My grandfather was a West Texas cowboy. When he was ten years old in 1902, he rode his pony alongside his parents’ wagon for three weeks from Abilene to Fort Davis. He’d made the trip once before, as a tiny child, when his mother traveled to Fort Davis to return her niece, whom she’d adopted for three years after her sister died in childbirth. This time, on his pony, he pointed out the line of mountains in the distance and told his parents he knew they’d turn left there. He remembered.
He was the youngest of six, and that pony and saddle had been given to him by his adult brothers, already a couple of cowpokes (and, coincidentally, the men my own son is named after). My grandfather loved that pony. When it was struck by lightning and killed only a few weeks after they arrived in Fort Davis, it caused him such intense pain it could still bring tears to his eyes to write about it seventy years later.
My grandfather wrote his memoirs in the 1970s, in his final years before he died at the age of 86. He worked on a typewriter with dirty keys, pounding so hard he punched the o’s through the paper. Now whenever I see graphics of typewriting with the circles of the d’s and p’s greyed in and crescents of extreme dark along the edges of the o’s (nobody ever shows them completely punched through), I always think of him. A West Texas cowboy crouched over a typewriter on a formica table in his 1940s kitchen, out in the dusty fields of the California San Joaquin Valley, his bushy eyebrows bristling and a cigar between his teeth. He said he became a cowpoke as a young man because he didn’t care what he did as long as he got to ride a horse. He used to play the old cowboy songs on his harmonica for us when I was little.
He also said, in his old age, that he’d read both Louie L’Amour and Zane Grey, and one of them knew exactly what he was talking about, and the other was an idiot.
Unfortunately, when my aunt relayed this opinion to me thirty years ago, I immediately forgot which was which.
Read the full essay on The Art & Craft of Fiction.
If you entitled your blog “Riding the Purple Sage”, then you must subconsciously remember your grandfather thought Zane Grey was the cowhand’s true biographer. I hope so! “Shadow on the Trail” was my favorite book for something like five years. I based my whole cowgirl persona on it! How horrible it would be if I was running around acting like an idiot all that time! 🙂
Actually, I did figure it out (by reading both of them), which I went into in great detail on the magazine.
You’re familiar with Thunderhead and The Green Grass of Wyoming, yes? You’d better be.