Family Ranch Research Articles

Management Transitions: Handing Over the Reins

hen a family farm or ranch is handed down to successive generations there are a multitude of potential economic and rela-tionship issues that can derail the best-laid plans, but foresight and planning will greatly improve the odds of a successful management transfer. Most successful cases we have observed during the past 30 years were due to early and deliberate planning. Good transitions between managers leave little to chance (Table 1).Some ranch families may think the title Chief Executive Offi cer (CEO) sounds too corporate for ranching and does not apply to them. On many ranches it may be “Dad” or “Grandpa,” or it could be “Grandma.” If the ranch is managed by outside talent, it may be “the general manager.” Whatever the title, there is one decision maker who carries more weight than all others and for the purpose of this discussion, that person will be the CEO. For a family ranch to make it from one generation to the next, with every CEO there must be a successor. Here again someone may say that life on our ranch is not so simple. However, one of the keys to successfully passing on the ranch to the next generation is planning for the future. Thinking in terms of “CEO” and “successor” is the fi rst step in that direction.The focus of this article will be on four problematic aspects of the transition process: 1) a reasoned approach to identifying the right successor, 2) open and honest commu-nications on the ranch, 3) development of the successor, and 4) the exit of the current CEO.

The Family Ranch: Land, Children, and Tradition in the American West by Linda Hussa, Madeleine Graham Blake

THE FAMILY RANCH:LAND,CHILDREN, AND TRADITION IN THEAMERICAN WEST byLindaHussa photographs by Madeleine Graham Blake University ofNevada Press, Reno, 2009. 272 pages. $24.95 cloth. "Self-sufficiency," Linda Hussa argues in this thought-provoking book, "is difficultto attain but paramount and worthy of the effort" (p. xxvii). In awork thatconsiders the"mothering dynamic" of families raising theirchildren ina "classroom of quiet horizons," Hussa explores the ways ranch families in theGreat Basin inte gratedwork, leisure,education, and landscape during the late twentiethcentury.Hussa pres ents a seriesof intimatevignettes,profiling the experiences of sixdifferentranch families in a montage of recollections thatconvey moral and ethical themes.Hussa depicts a rancher ethic revolving around family, land, and livestock. In a work that lacks footnotes, bibliography, or other scholarlyapparatus, theonly support ingdocuments areMadeline Graham Blake's evocative photographs showing parents and childrenworking together against those quiet horizons. Hussa presents these themes in loosely structured life-histories, apparently gleaned from undocumented conversations and interviews. These narratives, told from the perspective of transitional figureswho were either children of ranching parents or parents of ranching children,depict a culture of rural fundamentalism that embraces producerist, familyvalues. Hussa foregrounds people who conveyed their values and traditions across generational lines by sharing hard work with their children on family-based ranches and farms.Homeschooling figures prominently in these stories and photos (for example, the McKay, Harper, and Stoddart families on pp. 129,171-77, and 15-17). The author acknowl edges that other ranch families took a differ ent approach, but thisbook presents families who preferhomeschooling as a component of ranch life. Hussa's largely autobiographical chapter, "Eminent Domain and Land Use: Cattle Free in '93," questions theforeshortenedperspective of unnamed environmentalists, scientists, and federal agents whose decisions transformed remembered landscapes of rancher-managed cattle and rangelands into a government managed "wasteland" where people "pro duce nothing" (p. 28). Voices in these stories particularly criticize agents of the federal government for causing problems for rural folk;position family ranchers and farmers as "holistic,"production-oriented, land stewards; and praise cattle as beneficial to the ecosystem (p. 144-45). The familieswhose storiesHussa privileges as exemplars of producerist, rural values are impressively varied. They include families of interracial adoption, a singlemother who adopted a teenaged girl,and a Shoshone family thatblends reservation lifewith commercial ranching. Most chapters focus on multi generational familiesofEuro-American origin, butHussa emphasizes the restorativepotential of ranch lifefordisaffected or disadvantaged orphans. Despite its important attention to racial, ethnic, and gender diversity, the book lacks context in previous scholarship that examines closely related landscapes of rural lifeand ranch families. Kenneth Porter's studies ofAfrican Ameri can workers in thewestern cattle industry might better inform the discussion of the McKay family's children, for example, and Hussa's lingering discussion of adoption impressionistically dismisses the Haitian landscapes thatproduced those children. The Walker family story is similarlyvague on the closely intertwinedhistory of cattle ranching and Indian labor in theAmericanWest. Nancy Langston's recent study of cooperative, adap tive management in the Malheur and Klamath Reviews 487 districts as an outgrowth of numerous, con flictingdemands for the samewater resources and tribal treatyrights,orWilliam Robbins's discussion of similar issues along theKlamath inhis recentLandscapes ofConflict,might also better informHussa's stories involving the Klamath water crisis of 2001 and theKlamath River Coalition ofConservation Districts. Hussa focuses on the Walker and McKay familystoriesonly in the latter half of thebook, which veers into disconnected paragraphs critiquing federal land managers and legal decisions. Hussa only vaguely linkstheseasides to the stories and concerns of the McKay and Walker families and theirvalues. Earlier chap ters that focus exclusively on Euro-American families more closely integrate their stories with policy discussions. Methodologically, Hussa's book is strongest where itfollows closely Studs Terkel's formula inWorking. Terkel's classic study introduced each narrative voice with a briefbackstory and thenused each person's words to tellhis or her own story inways that revealed producerist notions of value and virtue in theworkplace while also illuminating underlying class and racial tensions.Hussa's stories similarly ideal ize physical labor as a transcendent ethical force and teaching tool, but she selects narra tives thatoveremphasize ruralityas a unifying identitywhile underplaying class, racial, and gender difference as...

Building a Vision that Drives Success and Transition in a Family Ranch Business

Building a Vision that Drives Success and Transition in a Family Ranch Business

A Challenge for All: Successfully Transferring Wealth and Management on Family Ranches

A Challenge for All: Successfully Transferring Wealth and Management on Family Ranches

A Challenge for All: Successfully Transferring Wealth and Management on Family Ranches

A Challenge for All: Successfully Transferring Wealth and Management on Family Ranches

Building a Vision that Drives Success and Transition in a Family Ranch Business

Building a Vision that Drives Success and Transition in a Family Ranch Business

High Country: A Novel by Willard Wyman

3 3 0 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 8 Rio’s Robert Laxalt: La voz de los vascos en la literatura norteamericana (2002) is the first book-length study of Laxalt’s writing, recently translated into English and published in the United States to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Sweet Promised Land. Only two of Laxalt’s books are available in Basque-language editions, and only a few have been translated into Spanish. Hence, Rio’s study is of necessity descriptive, offering plot summaries, literary analyses, and biographical infor­ mation. Particular strengths include Rio’s extensive research, which includes the Robert Laxalt papers at the University of Nevada, Reno; English-, Spanish-, and Basque-language articles and reviews; and interviews that Rio conducted in the 1990s with Laxalt, his family members, and close colleagues. Rio’s readings are sensitive and skillful, adept at interpreting motifs of initiation, contextualizing immigrant identity, and revealing the aesthetics of some of Laxalt’s more kaleidoscopic texts. At the same time, Rio’s willingness to be critical has to overcome his friendship with Laxalt, and his focus on the role played by Basques in Laxalt’s stories inevitably obscures other elements of Laxalt’s multi­ faceted work, including his critically acclaimed novel A Man in the Wheatfield (1964), a book centered on a community of Italian immigrants in Nevada. Rio thus brings overdue, critical attention to Robert Laxalt and offers a valuable survey of his work, opening up rewarding terrain for future critics. High Country: A Novel. By Willard Wyman. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. 362 pages, $16.95. Reviewed by Stephen Tatum University of Utah, Salt Lake City The “high country” referred to in the title of this 2005 award-winning novel, now available in paperback, is both that of Montana’s Swan Range and that por­ tion of the Sierra Nevada Range marked by Mt. Whitney and the headwaters of the Kern River. Here in this mountain topography, Willard Wyman’s engaging first novel chronicles, over approximately a fifty-year period, the adventures and romances of central character Ty Hardin, whom we first encounter as a deter­ mined fifteen-year-old on horseback rescuing a half-frozen calf on the family ranch that had been taken over by “the big outfit” during the Great Depression. With the exception of a long chapter that flashes back a decade to describe the background of Hardin’s packer mentor, “Book One: The Swan”—which occu­ pies nearly three-fourths of the novel’s pages— centers on Hardin’s initiation into the high country’s packer culture after he leaves his family’s hardscrabble life in the Bitterroot Valley, his eventual military service in World War II, and, finally, a short-lived marriage that ends in tragedy during childbirth. “Book Two: The Sierra (1950-1984)” details Hardin’s adult years as a packer explor­ ing the Sierras much as he had earlier learned to “read” the Swan Range can­ yons and trails; this section’s growing elegiac tone and subject confirmed by a climactic moment centering on another Hardin search-and-rescue attempt. B o o k R e v ie w s 3 3 1 As a historical novel of formation that some reviewers have compared to the ambition of Lonesome Dove (1985), High Country details in serial fashion Hardin’s intuitive skills with working horses and mules; the expansion of his social, cultural, and sexual horizons; and his haunted maturity as he encounters the sorrowful complexities of love and death. He also witnesses the changes in the high-country tenain due to technology and recreational tourism. The nov­ el’s central tension is thus both geographical and historical. The plot oscillates between events in the mountains and in the rural valley towns. The novel’s repetition of the rescue motif, its allusions to popular music and dance, and its staging of various human and animal deaths mark the novel’s great theme of relentless change and transformation. The geographical and historical tension converges in the wake of one of the...

Developers Address New Challenges in the Planning and Implementation of Very Large Scale Developments Designed as Self-Sustaining Communities

Abstract This article is focused upon the learning and innovation that grow from the experience of pioneering the implementation of a large-scale (19,500 units) self-sustaining community plan on a large acreage ownership. Across the suburban and rural areas of the United States and especially in South Florida old family farmlands and ranches are passing from the generations who assembled and worked them to heirs who would prefer to sell the property for development. Kitson & Partners (K&P) was able to secure such a family ranch, the Babcock “Crescent B” Ranch, when attempts by the public and the State of Florida to purchase it were unsuccessful. The precedent K&P has set is to assure that approximately 90% of the 91,361 acres they purchased from the Babcock Family will be in various forms of public ownership at the end of the project. The purchase and subsequent below market price sale of the 73,471 acres to the State established Florida's largest State Preserve, working ranch, single purchase, and public...

Technology, Aesthetics and Populism in "The Gospel According to Mark"

Through a study of Borges's El segun Marcos (The Gospel According to Mark), this essay examines two relationships: aesthetics and populism, on the one side, and technology and globalization, on the other. These examinations, however, do not form two separate discussions but a single contestation whose intermingled, moving parts generate not only El Evangelio but much of the Borgesian canon. In The Gospel According to Mark, Baltasar Espinosa, 33, travels with his cousin to the latter' s family ranch, where he performs farm duties under the guidance of the foreman, a certain Gutre. Endowed with a casi ilimitada bondad (1068), Espinosa nonetheless has accomplished little. A non-graduate of the university, he won high school awards for rhetoric, has completed a promise to his mother to cross himself each night, prefers that others defeat him enjoys loss in arguments and when betting, and once punched a schoolmate for trying to force him to partake in a strike.

Review of Bailing Wire & Gamuza: The True Story of a Family Ranch Near Ramah, New Mexico, 1905-1986 by Barbara Vogt Mallery

Review of Bailing Wire & Gamuza: The True Story of a Family Ranch Near Ramah, New Mexico, 1905-1986 by Barbara Vogt Mallery

Bailing Wire & Gamuza: The True Story of a Family Ranch Near Ramah, New Mexico, 1905–1986

Bailing Wire & Gamuza: The True Story of a Family Ranch Near Ramah, New Mexico, 1905–1986

Not just any land: a personal and literary journey into the American grasslands

Though he'd lived in Iowa all his life, the allure of the prairie had somehow eluded John Price - until, after a catastrophic flood, a brief glimpse of native wildlife suddenly brought his surroundings home to him. Not Just Any Land is a memoir of Price's rediscovery of his place in the American landscape and of his search for a new relationship to the life of the prairie - that once immense and beautiful wilderness of grass now so depleted and damaged as to test even the deepest faith. Price's journey toward a conscious commitment to place takes him to some of America's largest remaining grasslands and brings him face to face with a troubling, but also hopeful, personal and environmental legacy. It also leads him through the region's literature and into conversations with contemporary nature writers - Linda Hasselstrom, Dan O'Brien, William Least Heat-Moon, and Mary Swander - who have devoted themselves to living in, writing about, and restoring the grasslands. Among these authors Price observes how a commitment to the land can spring from diverse sources, for instance, the generational weight of a family ranch, the rites of wildlife preservation, the 'deep maps' of ancestral memory, and the imperatives of a body inflicted with environmental illness. resulting narrative is an innovative blend of memoir, nature writing, and literary criticism that bears witness to the essential bonds between spirit, art, and earth. John Price is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. His essays on nature have appeared, among other places, in Orion, The Christian Science Monitor, and Best Spiritual Writing 2000.

Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon by John D. Nesbitt, and: Antelope Sky: Stories of the Modern West by John D. Nesbitt

B o o k R e v i e w s 103 ing World War II. The story of comfort women had to be told, and Keller proves to be the right writer to brave that unchartered territory. Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon. By John D. Nesbitt. New York: Walker, 1997. 181 pages, $20.95. Antelope Sky: Stories of the Modern West. By John D. Nesbitt. Torrington, Wyo.: RR Productions, 1997. 166 pages, $8.95. Reviewed by Jonathan Pitts SUN Y-Buffalo John Nesbitt’s Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon follows the trials of Henry Sommers as he struggles to build a life in a canyon on the plains of Wyoming in the late 1800s. His problems are, in this order, a sleazy fellow homesteader named O ’Leary, who tries to lure Henry into a mavericking scheme; O ’Leary’s suffering wife, Dora, who seems to want something else from Henry; and Molly, the shopgirl in town, whose tanned skin, dark hair, and sparkling eyes are the vision Henry needs to keep working on his little place and riding for the Box Elder Ranch— familiar stuff, of course. Henry’s prob­ lems are all solved in the end, and you know that from the first page. Nesbitt knows that you know, and he knows what you want in a Western: comfort­ able characters on horses making short work of whatever rides into their way. This is to say that Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon is indeed “another fastreading Western,” as the publicity blurb says. I liked the novel in the way we usually like formula Westerns— they give us our formula, fast. Henry is the boyish, morally pure hero threatened by, but invulnerable to, the cor­ rupt temptations of men like O ’Leary out on the plains. If Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon can be accused of a lack of ambition, this is because Nesbitt’s considerable talent as a writer is too limited by the genre. The characters shouldn’t be too complex, the conflict too tangled or meaningful. Nesbitt does his job, but he obviously has the ability to do more. For instance, as in the best of the formula Westerns, Nesbitt gives us moments we recognize from our own thrilling experiences alone in the western landscape. Sitting in the shade of his sorrel, Henry saw the herd spread out below him for a half mile in the rolling grass country. The animals were grazing, but from this dis­ tance the scene looked motionless. The sun overhead had not seemed to move in the last hour, and the land stretched away for­ ever in all directions. Although there was almost always some breeze or stronger wind in this part of Wyoming, the afternoon was almost breathless. (86) I hope Nesbitt continues to write fast reading Westerns, but I also hope that he finds some way to let his talent expand into a more substantial, chal­ lenging space where we can enjoy his writing more slowly. 104 W A L 34(1) SPRING 1999 He’s already good at the small things, as he shows in his collection of stories, Antelope Sky: Stories of the Modem West. In the best of these, the characters muddle through everyday life while the land and its wildlife fol­ low their own, often inscrutable, order. These people are familiar to those of us who have lived in the West— most of them could be people we know; some of them are us. In “In the Land of the Bucking Bronco,” Brent takes a job at a restaurant in Wyoming while hoping to get work on a ranch. Three rodeo cowboys drive up in a brand-new pickup for drinks, and in their drunken bar talk offer the awed Brent a job on their family ranch. Tiny, Brent’s wise old boss, warns him about entertaining cowboy dreams, but these dreams are deep and they die hard. As the title of Nesbitt’s collection suggests, the stories explore the con­ tinuing existence of the western dream in its many, often hallucinatory guises. In “Road Hunter’s Neighbor,” the narrator watches from his kitchen table as his neighbor, who hunts from the cab of his...

Twisselmannia (Brassicaceae), a Remarkable New Genus from California

Twisselmannia californica, a new genus and species from Kings County, California, is described and illustrated. Its relationships to other mustard genera are discussed. To the foreign reader, the discovery of a new genus from the United States would seem rather unusual, especially for a family like the Brassicaceae (Cruciferae), which has recently been treated for North America in the outstanding monograph by Rollins (1993). Although most of the North American flora north of Mexico is well known, numerous discoveries continue to be made, and it is estimated that several hundred new taxa remain to be discovered and named from the United States alone (Ertter, in press; Milius, 1999). Hartman and Nelson (1998) indicated that 1197 new taxa of vascular plants, including five genera based entirely on newly described species, were discovered in the United States and Canada between 1975 and 1994. Of these, 91 taxa belong to the Brassicaceae, and 217 (ca. 18%) were discovered from California alone. Recent outstanding discoveries in the Brassicaceae from California include the new genus and species Sibaropsis hammittii S. Boyd & T. S. Ross (Boyd & Ross, 1997) and Arabis hirshbergiae S. Boyd (Boyd, 1998). The remarkable new discovery, hereafter known as Twisselmannia californica, is based on a single specimen collected in 1994 and was nearly passed over by its collector as the common weed Capsella bursa-pastoris (L.) Medikus (Andrew Sanders, pers. comm.). It was sent initially to Reed C. Rollins who for reasons of deteriorating health never had the time to study it. The specimen, along with many others left in Dr. Rollins's office after he died, were loaned to me in November 1998. Upon a casual look at the specimen, it was immediately evident that it does not belong to any known genus in the Brassicaceae. Critical further study, as well as a thorough checking of Schulz (1936) and all the major floras of the world, supported the fact that the plant is a native new species that belongs to an undescribed monotypic genus. The saltbush scrub habitat in which TI californica grows belongs to a private property of ca. 1700-acre parcel land in Kings County that is up for development into an instant city, an action that would have resulted in the total destruction of the habitat (Andrew Sanders, pers. comm.) and perhaps the extinction of the species. It was planned that I and several colleagues would look for T californica in late February 1999 before I formally described it. However, due to the drought this year in that part of California and because of the immediate need to protect the habitat in which it grows, it became necessary to publish a formal account without delay. The genus, anecdotally referred to as the Kings Gold, is named in honor of Ernest C. Twisselmann (1917-1972), rancher and tireless botanical explorer of the arid lands of south-central California, whose name is synonymous with floristic works on the Inner South Coast Ranges. His initial attempt to compile a simple list of the plants on the Twisselmann family ranches culminated in A flora of the Temblor Range and the neighboring part of the San Joaquin Valley, all potential habitat for additional populations of Twisselmannia. He subsequently authored A flora of Kern County, His floras (Twisselmann, 1956, 1967) continue to inspire several of the most enthusiastic floristicians in California. Although the opportunity to honor Ernest Twisselmann with his own genus could not be passed by, credit must also be given to the discover, Ed LaRue, whose keen-sighted recognition of this anomalous mustard resulted in the fortuitous collection of the sole specimen currently known. Twisselmannia Al-Shehbaz, gen. nov. TYPE: Twisselmannia californica Al-Shehbaz. Herba annua; folia caulina pinnatisecta; racemi ad apicem bracteati, valde elongati; sepala oblonga, nonsaccata; petala lutea; stamina 6, tetradynama; fructus obdeltoidei, valde compressi, puberuli, valvis in dimidio inferiore carinatis, laevibus et tenuiter coriaceis, in dimidio superiore rotundatis, tuberculato-rugosis et crasse coriaceis vel sublignosis; septum valde angustatum; semina 4-8, oblonga, nonmucilaginosa; cotyledones incumbentes. Herbs annual. Trichomes unicellular, eglandular, simple and minutely forked. Stems erect, few NovoN 9: 132-135. 1999. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.141 on Sun, 11 Dec 2016 04:52:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms r Missouri Botanical

Claiming, Corrupting, Contesting: Reconsidering "The West" in Western American Literature

By Joan M. Jensen University of New Mexico Press, 1995 In his collection of autobiographical essays, Owning It All, William Kittredge tells of how his grandfather had built a cage near a slaughterhouse on the family ranch and stocked it with the entrails of butchered cows in order to trap magpies. Once a week during summer he drive an old Cadillac there and, proceeding in slow, measured steps to confront the birds, would lift the shotgun, and from no more than 12 feet, sighting down that barrel where the bluing was mostly worn off, through the chicken wire into ... their eyes,... kill them one by one, taking his time, maybe so as to prove that this was no accident (66). Kittredge's stunning image evokes the grandfather's daunting conviction of rightful ownership and his deep-seated malevolence toward what he, and his ranching ilk, had decided did not belong in Warner Valley, southeastern Oregon. One senses that the power of this episode derives from Kittredge's own appalled understanding of the grandfather's action. Out in the far West, in places well removed from cities, such ranchers, who owned and leased massive acreages, cast great shadows across the land. Kittredge details the far-reaching changes they made to the Great Basin environment in order to make it suitable for commercial agriculture. When in 1946 his father traded in 200 working horses for chicken feed, this was seen as progress, for the new John Deere tractors proved far more efficient than animal labor had been. Meanwhile, through mechanized power and irrigation, former marshlands that for centuries had supported massive populations of annually migrating

Evaluating Changes in Ranch Management Practices through Extension Education

Since 1988, University of California Cooperative Estension short courses have been offered to 362 California ranchers and interested participants. The purpose was to assist private rangeland owners and managers in planning ranch goals, monitoring ranch operations, and establishing economically feasible and ecologically sustainable grazing management systems. In 1994, an evaluation study of the short courses was conducted to determine if the rancher participants had initiated successful improvements in their ranching and grazing management. A survey questionnaire mailed to all short course participants had a rancher response rate of 49%. Results of the survey indicate that over three-quarters of the ranchers had family operations, most of which were cow-calf operations. Almost 40% of the ranchers earned more than half of their income directly from their ranching operation. As a result of having taken the short courses, ranchers reported that they had improved or protected 14% of the rangeland which they owned or leased. Over half said that they had increased their ranching profits. A majority of respondents had implemented at least one ranching practice presented in the short course. These changes appear to be motivated from ranchers’ needs to increase on-ranch profits through enterprise diversification, to cope with regulatory constraints, and to improve land management for future generations on a family ranch.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

182 Western American Literature other hand, what does come through in this study is a keen sense of Estes’s love of writing and his enthusiastic and prolific profiling of rural Texas life. While William Humphrey’s career has fared comparatively better, there is considerable doubt whether he is even a westerner or that his work reflects anything that is inherently western. In the introductory section of his study, Mark Royden Winchell admits that the locus of much of Humphrey’s writing is just “200 miles west of Oxford, Mississippi,... where the ‘South draws to a stop’ and the West begins.”This statement is in itself rather problematic; most would agree that the West begins somewhere around the 100th meridian, far from Clarksville in east Texas. The problem here may be Winchell’s confusion of rural with western, and indeed the two have much in common, but few would concede that a book with a rural setting such as, say, Winesburg, Ohiois a western book. This confusion is intensified by Winchell’s citing numerous critics who link Humphrey’s work with Faulkner’s. If Winchell’s sense of geography is debatable, his critical eye is strong and lucid as he digs into the crux of Hum phrey’s writing with an explication that is both penetrating and sound. Edward Butscher’s study of Peter Wild is both interesting and disappoint­ ing. First off, many would agree that Wild is at his best as an essayist. That Butscher focuses exclusively on Wild’s poetry at the expense of his other writing is disappointing. Conversely, this limited focus should also be the source of considerable interest for readers who prefer Wild the poet to Wild the prose stylist. The problem here is not, however, with Butscher’s subject matter so much as with the way he writes. His pleonastic discussion of Wild’s highly personal poetics comes dangerously close to lucubration, to academic parody; yet in Butscher’s defense it is quite likely that writing about prose is significantly easier than working with poetry. Or is it? All in all, these five studies provide clear testimony to both the breadth and vitality of western literary scholarship. And if some of these efforts are less than perfect, each adds to the layer of understanding necessary for continued growth in western letters. (^BILL D. TOTH Western New Mexico University All thePretty Horses. By Cormac McCarthy. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. 302 pages, $21.00.) After his first four novels, from The Orchard Keeper (1965) through Suttree (1982), Cormac McCarthy’s regional reputation was Southern, and his renown primarily stylistic. Commentators made comparisons with artists as diverse as Sam Peckinpah and Jorge Luis Borges. Then the Protean McCarthy produced Blood Meridian (1985), a tale of the West that mixed grotesque violence and grotesque humor and delineations that both drew on and mocked the conven­ Reviews 183 tions of eighteenth-century novels and epic plots in general, altering his re­ gional identification and adding to his reputation as a prose-wizard and an original visionary. All the Pretty Horses, winner of the 1992 National Book Award, is the first volume of a promised border trilogy, and will attract much attention to McCarthy as a writer of the West, and one who seeks to combine the impulses of the Modernist and the nineteenth-century traditions. This novel is a mustread . McCarthy’s story is elemental: at once abandoned and freed by the death of his grandfather, the divorce of his parents, and the sale of the family ranch near San Angelo, sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole sets out in the late 1940s with a friend on ajourney south, crossing on horseback into the last great approxima­ tion of a dry frontier, Mexico. Into this traditional quest paradigm, McCarthy puts elements of western on-the-road picaresque, and later the purest pastoraland -romance interludes, the dense accretions of social-manners realism, the horror of captivity narratives, the suspense of the cross-country chase, the necessity of an ending. His particular skill is to draw energy from each of these sources without giving allegiance to any of them. His two most memorable characters, in fact, spring from...

Nothing but Blue Skies by Thomas McGuane

Reviews 283 lack of coherence as a book by offering many fine poems that promise good things to come ifNewman continues to write poetry. I have less to say about Fred Candelaria’s Preludes & Fugues, a book that doubtlesswillappeal to many readers, but one Ifeel istoo interested in affected allusion, in wit—and in a kind ofcerebral sensibility that values discursiveness, formal fragmentation, and nature as an analogue for the mind hiding behind generality to avoid particulars about human situations. Manyofthese poems are epigrammaticwithoutbeing pithy or insightful, as in “buddhist nun”:“none but buddha/will ever/know your beauty.”Candelaria usually utilizes a rather generic imagery—and when it is more felt than de­ ployed for a philosophical point, the imagery can be too easy: “not a honey­ moon/more like vinegar than rain.”Such phrases and lines as “timeless perfec­ tion”and “drowned greeks/phoenicians/romans”tarnish the poetry. Wearied modernism hangs like barnacles from such poems as “sea sketches.” The only poem that held promise for me was “The Market,”but its consid­ eration of commodified sexuality was ruined by abstraction, tiresome rhyme, leering, and an unconvincing attitude on the part of a woman who knows herself to be a sex object. It is possible that a reader who values wit and an obviously learned intelli­ gence may find much more in Preludes & Fuguesthan I have. I hope so. CHRISTOPHER COKINOS Kansas State University Nothing but Blue Skies. By Thomas McGuane. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin/ Seymour Lawrence, 1992. 349 pages, $21.95.) Nothing but Blue Skies, Thomas McGuane’s new novel, offers a provocative and sweeping vision of the post-Reagan West, a landscape blighted by environ­ mental, economic, and spiritual frailties. Through his depiction of Frank Copenhaver, the book’s central character, McGuane seems intent on nothing less than a re-examination of the myth of the American West. McGuane skill­ fullymanipulates the conventional iconography, employing a disturbinglycom­ plete set of traditional western images: this is a book about land and livestock speculation, about fly-fishing and Montana rivers, about barroom brawls, about male camaraderie, about selling the family ranch—in short, about all forms of western cultural inheritance. Frank Copenhaver is an ex-hippie businessman whose wife and luck have deserted him, a man trying to understand the burden of his unusable past. He sees himselfas a “transitional figure”caught between generations and between value systems: he looks in one direction and sees obsolete cowboyswho “spend all their time reading magazines about themselves”;he looks in another direc­ tion and sees “We, Montana,”an absurd group of demagogic activists working 284 Western American Literature “to keep any water from leaving the state, through the erection of dams and diversions.” In his search for stability Frank finds himself peeping through windows (looking for some archetypal happyAmerica),drinking too much, and abusing friendships. McGuane effectively symbolizes Frank’s decline through the parallel decline of the Kid Royale Hotel, “one of the monuments of the Montana frontier”: Frank had purchased the aging building with the hope of restoring it, but ends up renting it out as a chicken farm. McGuane’s cultural critique is superb, but in reaching this level he leaves behind a narrative that is not entirely satisfactory. When reading McGuane, perhaps the dean of contemporary Montana writing, one expects a great deal: the biting wit, the incisive commentary, the outrageous climax, the lyrical reflection. While McGuane’ssignature stylistic movements are feltin Nothingbut Blue Skies, here they are only occasionally devastating, and too often the antici­ pated peaks don’t pay off (including a disappointing father-daughter fishing scene, and a silly pig-riding episode). The periodic moments of rhetorical brilliance and wicked humor leave the rest ofthe book sounding somewhatflat. Grand in scope and perception, uneven in execution, NothingbutBlue Skies again demonstrates McGuane’s considerable literary ability, leaving hopes for still greater achievement. NATHANIEL LEWIS Harvard University Mountain Windsong: A Novel ofthe Trail ofTears. ByRobertJ. Conley. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. 220 pages, $19.95.) When Euro-Americans of the nineteenth century looked to the West, they dreamed ofopportunity, ifnot offulfilling their God-appointed destiny. That’s quite a contrast to the Cherokees, who, even before...

Drug Analyses of Skeletonizing Remains

Abstract A 47-year old white female was reported missing by her family after an argument with her husband and son. The arguments were of long and continuing nature with sharp differences as to the use of real properties. Her body was discovered by the family dog eight months later in a desolate area on the family ranch on the slope of a hill.