Customer Reviews

The Long Journey Home

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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.

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.

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!