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

Abstract

268 Western American Literature snow”), vital green both, oppose living and not-living, life and not-life images (“What could matter if life / was really about sex / instead of learning / to / die / ”). An orgasm compares to “eating the best / fresh-leaved pesto on home­ made noodles,” and contrasts to emeralds in the following stanza when the poet asks if “women dream / the Saturnian ice of emeralds and sapphires / because men never touch them?” The poem likewise holds private images (“. . . men who rode motorcycles into the living room, once, / . . .the Silver Surferwho might travel with me,”), many of which reflect on earlier poems and collections. Through these images, the reader is made to recognize that Emerald Ice contains not just the poet’s consciousness, but also the sources of that consciousness. At the same time, all Wakoski’s imagery (in, to highlight a few works, “The Mechanic,” “George Washington’s Camp Cups,” and “Duchess Potatoes”) universalizes experience to dispel any notion that, though she is a westerner, she is a regionalist. Perhaps most important, though, remains the refraction of experience through time. The collection filters a quarter century of the poet’s life, a quarter century which provides the reader an opportunity to witness the growth and learning only time brings. Love and life resonate and change, and Emerald Ice contains those resonances and changes. BILL BAINES Truckee Meadows Community College Pulling Leather: Being the Early Recollections of a Cowboy on the Wyoming Range, 1884-1889. By Reuben B. Mullins. Edited and with an introduction by Jan E. Roush and Lawrence Clayton. (Glendo, Wyoming: High Plains Press, 1988. 219 pages, $10.95.) Published fifty years after the author’s death and a century following the events described, Reuben Mullins’ Pulling Leather is an authentic and read­ able first hand account of cowboy and range life. The locale is the eastern half of what became the state of Wyoming in 1890, the year after Mullins stopped cowboying to work as a blacksmith, miner, and drugstore clerk, complete medical college and dental school . . . and settle into a long career as a Nebraska dentist. Although discovery and publication of his recollections involved unusual circumstances, the author clearly wrote with publication in mind. The book’s values include the interest of the personal narrative skill­ fully related by Mullins, the historically crucial years covered, and the author’s abilities to describe Wyoming life in the 1880s, characterize varied types of people engaged in raising cattle, and supply colorful details and anecdotes related to ranch work as well as cowboy mores and humor. Mullins arrived in Cheyenne in 1884 as a tenderfoot of twenty. Working as a cowboy over much of the next five years, he developed into a capable hand while employed by the Swan Land and Cattle Company, the AU7, the 4W, Reviews 269 and finally the Hoe Ranch, until he decided to look for a steadier career because the open range was ending under pressures from sheepmen, settlers arriving on the railroads, and terrible cattle losses during the 1885-87 winters. Writing Pulling Leather late in life, Mullins saw both the values and limita­ tions of his early experiences. His fortitude, confidence, and attraction to cowboy life are evident, and he shares the attitudes of many cattlemen of the period, including prejudices toward Indians, sheep, fences, and farmers. Yethe understands the thinking of ordinary cowboys and their limited opportunities to become more than hard-working hired hands on large ranches, and he refuses to romanticize the drudgery, boredom, and dangers of their jobs and lives. Firsthand recollections of range life—such as We Pointed Them North, A Texas Cowboy, and Bud Cowan’s Range Rider—have long been an enter­ taining and revealing category of western nonfiction. In adding another work to this lively body of writing, High Plains Press has published Pulling Leather in an attractive, carefully edited paperback edition with an excellent introduc­ tion and biographical essay on its author. ROBERT A. RORIPAUGH University of Wyoming Literature & Landscape: Writers of the Southwest. By Cynthia Farah. (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1988. 137 pages, $35.00.) Cynthia Farah calls this book “a labor of love.” Her labor—along with her enthusiasm and...