The summing up, Summer 2011

Reviewed June 20, 2011

I’m borrowing a phrase from Patti Abbott today to mark the end of my summer. Monday it’s back to work for one last year in the classroom. Charles Gramlich does this kind of summing up, and it’s a measure of his discipline as a writer that he observes such things. I’m following his noteworthy example.

As many know by now, I’ve been working for over a year on what is turning into a two-volume book about early-early western writers. Thus, while moving at a steady pace over the summer of 2011 and taking copious notes, I became immersed in another time (1880-1915).

The list. I’ve also kept company with mostly forgotten writers who, thanks to digital media, have had a second life on the kindle and nook. Since May, I read and will have written up each of the following novels. (By my count, I still have ten to go.)

Henry Wallace Phillips, Red Saunders (1901)
Jackson Gregory, Under Handicap (1914)
Kate and Virgil Boyles, Langford of the Three Bars (1907)
Ralph Connor, The Sky Pilot (1899)
Robert Alexander Wason, Friar Tuck (1912)
William R. Lighton, Uncle Mac’s Nebrasky (1904)
Hamlin Garland, The Moccasin Ranch (1909)
Will Lillibridge, Ben Blair (1905)
Randall Parrish, Bob Hampton of Placer (1906)
Mary Hallock Foote, The Led-Horse Claim (1883)
Charles King, Dunraven Ranch (1890)
Charles King, Two Soldiers (1888)
John H. Whitson, Justin Wingate, Ranchman (1905)
Oscar Micheaux, The Conquest (1913)
George W. Ogden, The Long Fight (1915)
Nat Love, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love (1907)
Owen Wister, Red Men and White (1896)
Owen Wister, Lin McLean (1897)
Frederic Remington, Sundown Leflare (1899)
Frederic Remington, John Ermine of the Yellowstone (1902)
Mary Austin, Isidro (1905)
Roger Pocock, Curly: A Tale of the Arizona Desert (1905)

Reviewed June 6, 2011

Other writers. I’d planned to read a whole lot more recent western and historical fiction. My TBR stack reaches the ceiling. But I kept finding more early-early writers, and so most of the leisure reading got put on hold. I look forward to the day I can thoroughly indulge myself among the many, many later western writers who have contributed and are still contributing to the genre. Here’s what I did get to:

Loren D. Estelman, Roy & Lillie
Max Brand, Best Western Stories, 3
Max Brand, South of Rio Grande (1936)
Charles Gramlich, Killing Trail
Johnny Boggs, Lonely Trumpet
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)
Axel Brand, The Dead Genius
Edward A. Grainger, Adventures of Cash Laramie and Miles Gideon
H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885)
Gerald So, We Might Have: Poems
Charles Whipple, A Matter of Tea and Other Stories

Women writers in the West

Richard Prosch over at Meridian Bridge has posted a "My Personal West" with a video from me. Go on over and you'll find out as much as you probably care to know about an area of my home state, the  Sandhills of Nebraska.

For Buddies in the Saddle today I've put together another reading list. This one goes along with the Cowboy Memoirs list I posted a while ago. Many women have lived in and written about the rural West, and have had plenty to say for themselves. While the West is often regarded as mostly a "man's world," I offer the following books and writers as evidence to the contrary.

Judy Blunt, Breaking Clean

A memoir of growing up on a ranch in the High Line country of northern Montana. Blunt focuses on the difficulty of conforming to expectations for women and traditional norms that continue to exist today.

Debra K. Marquart, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere: a Memoir

This collection of personal essays is part memoir, part social history, and part appreciation for the lunar topography of the author's home state, North Dakota. Captures well the tedium of growing up rural while “real life” is elsewhere.

Teresa Jordan, Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album

Thoughtful and evocative memoir of growing up on a ranch in southeast Wyoming. A chapter on calving season brings to life the day-to-day labors and rewards of stock raising.

Linda M. Hasselstrom, Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains

One year chronicled by the poet-author of this book about a small ranch in southwest South Dakota. Haying, fence mending, and cattle branding are described, plus prairie fires and sub-zero weather.

Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography

Returning to the family farm in South Dakota, the author writes of discovering the dimensions, sometimes spiritual, of rural life on the northern Great Plains.

Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

In this book, a California filmmaker visits Wyoming, meets a rancher, and decides to stay. Great visual descriptions and appreciative commentary on ranching, cowboys, rodeo, Native Americans.

Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Letters of a Woman Homesteader

The writings of Elinore Pruitt Stewart (1876-1933), who settled as a homesteader on the frontier in southwest Wyoming. Made into the film Heartland (1979) with Conchata Ferrell and Rip Torn.

Cowboy Memoirs

For Laurie Powers over at Laurie’s Wild West, who likes memoirs.
 
From early days, there's been an interest in the life of the real American cowboy, and the personal stories of the men who lived and worked as cowboys have often found their way into print.

This list of 24 cowboy memoirs covers a range that extends from Texas to British Columbia and from the late 19th century up to the present. The variety of experiences working cattle at different times and in different places is remarkable, and while there is some repetition in these books, from first to last they are full of surprises and absorbing (often humorous) yarns.

Old West

E. C. Abbott, We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher

Classic as-told-to memoir of "Teddy Blue" Abbott about his early years cowboying in Nebraska and Montana in the 1870s-80s. Includes warm tributes to the Cheyenne and to the women of the cow towns, including Calamity Jane.

Reuben B. Mullins, Pulling Leather: Being the Early Recollections of a Cowboy on the Wyoming Range, 1884-1889

Informative and entertaining cowboy memoir of punching cows and becoming a top hand during the peak of the open rangeland cattle industry in 1880s Wyoming.

Charles A. Siringo, A Texas Cowboy: or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony

Born in 1855 on the Gulf Coast of Texas, Siringo had worked as a cowboy for 15 years when he wrote this memoir "to make money" at the age of 28. Siringo also includes his experience as a range detective.

Charley Hester, The True Life Wild West Memoir of a Bush-Popping Cow Waddy

Memoir of a cowboy on the Chisholm Trail and, according to my notes, inspiration for Errol Flynn's character in the 1939 film Dodge City.

           

Ed Lemmon, Boss Cowman: The Recollections of Ed Lemmon, 1857-1946

His work taking him across parts of South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska, Ed Lemmon managed the largest fenced pasture in the world (865,000 acres), bossed the single biggest roundup in history, and handled more cattle (more than a million head) than any other man.

Con Price, Memories of Old Montana

This enjoyable memoir, published in 1945, dates back to the early days of cowboys in Montana. Con Price was a contemporary and friend of cowboy artist Charles Russell, and his account of life on the range in the 1880s is full of wonderful details and an admiration for those who knew themselves as cowpunchers.

Nellie Snyder Yost, Pinnacle Jake

This as-told-to memoir takes readers back to the 1890s, when Nebraska-born A. B. Snyder cowboyed for the 101 ranch, a huge agribusiness with thousands of cattle on the open ranges of Wyoming and Montana.

Happy Birthday, Duke!

I figure John Wayne's birthday is as good a day as any to get in the saddle here on blogger. I come to my interest in westerns from many years of reading about the historical west and cowboys in particular. Years ago, I discovered real-life cowboys of the 1880s were not regarded as icons of national character but rather as public nuisances on their trips into town from the open range. Then I wondered how they got to be the heroic figures we're familiar with from the movies. And that started a lot of reading, reading, reading.

Eventually, my interest expanded to cowboy songs, cowboy poetry, rodeos, comics, western movies, radio and TV. And I have an idea now of how myth and history overlap in these different genres - also how prolific was the output of cowboy-related material in popular culture. I'm just now discovering pulp westerns, thanks to Laurie Powers' book about her pulp writer grandfather, Paul S. Powers. Sagebrush Trail (1933) is one of John Wayne's many B-westerns made in the 1930s. Great example of how pulp westerns and B-westerns came together. And it's one of my favorite John Wayne movies. It also stars Lane Chandler and the incredible Yakima Canutt, who was a champion rodeo rider and stuntman for Wayne's early movies.

Anyway, that's how I got here today. I just acquired a stack of westerns from amazon that I intend to view in the coming weeks, with the intention of leaving my comments here and inviting those of any cowboy fans who happen to find this blog