The Long Journey Home [Mass Market Paperback]

Don Coldsmith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 19, 2002

John Buffalo, a Lakota Sioux, is taken from his family and his home as a young boy and is forced into the White man's world.

Buffalo's teachers soon recognize his extraordinary athletic potential and push him to train for track and field events. Accepting this as a way to integrate into the White man's world, Buffalo sets his sights on competing in the Olympics.

Along the way Buffalo meets a variety of early-twentieth-century celebrities including Theodore Roosevelt, James Naismith, Tim McCoy, and even Jesse Owens, the African-American gold medal winner snubbed by Hitler at the 1936 Olympics.

The Long Journey Home is beautifully written historical fiction that is sometimes heart wrenching, sometimes hilarious, and always poignantly accurate. It is a heartfelt story about love, self, and the reality of home.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Treating readers to yet more meticulous historical detail, Coldsmith's (The Lost Band) latest lengthy yarn is a low-key and uninspiring kind of Native American Forrest Gump. After more than 35 western novels, Coldsmith continues to chart the adventures of peripheral characters who wander through history brushing arms with major figures (this time Olympic track star Jim Thorpe, Will Rogers and Theodore Roosevelt). John Buffalo is a Lakota Sioux sent to a government school as a young boy in the 1890s. Proud of his Native American heritage, he vows to outdo the white man at his own game. Although he is a bright student, John's real success comes as an athleteAhe plays football, baseball and track, and dreams of competing in the Olympics and later becoming a coach. Racism, however, derails his Olympic hopes and disrupts his budding romance with a U.S. senator's daughter. John later becomes a horse trainer and actor with a traveling Wild West show, performing around the world. In the 1920s, he travels to Hollywood, where he works as an animal trainer for motion picture companies, but he is never fulfilled by any of these adventuresAa return to his Indian heritage is all he desires. John is an agreeable, sympathetic character, but not a compelling one; he is portrayed as a frustrated talent trying to make an ordinary living. Coldsmith's sketches of Wild West shows, early Hollywood and the flu epidemic of 1918 are excellent, but John's minor and unexciting involvement is just a vehicle for a painstaking history lesson. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

In this engrossing historical novel, based on the life of Olympic great Jim Thorpe, young John Buffalo is sent to the Carlisle Indian School by a patron who believes he has Olympic potential but then exiled to a junior college when the patron's daughter becomes attracted to him. Nobody wants to give a coaching job to an Indian, so John works at a ranch until his talent for taming horses earns him a job with a Wild West show. Carlisle asks him to train Jim Thorpe for the Olympics, but no coaching job materializes after he helps Thorpe win. Each time a racial barrier prevents John from doing what he wants, he shrugs and simply does something else, drifting from one job to another, doing all of them well. His absence of control over his own life makes the book seem eerily plotless, but John's adventures in this vibrantly drawn historical period will keep readers engaged throughout. For larger historical fiction collections. Marylaine Block, Librarian Without Walls
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Forge Books; 1st edition (May 19, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812578724
• ISBN-13: 978-0812578720
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,403,905 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Reading this was indeed a "long journey", July 26, 2003

By 

Oncology Nurse "Oncology Nurse" (Bloomer, WI United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Long Journey Home (Mass Market Paperback)

Having been a great fan of the Spanish Bit series by this author, I began this book with great anticipation. I rarely set a book aside unfinished but after slogging through about half of this one, I closed it and put it on the shelf. Coldsmith's talent lies in the historical fiction like that of the Spanish Bit saga. Those are outstanding. This was not worth my time.

5.0 out of 5 stars Should be a movie, October 2, 2006

By 

Charles Rodenberger (Baird, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Long Journey Home (Mass Market Paperback)

I read this and immediately in my mind saw it on the big screen with a cast of characters. I went to school in Prague, OK who claims Jim Thorpe and reading the intro was hoping to read about his life. I got more than that. A story covering the history of Native Americans being assimilated into American ways that fascinated me. It is a few years earlier than my history, going back to before WWI. I only go back to WWII.

Little Bull, son of Yellow Bull, is immediately told at the Indian school that his name must be Americanized to John Buffalo. He excells in school and in sports and is chosen to go to Carlisle, the Indian college, because he can improve their football team that competes with Army and the Ivy League schools. He does too well. Sponsored by a US Senator, the Senator's daughter falls for him and he is immediately transferred back to a two year college at Haskell, KS near the Univ of Kansas. There he gets to meet some of the famous coaches and decides to become a coach. Because he is an Indian, jobs are few and far between. He gets a job as an assistant coach and gets to coach Jim Thorpe at the Olymics in Sweden. He returns to the plains and drifts into a job training horses for the 101 Ranch Show that travels the world like Buffalo Bill's show. He again falls in love. I won't tell that story but leave it a mystery. He goes into WWI as a soldier that falls victim to the flu epidemic and there are graphic descriptions of the medical treatments of the times. John has another romance with a nurse, whose husband is killed overseas. Coldsmith is a retired medical doctor and an expert on horses as well as an American Indian historian so that everything rings true.

You can visualize the sweep of the drama of the wild west show, the romances of a young man and his frustrations with the white man's domination. The movie would have all the famous events of the period including the famous coaches, invention of basketball, famous football games where Thorpe runs over people, the drama of Thorpe losing his Olympic gold medals, John getting to go to the Olympics in Germany where Hitler snubbed the black American hero. A great movie and a great story with a satisfying ending of his romance. I am only disappointed that John Bull didn't find Christianity satisfying because I know that Coldsmith is also a Sunday School teacher.

5.0 out of 5 stars Different, Interesting, an Excellent Read!, January 1, 2006

By 

Thomas L. Ogren (San Luis Obispo, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Long Journey Home (Mass Market Paperback)

I recently read Don Coldsmith's The Long Journey Home and enjoyed it very much. As with most of Coldsmith's Westerns, this one too, is not at all typical.

Don Coldsmith is an interesting author, a country MD (a gynecologist no less!) who actually delivered Joe Montana. I met Don last summer in Spokane, at the Western Writers Association (WWA) conference...and a nicer, smarter, less pretentious fellow you couldn't hope to meet anywhere.

John Buffalo is the hero of this story, a young gifted Indian athlete and the book follows his life, one full of ups and downs...all in all a fine piece of period history (the early 1900's) and an entertaining read. In this book I first encountered the deadly flu of the World War One time, a flu that apparently has much in common with the scary bird flu of present times.

If you've never read any Coldsmith, give The Long Journey Home a try. I predict you'll like it, very much!