Commentary on When the Legends Die Essay

When the Legends Die by Hall Borland, a Native American, in the 1930s Thomas Black Bull is orphaned at a young age and left to live alone in the old ways in the wilderness. Toms life changes drastically when a fellow Ute Indian, Blue Elk, comes, finds, and tricks him in coming to live at a reservation school to learn the way of the white people. From this point forward, all the people in his life force him to abandon his Indian way of life. Throughout the book, Thomas struggles to forget his meaningful childhood life as an Indian while being forced to live a life in a white mans world which he hates. Thomas connection to who he is cut off when Blue Elk burns down his lodge, when Thomas rides broncos to death, and when Thomas tracks and plans on killing the grizzly bear. Peace and freedom only come to Tom when he has a spiritual experience which reveals truth to him.

One of the ways that Thomas is cut off from his life as a Native American is when Blue Elk burns down his lodge in the forest. Thomas runs away from the Mission School and returns to his mountain home. When he arrives he expects to find his brother the bear and the rest of his animal family, but instead he finds a charred circle (70) where his lodge used to be. Tom then stood among the ashes and whispered the sorrow chantFor small griefs you shout, but for the big griefs you whisper or say nothing. The big griefs must be borne alone, inside (70.) He knows that it was Blue Elk who did it because there is not one item of worth left behind, not even the knife Toms mother gave him. Blue Elk is well known among the people of the reservation as a person who will do anything for money. When he is asked, You would sell your own grandmother, wouldnt you? Blue Elk seriously states, My grandmother is dead (54.) When Toms lodge is burned, he loses his connection to the wilderness, and he also loses his connection to his family.

Thomas tries to cut off his connection to his old life and his anger by riding broncos. Tom rides broncos because when he does he feels that he is the boss, which is ironic because in the end all the broncos that he has ridden will have ruined his body. Meo, an Aztec Indian and former bronc rider, tells Tom that in the end We are all eaten. If [the bean] has a rumble to make, where will he make it? In the belly of the one who eats him (106.) Tom rides the horses to try dn remove the hate he feels for his life. This means that no matter how hard we try something else will always have the control.

Tom lastly tries to remove the last pieces of his life that remain by killing a grizzly bear. While working as a shepherd in the mountains where he grew up, he encounters a bear which attacks his sheep. The bear which he believed was the bear from his childhood which he had named his brother and betrayed by cutting it away from him to try and save it from the white men, came and took a sheep and Tom runs into the forest unarmed chasing after it. Afterwards Tom scolded himself for having been so foolish, Killer Tom Black, who sees a bear and runs after it and empty-handed and hollers, boo! (193.) Tom realizes that the bear he saw, if not his bear, represents his bear and his last connection to his childhood. In desperation to numb himself from all of his life, Tom goes and tracks down the bear but once he gets the chance to, Tom cannot bring himself to kill it. Tom knows that if he kills the bear, he will kill himself and in the place of his spirit, there will be only blackness and evil.

Thomas struggles throughout his life make him an angry and depressed person, at one point he is an alcoholic, so to try to remove his pain he went back in his past and killed off everything that had controlled him, Blue Elk, Red, and Rowena. In killing of these past hurts, he became empty of feeling and full of bitterness and hate. Therefore, in trying to hunt and kill the grizzly bear, Tom riding broncos to death, and Blue Elk burning down his lodge, Thomas tail is cut off. Finally, in the moments when Tom is trying to decide whether or not to kill the grizzly bear, he goes into a trance where he sees the all mother or the mother of all of his people. In this he comes to the revelation that it is not the bear that is the problem or any of his past but he himself. So he chooses not to kill the bear but to change who he, to become a better person and version of himself, not someone filled with rage and hatred at what life gives them.