Customer Reviews

Red Cloud's Revenge: Showdown On The Northern Plains, 1867

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The second book of the Plainsmen series is really a payback story of the white man's revenge in Wyoming in the summer of 1867. Following the debacle of the Fetterman disaster the previous winter, the military regrouped to hand the Indians two good whippings on two successive days in early August. Both battles are explained in great detail as well as the major players on both sides of the conflicts. The odds were far from even as the Indians greatly outnumbered the soldiers who were determined to sell their lives dearly at all costs. Circumstances have Seamus Donegan, the author's hero, on hand to play a major part in the Hayfield Fight but in spite of this oafish, heavy-handed fictional character, the book is an entertaining slice of western history.

If you like some fiction thrown in with your history, this is the series for you, read them all and read them in order, as the series will take you on a ride through the Indian Wars and when you are finished, you will feel like you where there, in the snow and the rain and the 100+ degree heat, as all the while you were being stalked and hunted by the best of the Indian warriors......

Hope you will survive......

Interesting and a pleasure to read. Have trouble putting the Plainsmen Series down as I begin to read each new book. What rich writings Mr. Johnston has left to us that have just discovered this treasure.

In new condition as advertised

As with most of his series could do without the main character's sometimes blatantly silly musings which interrupt an otherwise good account.

At least that's the case with Terry C. Johnston's Plainsmen series. Red Cloud's Revenge was the second part of this long, ambitious series that had as a goal to depict in Johnston's rich fiction all the major campaigns against Native Americans on the western prairie after the Civil War. Focousing on the Bozeman Trail-war of 1867 and the climax that was reached in the Hay Field Fight and Wagonbox Fight. Johnston knows his frontier history, albeit I sense a lesser degree of historical fascination in these early volumes than in the last he wrote. One of his biggest faults here is his inclusion of the highly fictional character of a confederate renegade in the ranks of the Arapaho. Perhaps trying to make the reader easily understand that one should not cheer on the Indian part he makes them all even more one-dimensional than his protagonist, the irishman Seamus Donegan. Depicted as larger-than-life, despite that Johnston insists he is as normal as anyone of his readers, he is not easy to swallow in this book or in any of the first four books in this series. Too bad that Johnston had to write 1000 pages in this series before he made good and fascinating fiction out of still exciting history. Still, I recommend this series to anyone that can not get enough frontier history. It only gets better by each book. *(*) on the barometer.

THE PERSON WHO WROTE THE REVIEW JUST BEFORE ME HAS IT RIGHT ABOUT THE THOUSANDS OF WORDS NEEDED BY jOHNSTON NEEDS TO GET HIS POINT ACROSS. I DO LIKE HIS STORIES BUT I'M NOT A SPEED READER NOR DO I ALWAYS COMPREHEND EVERYTHING THE AUTHOR IS TRYING TO COMMUTE. THE TWO BATTLES IN THIS BOOK, "THE HAY FIELD FIGHT and THE WAGON BOX FIGHT " only lasted but just hours. I have read about these by other authors and they took only several pages and gave me just as much fact.