The Holy Road, Blake - B+

                     Years later, Dances With Wolves, Stands With A Fist, and their children are living happily with the same band of Comanche, led by Wind In His Hair and Kicking Bird. Although all is well, they are constantly hearing from the tribes to their north that the white man is coming, killing buffalo, and laying tracks for a road that will carry an armored car.  Dances With Wolves learns from the Kiowa that the whites are offering them war or a reservation. The Comanche conclude that they must resist. Within days, Wind In His Hair leads a war party east to kill white men, Dances With Wolves rides west to hunt, and Kicking Bird rides north to seek a meeting with the white men. While Kicking Bird is in camp with the Kiowa, a white agent, a Quaker named Lawrie Tatum, arrives alone and expresses his desire to pursue peace. Kicking Bird and the Kiowa chief engage with the Quaker agent. The village that all of the men assume safe, is not. An undisciplined group of murderous civilian rangers fall on the Comanche camp one morning and murder more than half. The survivors, under the leadership of the young, Smiles A Lot, quickly move west away from the white men and toward Kiowa country. The white men rode east with a captive white woman and her daughter. They are proud to have rescued Christine Gunther after all these years. Stands With A fist is terrified that she would never see her husband or oldest children again.  Dances With Wolves joins in an attack on a wagon train and steals the clothing of a white man. He travels extensively before he finds and rescues his wife and daughter. They return to a diminished village, one suffering endless battle losses, including Wind In His Hair, and slowly starving as the buffalo is fading from the scene.  The end is at hand for all of the plains Indians.

                  Obviously, these two books have impressed me. I cannot think of a historical novel within recent memory that so aptly tells a story with so much insight  as well as these do. The reader is totally immersed in the world of the Comanche. Simply superb.