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Summary
Summary
I knelt down by one of the grizzly's tracks. It was larger than my hand where his pads had pushed the mud out wide. I pressed my palm into the hollow of his track and stretched my fingers out to touch his claw marks one by one. My scalp tingled.
"Sure was a big one, wasn't he?"
I spun around and something knocked me flat on my stomach. Before I could roll over, a heavy knee pinned my shoulder to the ground and a hard hand yanked my head back by the hair.
"It's me again, white boy," breathed Haggard in my ear. "Don't say you're not glad to see me." --From Daniel's Walk
"Your daddy's in trouble, boy," said the Voice.
Daniel's father is an experienced trapper who knows the Rocky Mountains. So what could have happened to him? Yet Daniel is haunted by the Voice and its message. He decides to leave his home in Missouri to search for his pa.
But it is 1844 and the West is a wilderness. Trouble lurks all along the Oregon Trail, and trouble finds Daniel right away. One stormy night he sees a frightening, scar-faced man stealing horses--and the horse thief sees him, too. Daniel barely escapes being shot. He joins a wagon train headed west, but for him there is no safety in numbers. As surely as he knows that his father is in danger, he knows that the scar-faced man will try to kill him again.
Slowly Daniel comes to understand that he and his father are not the only ones in danger. There are some who will prosper from the westward expansion, but many more-white and Indian alike-will suffer as their land and their lives are destroyed.
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 6-8-When Daniel LeBlanc hears a Voice in the night warning him that his father, a widowed French trapper, is in trouble, he sets off along the Oregon Trail in search of him. It's 1844, and the 14-year-old's quest clearly conveys the extreme difficulties encountered by those who attempted to settle the American West. Daniel walks over 1000 miles, is shot at, cut with a knife, beaten, half-starved, kidnapped, and nearly sold into slavery to the Utes. He is attacked by a dangerous scar-faced man who turns out to be his uncle and who shoots Daniel's father shortly after the boy finds him. Before his death, however, his father tells Daniel that he detests the white men for their treatment of Native Americans, that he has been helping them, and that he has married an Indian woman. Daniel realizes that the West is not the barren place he has been taught in school, and returns to his aunt's Missouri farm. While the author nicely conveys the drudgery and hardship of Daniel's trip, the plot is confusing and the characters are difficult to keep straight. A concluding note states the author's intent to depict history more realistically, showing the enormous price of white settlement of the West. Too bad the story doesn't show this more clearly through the characters and their actions, rather than having the author tell readers at the end of the book.-Connie Tyrrell Burns, Mahoney Middle School, South Portland, ME (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
Daniel LeBlanc is living with his aunt Judith when he receives a mysterious summons. Convinced that his father, who lives out on the frontier, is in trouble, Daniel joins an emigrant group on the Oregon Trail to search for him. Daniel is often too pious to seem realistic, and others are stock characters. The ending wrapped in Native American spirituality is unconvincing. From HORN BOOK Spring 2002, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
In 1844, a Voice in the night whispers to Daniel LeBlanc that his father needs help so he leaves his home in Caldwell, Missouri, and joins a wagon train heading for the Oregon Trail. Fourteen-year-old Daniel has been raised by his aunt and uncle after his mother's death and his father's disappearance in the West. Daniel is certain that he will be able to find this father he barely knows, a French fur-trapper, but heavy rains and a dangerous, horse-thieving outlaw imperil the wagon train's progress. He does become friends with a free black man and Rosalie, a young and resourceful half-Mandan girl who likes Shakespeare and beading with quills. When they finally arrive at Fort Laramie after hundreds of back-breaking, wind-blown miles, Daniel wonders whether or not the stockade walls keep out the Oglalas or "simply fence the white folks in"-a ponderous and probably anachronistic thought. When he finds a circle of buffalo skulls, he dreams of great Indian/soldier battles and of a wolf that speaks in the voice of his father. Kidnapped along with Rosalie, Daniel finds himself literally and figuratively in a den of wolves-a gang of white thieves who steal guns from the army and sell them to the Indians. In the violent finale, Daniel learns some truths about his family. His father survived an attack by a rabid wolf, took on its persona and appearance, and is the renegade leader of the gun thieves. The dangerous outlaw who kidnapped him is a member of the gang and his mother's brother. The story is certainly an adventure and conveys the hardships of the westward trek along with providing an interesting friendship between Rosalie and Daniel. However, Spooner relies too heavily on imagery. Rosalie refers to the uncle in Hamlet as a snake, certainly a precursor to Daniel's uncle. His father, perhaps too ahead of his time for seeing clearly the destruction of the Indian way of life and trying to forestall it, dies in a fire and causes Daniel to muse about darkness and light in his own life. He emerges a stronger young man from all he has lived through, but the journey is fraught with the perils of deep thinking and the temptations of literary symbolism. (Historical fiction. 12+)
Booklist Review
Gr. 6-9. Spooner's adventure, set around 1844, has everything: danger, Native American myth, a gritty survival struggle, a little romance, comedy, and wonderful characters, all rolled into a quick-reading, high-interest, satisfying historical novel. When 14-year-old Daniel experiences an unsettling dreamlike vision informing him that his father, Etienne, a French trapper, is in trouble, Daniel sets out to find him. His plan to join a wagon train heading west seems safe enough, but he's immediately thrust into danger when he foils a vicious horse thief, who is determined to get revenge. Children will gain a new appreciation for settlers who traveled the Oregon Trail thanks to Spooner's descriptions of their hardships, so vividly rendered that readers will feel muddy and wet themselves. Daniel's eventual discovery of his father's identity won't come as a surprise, though the conclusion may catch readers unawares, as Etienne's role in helping the Indians fight the encroaching white settlers is revealed. Without becoming pedantic, Spooner gives voice to reasons why the Indians opposed the settlers. --Chris Sherman
Table of Contents
| Part 1 Caldwell, Missouri | p. 1 |
| Part 2 Road to Oregon | p. 47 |
| Part 3 Fort Laramie | p. 93 |
| Part 4 Green River | p. 135 |
| Part 5 Etienne | p. 175 |
| Epilogue | p. 211 |
| A Note on History | p. 213 |