"Zane Grey and 'The Thundering Herd'"

 

Zane Grey and The Thundering Herd

      Did You know:  According to the main character, John Doe, from the TV Show by the same name(about the year 2000, I think) these are facts: (a) the nation’s only active diamond mine is in Arkansas; (b) it is illegal to walk down Main Street alone after 1:00 p.m. on Sunday in Little Rock, Arkansas; (c) fish sleep with their eyes open.

      Here's another fun fact:  Did you know the most popular western novel of all time is Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey?  I'm still reading Zane Grey, the famous American western author from a hundred years ago. Still think he’s definitely about love stories and western action. I liked Riders of the Purple Sage, about Mormons and rustlers and gunmen and a couple of love stories; I liked a little less To the Last Man, a love story about cattle men versus sheep men based on the infamous Pleasant Valley War in Arizona, a little known “terrible and bloody feud“.

      I also finished Grey's The Thundering Herd and liked it more than either one. It’s a love story set against the background of the great Buffalo slaughter of the western plains. Wonderful descriptions of American Buffalo, of their herds and fights and killing, of the way people felt about it(mixed feelings), of the history of it, mentioning Sherman and Sheridan -- Civil War Generals who were tasked with fighting Indians and who used the killing of Bison to destroy the food source of the Indians -- practicing total war as they did versus the South in the Civil War, and of the politics of it: some states outlawing the killing(Oklahoma and Colorado) and other states debating it(Texas).

      One scene has a wolf teasing a huge herd of buffalo into a stampede and the view of the chase between hills and through valleys and across rivers as hundreds of thousands of Bison chase a lone wolf.  The heart of the story is a lone young woman, seventeen or eighteen, and her singlehanded fight to survive evil parents, Indians, the herds of Bison, and the western judgment of women as weak, to get back to the man she loved and had promised herself to in marriage.   

      Tonight I watched an episode of the TV show “Longmire”(A&E) in which a lone Bison faced off with Sheriff Longmire’s truck on a Montana highway, until a baby white Buffalo could cross in front. Synchronicity. mm