If you’ve ever had a hankering to go West in a covered wagon, Buffalo Thunder is the book for you. It’s written by Patricia Wittmann and illustrated by Bert Dodson. Find it in the picture book section of the Pine Bush Area Public Library, in the Children’s Department. Wittman dedicates it to her father, and to her great-great-great grandparents, “Oregon Trail pioneers.”

“Tomorrow our journey begins. Everything we have fits like a puzzle in our new prairie schooner. Pa is looking for some land. Ma is looking for a home. Lily and Baby are too young to care. I, Karl Issac, am looking for the wild and fierce buffalo.”

They set off across the prairie. They join a wagon train. They cross a river and one wagon overturns. Karl and little sister Lily encounter Indians on ponies. They pass a grave for a child, and leave wild flowers. At night, the covered wagons form a circle. The pioneers visit with each other, and play the fiddle and dance. And meanwhile, all Karl wants is to see real buffalo. “The closest I get to a buffalo is picking up bushels of dried chips for the cookfire. Pa jokes that you don’t have to pepper beans cooked over buffalo chips. Will they ever pass this way again?”

The pictures are great. You can feel the hot sun, and taste the dust.

One day, the buffalo appear in their thousands. They stampede towards the wagon train! “More than I could ever count, more than I could even see, buffalo rushed by like a raging brown river….Pa said he’ll be glad to leave this prairie behind. I tossed my hat high into the dusty air. Yip-yip, YA-HOO! It was the rip roarin’est time I have ever seen…I, Karl Isaac, have seen the buffalo thunder. Now, I am ready to look for our new home.”

It’s a good book. I was glad to read it, and I was grateful I did not have to walk beside that covered wagon, all the way to Oregon.