The Trail to Ogallala by Benjamin Capps

 

Blackie killed two newborn calves on that bed ground, splitting their skulls with the butt of the axe, and they buried them in hasty graves to hide them from their mothers. It was barely light when they prodded the cattle up and tried to make them graze; the cattle did not have the eagerness of the morning before. They were sullen as they walked north. They had used up too much moisture the first day.

This trail drive novel won the Spur Award for Best Novel in 1964 and won a spot on Jon Lewis’ 100 Best Western Novels.

Well, how is it?

In a word—Superlative.

Those looking for shoot-outs, steely-eyed slim-hipped heroes slacking into chairs will find none of the formulary here.

No, this novel plays more like a documentary of a trail drive, a cowboy procedural if you will.

It’s all about the work, the struggle, the bonding, the sweat, the weather, the gripes, the politics of tired men doing a damned difficult job.

It is essentially a novel of Work.

The novel lacks the usual shoot-em-up aspect of the Western, hell, there’s not even a romantic subplot—it’s all Pure OD “We got a job to do, Boys.”

The novel is better for this strict adherence to realism.

We are offered educated glimpses of the realities of a trail drive; I offer a few extracts below to give the flavor.

[While riding night-herd before an impending storm. I’ve ridden in a cracking storm with lighting in the tree line—this nails it.]

They sang church songs. The thunderstorms which had surrounded them and now threatened to engulf them from the west produced awe and some degree of reverence in the riders. They could see up into the vast reaches of the clouds, see the varied lightings, see the upward depths with murky streaks and puffy fingers, writhing in contrary currents. They could hear the rumbles of thunder that seemed to penetrate even into the ground. They understood the belief of many peoples in the past that the sun is a God and the storm is an angry God, a belief not caused by simplicity of mind, but by a nearness to these forces, an involvement, sometimes a feeling of standing naked and alone in nature.

[At the burial of a comrade along the way.]

Blackie found a clean sheet of writing paper and a pencil in the saddle bag and said to the Professor, “I guess we ought to put where he come from and where he was born--stuff like that.”

“All right. Where did he come from and when was he born?”

It developed that no one knew. They had no doubt that he had actually been a colonel, and that about him there must be many important facts that should be recorded, but no one knew. In fact, no one even knew the day of the month he had died, except Scott. Professor wrote: “Colonel Horace Kittredge” and “Died in a stampede” and the date.

They wedged it into a split in the oak. It might last six months in the rain and the wind.

[Upon discovery that one had a harmonica and knew how to play.]

He got into the swing of it, and he played it. He played “Oh, Susanna” and “Turkey in the Straw,” and “Way Down Yonder,” and “Buffalo Gals.” They tapped their boots in the dirt. After more than two hard months on the trail, the music was nothing less than magic. It was possible the Kid was not really much of a musician, but they could hear in his little harp with ten holes in it all the violins and sweet voices they had ever heard. He played “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” and they all became motionless and silent. Ostler stopped puttering over the cow-chip fire. Then the Kid tried to play “Home, Sweet Home.” He got halfway through the chorus before he started having trouble; he played a little further, roughly, and gave up. He pounded the contrary harp on his leg to get the saliva out of it.

At his age, Kid might have been justified in falsely believing that he had a good home and remembering that he was a long way from it. But they all, even Ostler, four times his age, were thinking about things far away, and hardly a word was spoken during the evening meal.

[The experience borne trail craft of the characters, all based on real men, reminds us of what we lose by too much soft livin’ among artificial lights.]

In the north the Big Dipper had swung low and its handle curved out across the western sky. He got up and tugged the wagon tongue around and pointed it at the North Star.

They knew things about the heavenly bodies and their apparent motions, such things as they learned from familiarity, from watching the night sky as hours pass and as months pass, from watching it as they move north on the surface of the earth. The kinds of things they knew were such as been known for thousands of years by sailors standing watch at night or by nomadic herders standing watch at night, and such as are rarely known among people who live among artificial lights under a roof. They knew that the stars seemed to rotate in fixed patterns and that one point about which they rotate is the North Star, that the moon and planets wander across the face of the fixed patterns, that as one trails north the southern constellation sink but the North Star rises until at last the Big Dipper swings clear of the ground and is like a giant clock in the sky, and the moon falls behind almost an hour each night, that the fixed stars gain on the days so that during a three month drive a star which comes up as darkness falls will rise so that is overhead when darkness falls. And a trail driver who has been north with cattle every year for the past ten years might have been able, awakening suddenly like Rip Van Winkle and gazing at the night sky, to tell about how far north he was and the month of the year, however, if he were a shrewd guesser, he might have been able to say, “We’re a few days drive south of the Nebraska line and it's a little past the middle of June.

I repeat—Superlative.