also the name of a river near Marquette. Poe's eagerness becomes mixed up with an increasing affection for Laughing Whitefish, who returns his affections by the novel's end--a progressive-enough marriage for the civilized outpost of Marquette in the late 19th century, and maybe even in the mid-century when Traver wrote the novel.

Laughing Whitefish is breezy, readable, and largely artless. It suffers from being, in a way, ahead of its time: at the time it was written, we were not yet awash in legal dramas, and the courtroom scenes feel stagey and quaint. Similarly, the legal genius of Poe's ultimate strategy suffers from being entirely obvious with the aid of modern hindsight. Seeing that the opposing counsel tries again and again to settle, he senses that there is something that he's missed about the case that makes it winnable. That turns out to be the supremacy of U.S. treaty law: the American treaty with the Ojibwe, which promises recognition of all traditional Ojibwe relationships, ratifies Laughing Whitefish's claim to be her father's rightful heir. That Poe has to "discover" this bedrock fact of Indian law suggests, perhaps, that this jurisprudence was not quite obvious to everyone in the late 19th or even the early 20th century; after all, the United States has always had a way of forgetting stipulations in its supposedly "supreme" treaties when convenient. Still, Laughing Whitefish is interesting in the way it captures a moment in the changing legal landscape of the frontier, and it's hard not to see the symbolism in the generational shift from the drunk, dissolute Marji to his civilized, shrewd daughter, Laughing Whitefish--Charlotte.