GROWING UP IN THE WEST

What’s the picture on this blog?

That’s Scotts Bluff National Monument in western Nebraska.  It’s one of those place where, if you look hard enough, you can still see the ruts from the conestogas that rolled along the Oregon Trail more than 150 years ago. 

I used to be able to see that bluff on my way to school in the morning.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was growing up in the very heart of the Old West—literally a mile from the Oregon and Mormon Trails, almost within walking distance of a famous old fur trading post, and a few hours’ car ride from the spot where Crazy Horse was killed and the Plains Indian wars ended in the tragedy of Wounded Knee.

But I was a kid.  To me, the town of Scottsbluff, Nebraska, was just like any other small town in what I thought of as the Midwest except that we had that funny looking butte just across the river.  We went to school and church, palled around, watched TV (the few hours a day it was on when it first arrived in town) and did the stuff kids normally did in the ‘Fifties.  On Saturdays, we could walk to the Midwest Theater on Broadway and, for a quarter, see a cartoon and a double feature, which as often as not was a western. 

To us, those John Wayne or Randolph Scott movies were about somewhere else, some mythic Wild West, not our little town.  “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier” was about Tennessee and Texas—the “real” wild frontier.  Never mind that when we picnicked in the Wildcat Hills, we had to sit on top of the picnic tables because the place was crawling with rattlesnakes.  Somewhere else was the “West.”

Fast forward a lifetime, though, and it’s clear to me that that place got under my skin and into my brain and marrow and sinew in ways I would never have believed at the time.  (And don’t you know that only western writers use terms like “bone and marrow and sinew”!)

Perhaps it was because of the spinster woman who lived two doors away, the great aunt of my best friend.  We’d play canasta in her living room and listen with one ear to stories about growing up in the pioneer days before cars and highways and radio.  Or perhaps it was long drives to Cheyenne, across the starkly beautiful emptiness of the Nebraska panhandle and southwestern Wyoming.  Or visiting Rapid City, where the Reptile Gardens was at least as interesting as Mount Rushmore to a 9 year old, and having lunch in the home of Korczak Ziolkowski, the artist who was just beginning a lifetime of pounding away at the Black Hills granite to create the 3-D monument to Crazy Horse. 

Maybe it was some early exposure to the works of Mari Sandoz, the gifted Nebraska writer whose works covered the intersection of white settlement and the military defeat of the native Americans. 

It was Sandoz who wrote my favorite western book ever—Old Jules, the story of her tough-as-nails father who planted an orchard in the Nebraska Sand Hills.  She also wrote the classic Crazy Horse:  The Strange Man of the Oglalas that was made into a movie starring (of all people) Victor Mature, a man of Swiss and Italian heritage.  The movie played at the Midwest, of course.  But I digress.

No matter what made me fall in love with the West—John Wayne or Aunt Cass or the pine-studded, rattlesnake infested Wildcat Hills—I did. 

I moved away after a few years to New Mexico (another fertile landscape for a Western novelist-to-be), then to Iowa.  Years later, I circled back to Nebraska, and after a few more fits and starts, here I am today, although on the eastern end of the state where we can claim to be more properly Midwestern but no less authentically part of the American westering experience.

After all, Lewis and Clark passed by going to and coming from their grand adventure.  They buried the only member of their party to die on the journey just a hundred miles upriver near where Sioux City, Iowa, stands today.  The Mormons camped here before they started their oxcart trek to the Promised Land, and the Union Pacific, the mother of railroads, was—and is—headquartered here.  A short day trip away is the Homestead National Monument, which includes some of the first acres successfully claimed under the Homestead Act.  Less than ten miles from my home is the Platte River, the north branch of which flowed less than three miles from my home in Scottsbluff nearly sixty years ago.

This land and the people it nourishes are in me, and I in them.  Is that why I write about the West?

“Yes” is as good an answer as I can ever hope to come up with. 

How about you?

By the way, here are the links to the Nook versions of The Intruders and The Old Boys.  Check 'em out!