Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album

There's a growing literature of memoirs written by women who grew up on ranches, and this is a fine addition to it. Jordan tells of her family, who for four generations raised cattle in southeast Wyoming, north of Laramie and Cheyenne. With some irony, it was more circumstance than a love of ranching that kept the Jordans on the land, until the author's father sold the home place in the 1970s. But the love of that spot on earth lives on strongly in the author, and her book is a tribute to it and to her family who toiled there through good years and bad. She clearly admires the men who labored on horseback raising cattle, devoting chapters to her grandfather, her father, and the many foremen and ranch hands who worked for them. Fully engaging, too, are her memories of the women and the imprint they have made on herself. Three portraits in particular stand out: her mother, Jo, with a warm, generous, and independent spirit, who died suddenly at an early age; her great aunt Marie, who loved her horses and dogs like the children she never had, and lived happily together with her husband and her husband's best friend; and finally her grandmother Effie, a puzzlingly bitter woman whose wishes for a full life seem to have been frustrated from girlhood because of her gender and social limitations. There's much in this book to commend it, including a chapter devoted to the calving season and another describing the physically punishing nature of ranch work. Her chapter on her great aunt Marie includes excerpts from her journals, and each chapter is introduced with a photograph from the family album. The book closes with a description of the author's wedding at the community center near where she grew up, an idyllic day poignant for its wholehearted celebration of a way of community life that is rapidly vanishing. I recommend this book to readers interested in the West, ranching, family memoirs, and personal journeys. Also recommended: Mary Clearman Blew's "All But the Waltz," Linda Hasselstrom's "Windbreak," and Judy Blunt's "Breaking Clean."

I have really enjoyed this book. It's rare to get such an intimate view of ranch life, and especially of the women who made/make their lives out West. Teresa Jordan is a terrific writer. I admire her spare, evocative prose. This book should not be overlooked in the current craze for memoirs.

Reading Teresa Jordan's novel Riding the White Horse Home inevitably inspires a sense of regret and loss. Throughout her portrayal of the rugged untamed wilds of Iron Mountain Wyoming and its people, she paints a vivid picture of a culture and a way of life that has all but died out. Using her own personal experiences with her friends and family, she shows the reader what ranch life was like. Her detail and imagery is superb as she takes her acquaintances one by one, chapter by chapter, and tells us their story. We learn of Sunny the grandfather who took pride in his way of life, of her mother who loves her yet is hard to understand, of her friend Kelley and how their kind are not socially accepted today, her small local wedding, childhood experiences, and more. She shows us the stark differences between ranch culture and the culture of progress. We see the unspoken rules and laws of her people and their stoicism. We come to admire their discipline and stubbornness, their ethic and devotion. And we feel the same sense of loss that Teresa must have felt as this way of life slowly drifted away. For me, it was this central message of the book that was most touching. As someone who grew up in and frequently visits Idaho, I can at least partly relate to her sadness at the change. Like her, I feel an odd sense of pride whenever anyone speaks with disdain of the old fashioned methods of my state. I enthusiastically tell all my friends the Idaho state motto; "Idaho IS, what America WAS." This is the way that Jordan displays the ranch life. She shows an honor and pride that has since been lost to the world. Her people respected hard work over hard cash, and took satisfaction from their endless labor. Despite crop failures, drought, loss of livestock, and tiring years with no seeming gain, they trudge on, unbending. My own father is much like this, taking a job that pays much less then his previous one because it gives him more satisfaction. The power of her story comes through in its reality--we are made to see through her eyes, and with this new perspective come to love the land and people as she does. We mourn with her the loss of tradition and see the beauty in the harsh terrain of Wyoming. Although it is not written chronologically, the reader can easily see the transition from family owned ranches to modern technology. Each chapter is devoted to one of her family or friends and we learn of them in detail. Jordan expertly takes us into her life and experiences. We see her fierce love for her family and the kind of relationships that they have together. At college when her mother dies, she decides to come home and immerse herself in ranch life as she remembers their connections. She talks of how much she learned from her great grandmother, and of how much she didn't see. The reader learns the trials of ranch life--calving in all its messy glory, getting mauled by bulls, fighting against th

Riding the White Horse Home is appropriately subtitled "A Western Family Album." In it, Teresa Jordan explores her family's history as cattle ranchers in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth. She compares the life she has lived to the land from which she originated through anecdotal snippets of her ancestors' lives, searching out the "unconformities" in her history and linking herself to her family's past. Jordan grew up surrounded by generations of family living together on a ranch in Wyoming. She begins the book by describing her experiences walking with her great- grandmother on the rugged land, awestruck by her almost magical ability to find arrowheads and crinoids: "It's was a matter of looking, she said, of learning to see." By writing the history of her forebears, Jordan looks into her own life, learning to see who she is. She speaks of a troubled time when she was sorely in need of reviewing her life, "It was then, I suppose, that I first started trying to excavate the unconformities of my life that connect my heritage with who I am now, that I began to learn how to see." Her great-grandfather J.L. came to the land from the eastern Untied States to carve out a place for his family in the temperamental Western soil. From him sprang a procession of proud cattle-ranchers whose indomitable spirit helped them break the land like a stubborn colt is broken for riding. Jordan describes the curious, continuous war between the necessity for self-sufficiency in such an isolated setting and the people's need for community. Early in her life she strove for the same independence her grandfather did: "`I kill my own snakes,' Sunny was wont to say, `and bury my own dead.'" So, too, she describes the other men of her family: "I believe it comes directly from the primitivist urge that glorifies man alone and makes him believe he should be able to succeed entirely by himself." Jordan boarded with relatives in the city when she was young, and there was introduced to the urban prejudice against being from a rural community. She struggled with this for years, trying to become her own individual, distinct from the provincial taint of her upbringing and yet at the same time like her mother, who "had chosen to be fully herself. Early on, she had decided not to make sacrifices she couldn't make willingly; from that authentic core she was able to marry and mother free of martyrdom and guilt." Midway through her college career her mother passed away, and with that extra support gone, she writes, "Now I have to confront how scared I am to go on alone." She took a semester off college and worked on her senior project studying the history of the American West and found the sense of community and belonging that she had been searching for, right back where she had started: "My mother was dead and the ranch was for sale, but in the study of the American West, I had found a way to come home." Later i

I have only been to Wyoming once. All I can remeber is the wind blowing at 60 MPH, dirt in our eyes, ears, and noses; pancakes blown into the dust before we could even get them on our plates; long, hot walk across desolate plains. It is an experience I don't wish to remeber, and when I think of Wyoming, I think of this. But Jordan gives us a view of what it is really like to live on a ranch in Wyoming. Through facinating imagery and warm hearted moments as we remember our own family moments, Jordan unites us by the common thread of family. We do not all have the pleasant family memories that Jordan does, but for a small moment Jordan allows us to become part of her family, her memories. She masterfully weaves together the random tidbits of information to create a fascinating look at what life is like on a ranch. By examing herself through looking at the members of her family and others, she portrays a vivid view of what it was like to be her. We can almost see her kneading bread with her mother, or sitting around drinking coffee. We can feel her pain when her mother dies, but also the estrangement she feels when life just goes on. She ties it together by making it accessible to the reader: we have all, at one point, wondered where our parents came from. As she goes through, giving accounts of calving season, broken bones as rights of passage, her own wedding, she draws strength in a part of each person she remembers. She realizes that they are a part of her - they have made her who she is, molded her. As she grows up, she begins to realize the strength she has pulled from each member of her family. The memories are the only things that she has when she is confronted with the loss of her family and the land that had defined her family. Whether is was through her father, mother, grandfather, or hired hand, Jordan found that her heritage was her strength. This is the universal appeal of the book - that we all rely on memories to get us through the hard times. Jordan brings that knowledge to the forefront for us, and we can do nothing more than bask in the memories that she provides for, and let them take us away to our own memories. I have now been given a new look at Wyoming - one of people with courage, and honor in their heritage. Jordan shows us that Wyoming is not just a land of wind, dirt, sun, and snow, but a place of value and honor in her heart.