I had begun to see those beards long before
they were gray; when no wire fence mutilated the freedom of the range; when
fourteen mess-wagons would be at the spring round-up; when cattle wandered and pastured,
dotting the endless wilderness; when roping brought the college graduate and
the boy who had never learned to read into a lusty equality of youth and skill;
when songs rose by the camp-fire; and the dim form of the night herder leaned
on his saddle horn as under the stars he circled slowly around the recumbent
thousands; when two hundred miles stretched between all this and the whistle of
the nearest locomotive.
Oh, Friends, this is
one lovely elegy to the West that Was as Owen Wister knew it. It is chockful of
descriptive power, but it is also soaked in a sadness, a mournful lament for
what was and what may never be again.
Wister gave us this tale
towards the end of his life and one gets the feeling it is not a mere story, nor rose-colored nostalgia but a sad-eyed
goodbye to what the man saw as a better time.
Superlative craft
here.
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