The Hard Margins

“[Delaney] cares about details and understands their importance to the larger themes of loss, desperation, and betrayed loyalties. His characters are . . . fully realized, familiar people, whose failures are heartbreakingly authentic.” —The Boston Globe

A Bureau of Indian Affairs agent in a remote Wyoming reservation reckons with the clash of cultures, his own failings, and the attempted destruction of a people. 

Five teenagers take a joyride through the barren landscape of Wyoming’s small Towuk Indian Reservation. Only four survive. 

It’s 1958, and the horrific accident cracks open a heart of darkness tainted by years of betrayal and anger. Danny Hubbard, a Korean War vet and troubled agent from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, races to find the driver before the sheriff of nearby Suncreek can use the accident to bring a century-old tension to a violent head.

The nomadic Towuk once lived on horseback and without property lines. That changed forcibly in the 1870s, as recorded in a series of dusty reports over which Hubbard pores. Now petroleum found on the reservation has brought in just enough money to change the Towuks’ lives a little, but with the windfall comes dangerous resentment from the white residents of Suncreek. As the margin between reservation and town grows more rigid by the day, Hubbard witnesses both the last vestiges of the Towuk’s way of life and the tribe’s likely future. 

Book II looks back almost a century to Agent Dorrance, author of the reports in Hubbard’s office. A protégé of Horace Greeley and his Utopianism, Dorrance tries to persuade, then to force, the roaming tribe to give up their horses and settle down to farming—saving their lives at the expense of their culture.

Morally complex and as relevant to today’s issues of freedom and land occupation as ever, Hard Margins is about captive people and their desire to escape their fates, and the captors who desire equally to escape theirs.