North to Yesterday

"It is the first feller that does something that is the hero, and the last feller that does it that is the fool," Preacher tells Lampassas toward the end of this comic, sometimes tragic novel about some wonderful misfits and dreamers who made a belated drive of longhorn cattle from Texas to the railhead in Kansas. Chief of the dreamers was Lampassas, a storekeeper who sold supplies to the longhorn drivers and listened to their bizarre stories and tall tales until he could envision every bend in the trail. Making the drive to Trails End was one of the great adventures of the old West; but when he and his odd company of hands finally act out this once-heroic role, Lampassas becomes a tragicomic hero, a kind of American Don Quixote living in the past. The cowhands he assembles are inept, and the heroine tougher than the men, but all of them are chasing dreams: Pretty Shadow, the tough cowhand searching for the whore he once loved in Trails End and to whom he promised to return; Preacher, a self-ordained revivalist, who thinks the Lord meant him to save the sinners at Trails End; Gattis, the farm boy running away from cotton picking and the dour financee his parents had thrust on him; the man nicknamed June, a stable hand whose pistol is the cherished symbol of his manhood; the Kid, Lampassas's son, who would rather be a locomotive engineer than a cowboy; and above all the entrancing tomboy Covina, who ran away from home with her illegitimate child and hoped to make a living as a barmaid. Lampassas, to whose fire and folly and utter weariness one is deeply drawn, holds the long drive together in the face of natural and man-made catastrophes, some nightmarish, some fatal, but many wildly funny. He is at once magnificent and absurd. This novel compiles a rich cast of characters, each on the cattle drive for his own Quixotic reasons, each a dreamer himself. A great western tale spare in talk, bold in incidents, endearing of characters, this is a must read for all lovers of the American western.

In his 1967 novel, Flynn uses the classic western myth of a trail drive to show how a man can, and cannot, return to a road not taken in his youth. Lampassas planned to test his courage by joining a trail drive north. But the young woman he admired convinced him that love and a home would be a better dream.Years later when his wife dies and his son faces a life as a storekeeper like his father, Lampassas knows he has little time. He sells his store, surprises his son with a full-blown plan for a trail drive, and sweeps them off to follow his recaptured dream. He assembles a bedraggled crew of misfits and rounds up 2000 range cattle for the great adventure. Unprepared, under-capitalized, and unwilling to give up, this group of dreamers loses their horses and wind up "walking" the cattle to market. Arrival at the railhead proves disappointing since there has been no market for cattle for fifteen years, and the cattle are too scrawny by then to be worth anything except their hides. But the dream will not die.Written almost 20 years before LONESOME DOVE, this novel captures the lure of the drive, where every man faces tests of courage and manhood, where every disaster can only be the prelude to success just over the hill.With respect for his characters' quest, empathy for their refusal to abandon their dreams, and wry and hilarious humor, Flynn captures the American passion to be going somewhere, to be "satisfied for a while just to be on the trail." Readers who catch a glimpse of their own roads not taken will find themselves rooting for Lampassas and his motley crew to reach the trail's end, no matter what they find.