This is an amazing book. I am not sure about the historical accuracy though some of the events are true, especially those of the French explorer LaSalle.

I really feel I gained some insight into how the horses were introduced to the American indian culture. I really enjoyed the detail of indian life and culture. I wonder if the main character of the book, Horseback, really existed....

This is an enormous cut above the normal cowboy/indian book. I enjoy reading about this time period. It is my first Mike Blakely book... it won't be the last, that is for sure. ( )

A book dealing again with the Comanche and their lives before and during the Whiteman era. Touching, on occasion, but less full of the interior life than the great "Hanta Yo." ( )

Though labeled by the publisher as a western, Comanche Dawn may be more properly considered as a historical novel, given that its action unfolds from roughly 1690 to 1720 (generally speaking, westerns are set in the latter half of the 1800s, although some are set a bit earlier to take into account such events as the Alamo), and the point of view is largely assigned to an Amerindian character, with sidebars given over to two Spanish and French characters and, in the least successful section, to a horse.

Comanche Dawn is a largely successful real-world account of the legendary beginnings of the Shoshone Indian group who would form a separate nation called Comanche (the Comanche called themselves Noomah, or True Humans; Blakely writes of the difficulty in choosing a standard spelling of this name in his author's note, and notes, in the first part of the novel, "The Yutas [presumably the Utes, for whom Utah is named] called the Noomah by the word Komancia, which meant Those Who Always Want to Fight Us in the Yuta tongue" [pps. 104-05; Chapter 15]) shortly after they first acquired horses. The First Horse who -- unfortunately for it -- wanders into a starving camp of Burnt Meat People (a clan group of Noomah), where it is killed, eaten, and misidentified by an old man named Wounded Bear as a shadow-dog, or spirit dog, as it resembles no dog that they have ever seen. The protagonist of the book, Horseback, is born on that day (Wounded Bear is his grandfather), and is called Shadow Dog until his manhood ceremony; Horseback grows up to become a legendary war leader and pre-eminent horseman of the Comanche, teaching them that horses are good for far more than merely meat and pulling sledges. (As may be expected, at least some Noomah are hidebound enough to resent using horses to so drastically alter their traditional way of life, and these predictably refuse to follow Horseback.) Under Horseback's leadership, the Noomah are soon able to punch far above their weight class, impressing and awing even the Apache (or Na-vohnuh, who, a generation or so before Horseback, attempted to exterminate the Noomah, whom the Na-vohnuh called Snake People) and Spaniards (whom the Amerindian tribes call "Metal Men," owing to the armor that they wear).

Since Comanche Dawn is blurbed by Dee Brown, author of the seminal (not to say tragic and infuriating) history of the United States' treatment of the Amerindians, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, one hopes and trusts that Blakely's depictions of the Amerindian ways of life, and of their oral histories, legends and beliefs, are accurate; those interested in Amerindians as more than adversaries to be cheerfully "rubbed out" (a phrase that the Noomah, like the Cheyenne in Thomas Berger's novel Little Big Man, use; one suspects that this is where American gangsters -- or at least, American gangster movies, radio plays and pulp fictions -- appropriated the phrase from) by European-descended settlers and soldiers should find Comanche Dawn an agreeable and instructive diversion.

However, while Blakely treats the Comanche with respect, he does not shirk from depicting some of their more distasteful habits: some of the animal parts that they eat may well make a reader gag; the Comanche, especially the boys, were not exactly the respectful and humane hunters of more recent (read: post 1970) accounts of Native Americans; the Noomah typically raped women from enemy tribes as a way of "making them good," i.e., fit for adoption into the Noomah tribe and bearing Noomah sons; and, much like the Cheyenne in Berger's Little Big Man or the Norsemen ("Vikings") in Frans Bengtsson's The Long Ships or Red Orm, the Noomah are, first and last, a society of warriors, whose men all wanted to die relatively young in battle -- partly for the glory, partly to avoid becoming a burden in their dotage to their tribe -- and whose women would happily torture any enemy warriors hapless enough to be taken captive, or slay wounded enemy warriors on the battlefield. The Comanche, in Blakely's account, did not treat women very well: about the best that a woman could hope for was to be a chieftain's first (or "Sits Besides") wife, a chieftain's mother, or a medicine woman (or puhakut), whereupon she would be regarded with roughly equal amounts of fear and awe. Widows were expected to kill themselves when their husbands died, so as not to burden the tribe: widows, prior to Horseback's chieftaincy, were not regarded as fit for remarriage, and any who balked at taking their own lives were "assisted" in joining their husbands in the Shadow Lands.

Given that its primary focus is on the Comanche, Gregorian-style dates are relatively sparse in Comanche Dawn, which can be frustrating to the reader; more frustrating is the -- what one suspects to be -- liberties that Blakely takes with the life and death of the French explorer, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle (1643 - 1687), whose murder at the hands of one of his own men during La Salle's final attempt to search for the Mississippi River (called here Messipi, which is "the French rendering of the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe or Algonquin) name for the river, Misi-ziibi (Great River)," according to Wikipedia's entry on the Mississippi River) serves as the launching point of the story of another of his men, Jean L'Archeveque. L'Archeveque -- who supposedly enabled La Salle's murder by distracting him (and Blakely names a different man than La Salle's Wikipedia entry does as his murderer) -- is the main alternate point of view here, while La Salle appears only in a flashback to L'Archeveque's eventful story. (Indeed, one suspects that Blakely is addressing these concerns regarding historical fidelity in a sly metafictional remark, when he has the governor of New Mexico tell L'Archeveque -- whom the Spaniards call Juan Archebeque -- upon the latter's return from an extended trading expedition, "'It is a pity that history cannot record your adventure, my friend'" [p. 487; Chapter 59].) Some maps would have also aided the reader in following the narrative, but, with an internet connection, these can be found with minimal difficulty.

The jockeying for dominance in North America between New Spain and New France is largely shown here to be more smoke than fire -- there really wasn't much overlap in territory in the American Southwest, particularly in the wake of the disastrous French settlement at Fort Saint Louis in what is now Texas -- but it did have one lasting impact on history: namely that, in their anxiety that their rival would steal a march on them -- and out of simple greed -- government agents and traders of both colonial empires violated their home governments' prohibitions against allowing the Native Americans too many horses or relatively modern firearms; in so doing, they fueled what would be both a kind of blowback roughly analogous to the U.S.'s funding of the Afghan mujahideen against the occupying Soviets in the 1980s and the Amerindians' folly and glory, to borrow a phrase from the title of a recent Larry McMurtry western.

The biggest bobbles in Blakely's narrative are the chapters, towards the end of the book, devoted to the point of view of the horse Noomah, who is the Bucephalus to Horseback's Alexander the Great. That this shift comes so late in the novel undercuts what Blakely was apparently hoping to do: further buttress the mythical, legendary nature of his birth of the Comanche nation story. As it stands, it comes off as though Blakely read Richard Adams's Traveller during the course of writing Comanche Dawn, and decided that it would be a good idea to try to ape it. While I understand that Blakely was at least as interested in writing about horses as he was in writing about the Comanche and Comanche horsemanship (such is made explicit by the blurb offered by the two people he names first in his acknowledgments, W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear, as well as his humorous acknowledgment to one horse in particular: "Red Wing, who often kicked, bit, threw me off, fell on me, and otherwise earned my affection" [pps. vii-viii]), giving Noomah what amounts to a first person POV at the eleventh hour was ill-advised.

Still, for all of that, Comanche Dawn is a worthy read, one that may inspire the reader to pick up related works of history, or at least complementary historical novels. ( )