The book is, so far as I know, what the title suggests: true stories about the life and times of white settlers on the Great Plains during the 19th and early 20th Century. The chapters range from 2 to 10 pages, the subject matter ranging from stories about people traversing long distances to deliver mail, legends about lost treasures of stolen gold ("true" in the sense someone has told these stories), stories about people encountering some of the wildlife that used to exist on the prairies.
The writing is textbook, by which I mean Dray sticks to the classic paragraph structure of "introductory sentence, supporting sentences, concluding sentence, repeat." Which is fine so far as getting across information goes, but it makes for a choppy reading experience. One paragraph doesn't flow to the next with opening lines like, "Yet another legend of the plains tells of. . ." It feels like something I'd have written for history class in high school. There had to be more graceful transitions available.
There's also a sense Dray has a particular view of the life on the Plains, and isn't all that concerned with examining it. He might note that snakes were once so common in the prairies they were considered pests, as mice are today, without really noting that mice being pests can be somewhat attributed to the sorts of activities he describes in the rest of the chapter, where white folks go around killing every snake they come across. Or he'll note that grizzly bears had vanished from the southern plains by the 1880s, but doesn't bother to go into why. Which is kind of ridiculous when he started off a chapter talking about how much of the larger wildlife that once existed in the prairies is now gone. Yeah, no shit, wonder how that happened.
The height of the absurdity comes in a chapter about a lawless section of what became the Oklahoma Panhandle. he talks about some cowboys accusing a man of stealing their cattle, then hanging the man over his wife's protests. After they ride off, they come across another man in the process of stealing cattle and hang him. Then they turn around and ride back to tell the widow they hung an innocent man, laughing when she freaked out because she thought they were there to kill her.
Dray's next paragraph starts with, 'Most of the settlers and cattlemen in the strip were good people who respected the rights of others. . .'
Credit where credit is due, it's a more creative transition than a lot others.
'John Hittson and his little army recovered about eleven thousand stolen cattle and three hundred stolen horses before legal difficulties prompted him to end his invasion of New Mexico. The cattle and horses were driven away and sold - one account says in Denver - but from what is known, none of the Texas ranchers whose cattle were recovered was ever reimbursed.'
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