Conquering Horse

Frederick Manfred is one of the great lost American writers, and "Conquering Horse" is the beginning of the five-novel cycle (the "Buckskin Man" tales) at the core of his achievement. This novel takes place among the Sioux in the early 1800s, before white settlers started appearing in the region Manfred dubbed "Siouxland." Subsequent titles take in the Mountain Man era ("Lord Grizzly"), the horrifying violence of the 1862 Sioux Uprising ("Scarlet Plume"), the havoc wrought by gold miners in the 1870s ("King of Spades"), and the final transformation of the West in the image of Old World values ("Riders of Judgment") with a new century coming into view. Manfred is a superbly evocative writer, and taken as a whole the five novels (which were published out of sequence) create a unified picture of the Old West that is harsh and unsentimental, yet filled with grandeur and extraordinary writing.

I have always been interested in the old west. The various customs of the Native Americans and the ways that the minds of prior generations worked in their own times. I have always had a love of horses and this novel certainly kept my attention. This book is only one of the Buckskin Man Series. They are all excellent. They have an order in which they should be read to be most effective because of the dates. If I can remember the order they are as follows. 1. Conquering Horse. 2. Lord Grizzley 3. Riders of Judgement 4. Jack of Spades 5. Scarlet Plum I was not disappointed in one of these. Frederick Manfred also wrote under the name of Fredrica. I do however, have a few of his books that I do not like. His home was in Minnesota and the area that he writes about in all these novels is the five state area around Minnesota.