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Leaving Cheyenne
431 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
3 people want to read
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August 27, 2019
1871, Texas, and just-orphaned Ben and Bo Curtis are forced off their land and join a cattle-drive north to Abilene. Narrated by Ben, it's a rough, tough tale of surviving and growing up in the dying days of the Old West that probably owes a debt to Lonesome Dove, being all demythologising and anti-romantic, though packed with the sights and sounds and characters and adventures of the time. Ben's a likeable young hero, but, it turns out, like his brother and almost everyone else he meets, a product of his time and place, and, amongst other things, racist as hell. Ben has a lot to learn, and though he will learn a lot, he's not going to have a Damascene conversion into a 21st cetury liberal.
After driving cattle, he works at a store, and is gripped with a feverish need to make money, and sees the opportunities all around him, skipping over the poor farmers more or less tricked to come out and too poor to buy anything. His budding business venture takes him out to Dodge, little more than a bunch of shacks and tents, but eventually he ends up out on the plain, skinning buffalos as they are sytematically and heedlessly slaughtered in a great bloody orgy of excess and consumption and greed.
Every adventure Ben has is driven by greed. Even the traditional western trope of revenge pales in comparison. Worry about whether to order a bunch of hats, then whether the hats will arrive, then whether the hats will sell consume him in Abilene, while his brother's grave lies untended and his brother's killer wanders free. Not but that his reluctance to go looking for a fight with the guy seems sensible enough, and when the fight does come it's entirely through coincidence and idle boasting, but it does cut against the traditional motivating drive of a western. The conflicts in Carter's west aren't titanic tragedies of family or honour or revenge - they're over resources and riches, getting in first before the law catches up.
He's not the only one driven by the desire for money, almost everyone is out to make a killing in one way or another, from the riders on the cattle drive to the poor sodbusters to the merchant businessmen and the railroad tycoons. Ben's got the same fever as the rest of them, driven by his own poverty, but also the sense that everyone and everything around him is there to be exploited, and the prosperity gospel preached in the churches further tells him that God approves, too. Ben is not without empathy, though. He's puzzled to find himself grudgingly recognising the worth of a black man, realises that the indians aren't quite the savages they're made out to be, that the farmers are being given a raw deal, and that there is something appalling about the slaughter of the buffalo. Along the way we are given hints that these are the seeds of the man he may yet grow up to be.
Anyway, an excellent, novel, a true bildungsroman, a sweeping saga of a wilderness being conquered and consumed and a frontier yielding to first vestiges of a rapacious civilisation.
After driving cattle, he works at a store, and is gripped with a feverish need to make money, and sees the opportunities all around him, skipping over the poor farmers more or less tricked to come out and too poor to buy anything. His budding business venture takes him out to Dodge, little more than a bunch of shacks and tents, but eventually he ends up out on the plain, skinning buffalos as they are sytematically and heedlessly slaughtered in a great bloody orgy of excess and consumption and greed.
Every adventure Ben has is driven by greed. Even the traditional western trope of revenge pales in comparison. Worry about whether to order a bunch of hats, then whether the hats will arrive, then whether the hats will sell consume him in Abilene, while his brother's grave lies untended and his brother's killer wanders free. Not but that his reluctance to go looking for a fight with the guy seems sensible enough, and when the fight does come it's entirely through coincidence and idle boasting, but it does cut against the traditional motivating drive of a western. The conflicts in Carter's west aren't titanic tragedies of family or honour or revenge - they're over resources and riches, getting in first before the law catches up.
He's not the only one driven by the desire for money, almost everyone is out to make a killing in one way or another, from the riders on the cattle drive to the poor sodbusters to the merchant businessmen and the railroad tycoons. Ben's got the same fever as the rest of them, driven by his own poverty, but also the sense that everyone and everything around him is there to be exploited, and the prosperity gospel preached in the churches further tells him that God approves, too. Ben is not without empathy, though. He's puzzled to find himself grudgingly recognising the worth of a black man, realises that the indians aren't quite the savages they're made out to be, that the farmers are being given a raw deal, and that there is something appalling about the slaughter of the buffalo. Along the way we are given hints that these are the seeds of the man he may yet grow up to be.
Anyway, an excellent, novel, a true bildungsroman, a sweeping saga of a wilderness being conquered and consumed and a frontier yielding to first vestiges of a rapacious civilisation.
Displaying 1 of 1 review