I wish I could find words to express the trueness,
the loyalty to their trust and to each other of the old trail hands. I wish I
could convey in language the feelings of companionship we had for one another.—Charles
Goodnight
The full title of this volume is Wisdom of the
West: Riding Trails & Telling Tales.
It is a compendium of Western Related “inspirational”
quotes broken into loose themes.
I’m a sucker for such volumes but…I gotta say this
book disappoints.
The quote offered from Mr. Goodnight is practically the
only Westerner found within. Oh, we get a quote from Zane Grey, one from L’Amour,
a Mark Twain or two, but the vast majority is cobbled from Victor Hugo,
Shakespeare, Robert Oppenheimer and others not associated in anyway with the
West.
This not to say Hugo, Shakespeare and others have nothing
to offer in the way of wise words; it is to say that a title “Wisdom of the
West” would seem, by definition, to be of the West.
I know as well as you that there are vast untapped
resources of actual words of wisdom from Frontier America and it is a disservice
to package a few handfuls of standard quotes from Bartlett’s Familiar
Quotations and make claims that something about the specific magic that was
and is the West has been made.
A truly disappointing volume to this reader.
