Wind Over Wisconsin has been criticized for lack of unity and for having a disjuncture in the middle which seems to make of it two stories rather than one. Such is not the case. The italicized pages at the beginning and end of the novel provide the unity. At the beginning, a mythical Indian brave, Soft Walker, quietly watches the Marquette and Joliet expedition in its first awed discovery of the territory then called Quisconsin, and the reader is left to fill in the blanks of what happened to Soft Walker's homeland in the following centuries. At the end, the saga returns to Soft Walker's legend, and the realization of what happens to those who cannot adapt to change. The book is about change, about Black Hawk's people's inability to move with the changes in the continent, and about for their eventual extermination. It is about the white...