One of my Favorite Authors Passes Away

Taken from the Kansas City Star, June 26, 2009

EMPORIA, Kan. Don Coldsmith, a family physician who gained worldwide fame with a series of historical novels on Plains Indians, has died. He was 83.
Coldsmith, of Emporia, died Thursday at the University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City, Kan., his wife, Edna, said. He had suffered a stroke June 20 after attending a conference of the Western Writers of America in Oklahoma City, she said.
Coldsmith was born in Iola in 1926 and served as a combat medic in the Pacific during World War II. He earned his medical degree from the University of Kansas in 1958 and practiced medicine in Emporia for three decades.
Coldsmith began work in the 1980s on what would become his 29-volume series "The Spanish Bit Saga." The novels chronicle the momentous change in the lives of Plains Indians wrought by the introduction of the horse by Spanish explorers.


I am a big fan of Don Coldsmith's work. I started reading the Spanish Bit saga along with my buddy Jerod back in college. I remember arguments ensuing trying to get him to finish up the next book so I could read it. As a Kansas native you could feel the presence of the state in his writing.