Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest

by Dan Flores

These personal and historical meditations explore the human and natural history of the Near Southwest, a bio-region that embraces New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and slices of Colorado, Kansas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Centuries ago, the Navajos named this region the Horizontal Yellow, a landscape characterized by yellowed grass stretching in all four directions, rivers that drain from the Southern Rockies to the Gulf of Mexico, and human cultures peculiarly adapted to the regional biome. The Horizontal Yellow's piney woods, oak savannahs, blackland prairies, rolling desert plains, desert scrub basins, scarp mesas, table lands, pinon-juniper foothills, and diverse mountain ranges have succored and inspired American Indians, Hispanos, Anglos, and Frenchmen, including Dan Flores's own ancestors, who homesteaded in western Louisiana three hundred years ago and were mustangers on the Southern Plains. Moving between the present and past, the personal and historical, the author ruminates on myth, wilderness, wolves, horses, deserts, mountains, rivers, and human endeavor from Cabeza de Vaca to Georgia O'Keeffe in the Near Southwest.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Westerns, Environment, Travel, Science

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Dan Flores is an environmental writer who from 1992 to 2014 held the A. B. Hammond Chair in the History of the American West at the University of Montana. A native of Louisiana and currently a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, he has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Time Magazine. Along with appearances on Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown on CNN and on Joe Rogan's podcasts, he was a consultant for and is featured in Ken Burns's 2023 documentary on the story of the American buffalo. Flores's eleven books and numerous essays have won nearly three-dozen literary prizes. His most recent works are American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, winner of the Stubbendieck Distinguished Book Prize in 2017; Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History, a 2017 New York Times Bestseller that won the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award and was a Finalist for PEN America’s E. O. Wilson Prize in Literary Science Writing; and Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America, a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2022.

Reviews

[Dan Herman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over the top stellar environmental and social history from Dan Flores!!!! This is the Shakespeare of environmental history. He can write. And he knows stuff far outside the field, too. This book includes a fine chapter on Georgia O'Keefe.

[Richard Jespers · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, I love that Flores takes possession of this subject right away with the term, “Near Southwest”—a region stretching from eastern Louisiana and including all of Texas and New Mexico. I come over twenty years late to reading this elegantly scripted book about the area’s ecology, but the ideas he expresses here seem to gain urgency as time passes. Flores alternates sections of family history (French and Spanish) and other histories with first-hand accounts of living, say, on the Llano Estacado, as well as poetic and lyrical sections of fiction to bring alive said histories. Flores is always on the move. After advanced schooling at Texas A&M, he explores, to mention a few places, the Chihuahuan desert, the Southern Plains of Texas (Llano Estacado or Steaked Plains), Abiquiu, New Mexico—finally lighting in Montana. But the Horizontal Yellow of which he speaks is the once real, now metaphorical, wave of yellowing grasses that cover what locals call, with a certain inelegance, the South Plains. It is where he builds a primitive place to live in Yellow House Canyon, about thirty minutes from where he teaches at the local university. It is where he lives with two wolf-dog hybrids as their alpha male (a role he doesn’t particularly relish; it’s the critters’ idea). It is a place remaining in his heart as he makes his home up north, where he can establish and retain a closeness to nature that the Texas South Plains has mostly expunged from its existence. His is an admired life but one I’m not sure I could pursue myself. I adore my life in town—Internet, TV, central heat and air—a bit too much.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another long-ago read that I either never wrote up on my Bezos-destroyed old Amazon account or else never transferred. The "horizontal yellow"? If you know what Amarillo means and where it is, you've got it.

The high plains aren't so boring sociologically or ecologically and Flores will give you the details. (Having once lived in this general area, and putzed areas around his Lubbock canyons, I know that otherwise.)

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than a history it's a meditation on the West and wilderness. Flores gets personal and provides a humorous and informative account of his wanderings from his boyhood home of Louisiana to the Illano Estacado's largest city of Lubbock, Texas. It's a lament for what we have done to the land. We visit the desert and the land of Georgia O'Keeffe. We learn of the land revolt in the Chama Valley area of New Mexico in the 1960's. We meet the familiar icons of the West: Abbey, Leopold; but also some "new" interesting characters that too few know about, especially the men in Texas who lobbied for the national parks. Texas ranks very low in parks per capita (either area or population). The Texas fixation with ownership of land as private property rather than their use as commons like a park is discussed at length. Just a fascinating trip through Native American, Hispano, and Anglo culture encountering the landscape or place that is the Southwest.