Module 2: The Girl who loves Wild Horses

As a horse lover and a lover of Native American folklore, I was looking forward to this story. This story is drawn in the traditional style of native American artwork. The colors are great. The details of the drawing are very realistic. The Native Americans use their horses for all their way of lives. They use the fastest for hunting Buffalo.One of the girls loved horses, and as soon as she gets gone with her chores she goes out with the horses. On one of her outings, she falls asleep and a storm rolls in. The horses take off out of fear and she grabs a hold of one and rides with the herd. As the horses tire, they slow and begin to graze. The wild stallion comes and takes the herd into his fold. She continues to ride with the wild horses. Her parents search for her and to no avail. After a year she is seen and her parents set out to bring her home. She falls into a deep depression and because her parents love her, they let her go back to the herd. Every year she returns and gives her parents a colt.


 Goble, P. (1978). The girl who loved wild horses. Scarsdale, N.Y.: Bradbury Press.

This books shows the love of nature between man and animal. Native Americans believe that we are one and in order to take care of our selves we need to take care of all living creatures. This book shows the amazing love between the girl and her horses. Mr. Goble really studied Native American drawings and patterns to have drawn like their ancestors. The colors are wonderful and the story flows nicely. This is a great book to also use in a classroom, to show another cultures values and beliefs.

KIRKUS REVIEW

            There are many parallel legends – the seal women, for example, with their strange sad longings – but none is more direct than this American Indian story of a girl who is carried away in a horses’ stampede…to ride thenceforth by the side of a beautiful stallion who leads the wild horses.  The girl had always loved horses, and seemed to understand them “in a special way”; a year after her disappearance her people find her riding beside the stallion, calf in tow, and take her home despite his strong resistance.  But she is unhappy and returns to the stallion; after that, a beautiful mare is seen riding always beside him.  Goble tells the story soberly, allowing it to settle, to find its own level.  The illustrations are in the familiar striking Goble style, but softened out here and there with masses of flowers and foliage – suitable perhaps for the switch in subject matter from war to love, but we miss the spanking clean design of Custer’s Last Battle and The Fetterman Fight.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/paul-goble/the-girl-who-loved-wild-horses/

For Social Studies class, this book would be a good book to introduce your class to Native Americans and their culture. This could be uses in connection to other books from Native Americans to other cultures that blend together to make America. Students could  use this story and others to see what values, we have taken from the Native Americans and brought forward into our own cultures today.