During the gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century, the American Western Frontier was a world ripe for exploration, rife with danger, and just glimmering a small promise of hope. In Thorne’s Journey Home, author Harold Toliver captures the essence of that atmosphere with rugged realism and lyrical description. This is an adventure story but also a beautifully written novel about the harshness of living in what we romantically call the “Old West” or more appropriately, the “Wild West.”
Our protagonist is the aptly named Dante Thorne. He is on a journey through beautiful landscapes with obstacles including extreme weather conditions and a relatively lawless frontier in which uncompromising fellow gold seekers and different Native American groups frequently challenge his every step. Having lost a team member, Tanner, to a claim dispute, Thorne is originally teamed up with a wise-cracking Irishman (McGantt) and a younger Kusske, all seeking their fortunes in the California Gold Rush. Call them the “fellowship of the gold” given that their journey is all about avoiding danger and finding prosperity and peace.
When Thorne breaks company with McGantt and Kusske, he inevitably finds himself with two orphans, Chad and Lisa, who have lost their family to a massacre. Being a man of principle, Thorne’s quest for gold now becomes a quest to protect his new charges en route to reuniting with his brother Weiden and wife Edna. Thorne already has a cabin set up for his fiancé, Molly, to meet him when he is established, so they can all begin their new lives together. Given the lawlessness of this land, their journey is marked with individuals and groups who would kill for a bit of gold or a healthy horse. Some Natives and some gold seekers are reasonable; others are completely unscrupulous. It is an adventure with constant challenges; thus, Thorne’s group is somewhat analogous to the fellowship in the first novel of The Lord of the Rings.
The novel is beautifully written. The dialogue between Thorne and McGantt is full of pithy and sometimes profound philosophical observations about life and survival. Toliver deftly intersperses the adventure with letters sent between Edna, Weiden, Molly, and Thorne himself. In these epistolary interludes, they discuss everything from the scraps with outlaws and hostile tribes to thoughts about slavery and the upcoming Civil War. The novel intelligently combines this rugged individualism in search of wealth and the American Dream with these cultural evolutions and inevitable revolutions. Quite impressively he does so in a poetic way which indicates the author’s background in studying literature.
Thorne’s Journey Home is a literary novel with sound cultural and historical insights into what people were thinking at that time. But in the end, it is an adventure story that begins with dreams of wealth and ends with a search for survival and a life of simplicity. Amidst constant threats to their safety, Thorne’s heroism and determination to protect Lisa and Chad, while ultimately trying to reunite with his family and gold rush cohorts, will have readers riveted.
