Buffalo Trail--A Novel of the American West

August 24, 2015
Having written nonfiction accounts of such real-life criminals as the Clanton family, Bonnie and Clyde, and Charles Manson, Guinn’s second work of fiction is a sequel to his 19th-century historical western novel, Glorious. The story continues the adventures of Cash McLendon, who is now, in 1873, on the run from his past and hunting buffalo with a 20-year-old Bat Masterson. They wind up in Dodge City, Kans., where Bat gets them a gig with Billy Dixon hunting south into Indian Territory at Adobe Walls, which has already been the site of a battle involving Kit Carson. The war chief, Quanah, and visionary tribal mystic, Isatai, are raising a coalition of Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne Dog Soldiers to drive the hide men, as they are called, from their land. After he receives word that the love of his life, Gabrielle Tirrito, is in Mountain View in the Arizona Territory, Cash has even greater motivation for making money by selling buffalo hides. But in order to do so, he will first have to survive the Second Battle of Adobe Walls. As western heroes go, Cash is forgettable, neither hero nor villain nor anything interestingly in between. Instead, he is overshadowed by historical cameos in a novel that is too leisurely paced and too stylistically slick to be worthy of comparable titles such as Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and Mary Doria Russell’s Epitaph.

August 1, 2015
Continuing his trilogy about one-time St. Louis street kid Cash McLendon, Guinn (Glorious, 2014, etc.) rides onto the Great Plains. Still pursuing lost love Gabrielle and wary of an assassin dispatched by his former father-in-law, Cash drifts through Texas, loses his grubstake to Doc Holliday, and stumbles into "unsightly and dangerous" Dodge City, all "sod huts and wooden shacks." He meets Bat Masterson, a "mouthy little peckerwood," and the two scavenge buffalo bones to earn beans and bed. Guinn makes lively characters of historical buffalo hunters, and his imaginative take booms like a Sharps .50 as cultures collide across the Cimarron River, which locals call the Dead Line: "When we cross over, we're truly in Indian country." The last great buffalo slaughter is centered at Adobe Walls in Texas. Quanah, a Comanche war chief "more feared than Satan himself," has manipulated Kiowa and Cheyenne Indians with claims that the great chief Buffalo Hump's spirit can drive whites from the plains. In chapters that alternate between Cash's and Quanah's points of view, storekeepers price-gouge, hunters drink and fight, Comanches go hungry, and Texas cattlemen wait for the legislature to move the "tick line" quarantine to Dodge. Guinn's research brings to life the daily lives of the Comanche: their focus on plunder, torture, and rape to drive Apaches, Mexicans, and whites from the "hard, wild land known as Comancheria." Guinn also incorporates an intriguing subplot about Mochi, a Cheyenne woman and Sand Creek massacre survivor who's later accepted into the fierce dog soldier clan. Cash is no white-hat hero; he's often a vacillating opportunist who "had broken promises as easily as he'd drawn breath." Nevertheless, his flaws lend realism as he survives Adobe Walls and sets out for Arizona to find Gabrielle. Few Westerns reach the level of Lonesome Dove, but Guinn's latest is a better, more rambunctious tale than the trilogy's opener.

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September 1, 2015

Cash McLendon, a tenderfoot unfamiliar with guns and horses who had headed out West in Glorious, returns a bit more experienced, though he's not yet a crack shot or an accomplished cowboy. Still he joins a buffalo-hunting party heading from Dodge City, KS, to the Texas Panhandle. Unfortunately, this is Indian territory, and the native Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa plan an attack on the whites encroaching on their lands. The two groups collide in the Second Battle of Adobe Walls, fought on June 27, 1874. Full of historical notable figures from the Old West, this second volume in Guinn's trilogy not only provides a buoyant narrative but also several lessons in Western history. This title is so well constructed that it could stand alone (for readers new to the trilogy). VERDICT Those interested in the conflicts between Native Americans and the frontiersmen will be intrigued with both sides of the story presented here. However, the graphic violence detailed may deter some readers. Guinn skillfully ties his carefully constructed prolog outlining the Massacre at Sand Creek (1864) to a lone female warrior he imagines at the Second Battle at Adobe Walls. [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/15.]--Wendy W. Paige, Shelby Cty. P.L., Morristown, IN

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2015
In this sequel to Glorious (2014), Guinn returns to the story of woebegone Cash McLendon, weaving it in with buffalo hunting and the machinations of Quanah Parker, the legendary Comanche. In Glorious, McLendon betrayed his sweetheart, Gabrielle Tirrito, and stole from his employer; he tried to make amends to Gabrielle in the town of Glorious, Arizona, but then his employer's henchman, Killer Boots, caught up with him. Buffalo Trail finds McLendon marooned in Dodge City in 1873, a few years before the city became trail's end for cattle drives. Buffalo hides feed the economy, but the buffalo in Kansas have all been killed. A hide man named Billy Dixon gathers hunters for a big hunt in protected Indian country; meanwhile, Parker pulls together Plains tribes for a final assault on the whites. The forces converge at the Second Battle of Adobe Walls. A grand effort, and Quanah and his bogus medicine man, Isatai, are an entertaining pair, but McLendon's romance suffers from attenuation, and it's hard to cheer for buffalo hunters out to decimate the last great herd.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)