Old Sam and the Horse Thieves by Don Alonzo Taylor

This is the first of two horse books I have already read this year. I am not particularly a fan of horse books, nor was I as a girl. I think I read more about girls who were into pony books than actual pony books! However, I like a good story and some horse books provide a rollicking story. I had read the first of this series, Old Sam, Dakota Trotter, several years ago and liked the characters. Stories of young people living in other time periods and cultures have a way of transporting me to a different life. Bethlehem Books, the publisher, is a publishing company that started many years ago with reprints of classic children’s and YA books that had gone out of print, most of them historical fiction. This was before the days of ebooks and my daughter and I share many print copies of their earlier books. Now they are making most of their books available as ebooks for $4.95, a price I can get behind! I go to their website periodically to see if they have anything new and they did: the sequel to Old Sam, Dakota Trotter, Old Sam and the Horse Thieves, originally published in 1967.

Old Sam is a trotter who has been disfigured, is somewhat crippled, and can longer race. But two young brothers, Johnny and Lee Scott, take him on when he is being abandoned and make him into a very competent farm horse. When we meet them, it is the 1880s in the Dakota Territory. These stories are based in part on the author’s own experiences as a young boy whose family was with the first wagon to go to North Dakota. Johnny is 10 and Lee is younger. (Old Sam, Dakota Trotter was written in 1955).

For A Century in Books, I read the second book, Old Sam and the Horse Thieves. Johnny and Lee have grown up a bit; Johnny is now 15, and are even more the adventurous and capable young men one thinks of when reading about life in the territories and skills needed just for survival. At an early age they were taught to respect the land, to hunt and fish, and they used Old Sam to explore and come to terms with the untamed land that was all around them. Not so much books about family life, in the 1880s, nor is it directly a “horse story”, these are mostly just funny and interesting adventure stories about the boys and their horse.

In Old Sam and the Horse Thieves, Old Sam goes missing. Johnny has some ideas about tracking Old Sam which leads to finding a stolen cache of 9 or 10 other horses. With Johnny’s quick thinking, he devises a way to have Old Sam lead the horses out of the gully to safety. Then the sheriff asks for Johnny’s help in busting the ring of horse thieves that seem to be operating in a multi-territory area. Johnny does so using a scheme involving mirrors with a type of Morse code to send messages to friends. With the help of these friends, they catch a couple of thieves, but in one story, the sheriff and his helper “unintentionally” let the thieves go. So Johnny’s help is enlisted again. He’s made a deputy sheriff at 15 in order to finally reel in the ring. They do so, but one of the final episodes is rather jarring and much more shocking, as Johnny witnesses a scene of vigilante justice. So great is respect for Johnny, because at this age, with his horse Old Sam, he has already displayed common sense, fortitude, fairness, complex thinking, and skill with firearms that many a man could not have achieved.

If you like children’s books, especially historical fiction, I think you will really enjoy reading this. The discussion of land, the farming, what it was like to homestead, will probably make you appreciate the life of comfort most of us live, but will also bring an exciting period of American history to life. Definitely start with Old Sam, Dakota Trotter. And check out some of the other rousing books in the Bethlehem book ebook series--for less than $5 it is hard to miss!