Spirits of the Land

Over the past year, I set out to read for myself two writers who lived and wrote in Washoe Valley, Nev., where I live. Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Will James are both getting some of the posthumous respect that they deserve. Their best books are still in print.

The Ox-bow Incident by Clark was first. It came to my mailbox in a Book of the Month Club "Classics of the Old West" edition. Walt Clark hated that his first book fell so easily into that category. Let's just call it a classic of the West, period. It's not just an allegory of yesterday. The vigilante mentality still stalks this land, lurking in the mob, and every self righteous mind. That became frighteningly clear when somebody bombed Forest Service ranger Guy Pence's office and home last year under cover of night.

I retreated to the higher aspirations of The City of Trembling Leaves, Clark's novel of an artist's coming of age in the modern West. I've been using the two-inch thick University of Nevada paperback edition as a doorstop for five years. This fall as Indian summer lingered and the leaves slowly turned, I drifted through Clark's symphonic novel of composer Tim Hazard's struggle to fashion modern art in the West. But it was the ancient spirits of the land that captivated me most in this book. In Clark's view, Reno in the first half of the 20th century was dominated by the spirits of the land. They are still there, Mount Rose, Peavine, the Truckee River, Pyramid Lake, the seasons of leaves. It just seems that these days we have to remind ourselves even more to heed them.

Walt Clark's writing reminds us. In his collection of short stories, The Watchful Gods, which is unfortunately out of print, the spirits of the land are characters that demand respect. When the snow began blowing hard through the pines at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, The Track of the Cat , reminded me that even an old story about a prideful man tracking a mountain lion into a blizzard and his own death could make us see new things about ourselves and the land we live in.

While Walt Clark dug deeply into this place, Will James was an escape artist. Even as he wrote, James knew his stories were ready-made romantic nostalgia. Still nobody could draw a cowhorse in action, or drawl in print like Will James. Thousands of would-be cowboys followed the trail of Will James west. Many still look up to him despite his well-known alcoholic demise. At the urging of the Will James Society, Mountain Press is bringing his books back in print, beginning with the first two written in Nevada, Cowboys North and South and The Drifting Cowboy.

If you've ever wondered the difference between a dally and a tie man, a remuda and a caviada, a buckaroo and a cowboy, or if you too dream about bucking horses and cowboyin', these early books are filled with gem like stories. James's first novel, Smoky the Cowhorse, won the Newbery Children's Book Award and has never gone out of print. It is the Black Beauty of the West. It made James famous. He left Washoe Valley saying it was getting too crowded. He moved to Montana. And it was all downhill from there. In the end, James couldn't run from himself. Anthony Amaral's even-handed biography, Will James: The Last Cowboy Legend, tells the whole sad story. It can be read as another cautionary allegory of the West.

University of Nevada Press, Reno, NV 89557, (702/784-6573).
Mountain Press Publishing Company, P.O. Box 2399, Missoula, MT 59806.