Wisdom of the West by Tom Browning

 

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.