Review and comments on “The Buffalo Wallow: A Prairie Boyhood.”

Through some random algorithm of the Internet, I became aware of an autobiography called “The Buffalo Wallow: A Prairie Boyhood” by Charles Tenney Jackson and ended up meeting a nine-year-old and tagging along with him for several years as he grew up in a sod house on the Nebraska prairie. Jackson was born on October 15, 1874, in St. Louis, Missouri, and the story starts shortly after his Civil War veteran father drops Jackson off at his sister’s sod house on the Nebraska prairie and then disappears for good. Jackson is left living with his always upbeat aunt, her good-natured farmer husband and their son, a few years older than Jackson.

Accidental reading discoveries such as this used to happen to me in pre-Internet days in used bookstores, and some of my favorite reads have come from browsing through random stacks of books. “The Buffalo Wallow” is one of those happy discoveries in the Internet age. It wasn’t until a day after reading it that I realized how good it was. It’s one of those books where, for a while, you’re at a loss to find something to follow it up with that you hope is as good. I ended up rereading Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Why hadn’t “The Buffalo Wallow” come across my radar earlier? It turns out that Jackson is essentially forgotten. I couldn’t even find a photo of…