Brave Buffalo Fighter: Waditaka Tatanka Kisisohitika
by John D. Fitzgerald
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Bethlehem Books (Bathgate, North Dakota): 1973. Trade paperback: 183 pages. ISBN-10: 1-883937-59-0 Suggested retail price: $11.95 (US) Tags: Biography; buffalo; frontier; Historical; horses; Native Americans; revolvers; rifles; wagon trains; Young Adult Tactical strength: [7/10] |
Supposedly Brave Buffalo Fighter takes its story from the diary of ten-year-old Sue Parker and the entries that she wrote during her family's trip across the plains to Wyoming. The publisher, Bethlehem Books claims to have tried unsuccessfully to verify the existence of such a diary. They suggest, and I agree with the suggestion, that the entire story comes from the imagination of John D. Fitzgerald. In most of his other books, Fitzgerald uses his family as the basis for his novels, but he takes such literary license with his family history, that you cannot really make any distinction between the facts and the fiction. Fitzgerald seems to feel that fiction based on facts has a greater weight with the reader, and I suspect that he included the attribution to a diary to give his story greater impact.
The story opens with Sue's father, Steve Parker, coming home and announcing to his family that he has put their house up for sale and that the family will make the trek across the plains. Mr. Parker plans to buy homestead land in Wyoming and start a cattle ranch. Sue and her brother, twelve-year-old Jerry, both express excitement about the trip, but their mother doesn't want to leave their comfortable home in St. Joseph, Missouri. Eventually Sue's mother agrees to go on the trip, but she again expresses reservations when she sees that people she considers "white trash" comprise most of the members of the wagon train company. Although we experience the story through Sue's eyes, who you consider the main character really depends on how you interpret fiction. If you consider the character that experiences the greatest change as the main character, then you will view Sue's mother as the protagonist. Sue's mother starts out avoiding the "white trash" in the company, but she eventually has experiences that convince her that she needs to accept people for their value as individuals and not for their social standing. If you consider the character that goes through change at the climax the main character, then you will consider Jerry the main character. At the climax of the plot, an Indian war party has the wagon train surrounded. Fitzgerald entitled the final chapter, "Jerry Saves the Wagon Train," so you generally know how the story ends.
I would call Brave Buffalo Fighter Fitzgerald's most traditional novel. In most of his other "novels," he amalgamates a novel length work from a series of interconnected short stories. For example, every chapter in The Great Brain tells a different story about how the Great Brain used his intelligence. The chapters involve the same characters, but really no cause-and-effect relationship exists from one chapter to the next. In general, you could reorder the chapters in the Great Brain without much consequence to the reader's experience. Fitzgerald's adult novels have a bit more interconnectedness, but Brave Buffalo Fighter takes an initial situation and follows the successive events from chapter to chapter until the conclusion.
As you can expect from any Fitzgerald work, you get an excellent picture of the period and setting in which the events take place. You get a detailed portrayal of life in a pioneer wagon train, including the reasons for making the trek in the first place and the risks involved in the journey itself. The narrative seems much more sophisticated than a ten-year-old could produce, but then she probably didn't really exist except in the author's head.
