Chance mused about the way the young
colored man found a place among them. “We three are not really southerners,” he
thought, “certainly the Mexicans are not, and this is not really anything like
the South at all.” This was that West he had thought about as bigger than the North
and South put together, a place where an ex-slave could be a top hand or an ex-sergeant
could be anything he was big enough to be.
This 1965 Spur Award Winner for Best Novel is, indeed,
a fine work but there is a curious remove to it. A distance between the reader
and the protagonist Sam Chance.
Capps knows his ranching, his cattle lore, his Texas
history and politics. As evidenced in his 1964 novel Trail to Ogallala,
that extensive knowledge rendered that narrative more as a cattle-drive
procedural, rife with “How to” info than narrative drive. [That novel is
also reviewed in this blog.]
This novel has a similar, “In the know”
veracity to it, but it also is packed with incident. So much incident that it
plays as a condensed epic.
It spans from the Civil War to 1922 and my page count
has it at 261.
That may be the trouble. Capps has packed so much into
this novel that he left the episodes and plot points intact, but we never really
know much about Sam Chance himself. His character, his relations.
Sure, we are introduced to a raft of characters, but
all seem there to speed along an expansive yarn.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a fine novel, but it seems
that it could easily be double its size so that we garner a bit of emotional resonance
and not lose an ounce of that precious lore he is so knowledgeable with.
Nuggets of lore like the following.
Chance had trouble with prairie fires that
fall. Some of them were set by spiteful farmers, whose crops had failed; some
were set by careless cowhands; some were possibly set by nothing more than a
steel shod hoof against a stone, for the grass was dry and thin like tinder.
They usually fought the fires without water. They fought them by killing a cow
and ripping her open for a drag. They would pull the carcass along the fire
front by ropes from neck to saddle horn and from hind legs to saddle horn. It
was hot, exhausting work for man and horse, dangerous when wind whipped the
fire. The horses would give out, from nervous fear as much as from the work,
and have to be relieved. The men worked on through it, breathing smoke through
the bandanas, eyes smarting.
And that is the novel in a nutshell. A paragraph telling
of a marvelous truth of the Western life. An incident that would easily make a chapter
in prime McMurtry.
This is a good novel, and it is a rare thing to say,
but at twice the length it might have been a great novel.
