Dayton O. Hyde was a Yooper who set off on a freight train west to avoid his mother's wrath (yes, you read that correctly), and never looked back. The Pastures of Beyond is his memoir of an adolescence and young adulthood spent on a sprawling Oregon cattle ranch.
Initially out of his element, but with an unquenchable desire to become a real cowboy, Hyde learned to break colts, rope steer, and even to fight bull. His life on the ranch spanned the years immediately before and after World War II, with the requisite service in Europe, where Hyde landed on Norman beaches just after D-Day. Hyde writes of knowing many of the last true cowboys and Indians, and the first of the true rodeo stars. There can be no question that his life has been a colorful one, or that the West he knew exists no more.
The Pastures of Beyond is an excellent corollary to books about an earlier West, most notably To Hell on a Fast Horse and The Colonel and Little Missie. It's also a fun memoir that has many of the qualities the best memoir writes, James Herriot, Edmund Love, and the Gilbreth siblings among them.
Four stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment