Book Review/Let’er Buck
Book Review
Let’er Buck
The story of the passing of the old West
By Charles Wellington Furlong
Overlook Press
Hard cover $25
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
This is not a new book. Charles Wellington Furlong’s classic account of the Pendleton Roundup was first published by G.P. Putman and Sons in 1921. It has been out of print for more than 80 years but come September and the 97th anniversary of the world famous Pendleton Round-up, Overlook Press is republishing Furlong’s original volume including 50 black and white photographs. Don’t be put off by the 80 years that the volume has been out of print.
Furlong’s writing is as stimulating today as if he were alive and penning his manuscript in 2007. He spent years studying and participating in the life and culture of the American West, especially at the Pendleton Roundup in Eastern Oregon where cowboy contests epitomized the most dramatic phases of the pioneer days of the Old West and its spirit.
Furlong, who died in 1967, was an explorer, painter, writer and university professor. His fascination with the old West and of the cowboy philosophy lead him to write this book and make the prediction that the cowboy in America was facing extinction.
Interestingly, Overlook Press has been faithful to Furlong’s original volume and captured the flavor of the original text by uslnge of the original printing plates to accompany each of the pictures and the type describing those photographs. The language Furlong used in the book were taken from his own interviews and experiences with the cowboys of the Old West.
Furlong said of them: "The figures I see in the smoke are not phantoms of the campfires or silhouettes against the horizon of time, but real honest-to-God plainsmen and ranchmen on the real stage of their today."
"Let’er Buck" is a lively account in which he praises the human virtues — courage, daring, dedication, playfulness, optimism and humor — that symbolized the West. He said one of his purposes in writing the book was to "educate the blasé, effete, lily-livered youths" of America about the values of the rodeo.
From my own experience of working and talking with ranch people, I believe the Old West is alive and well — certainly in the 2007 Pendleton Roundup — but all over the West as well as over-the-fence conversation with my neighbor recently that reinforced that opinion. He had just sutured a wound on the flank of his pony. A bull had gored the horse in a local rodeo.
Oh, yes, the Old West is very much alive today, right here in Oregon.
Furlong never put down the characters of the Old West. In fact he wrote that the University Club in Hood River, Ore. was equal if not better than any university club in the Eastern United States. The cowboy poets, he wrote, were some of America’s best poets. He quotes Tracy Lane, the cowboy poet laureate of the Pendleton Rounup ending with his final lines:
"So now I’m old, I’m feeble; soon I’ll make another change.
And wherever I do go, I hope I’ll find a bunchgrass range.
I hope I’ll meet all those old cowhands, the cowhands that I used to know.
When I rode the Western ranges, over forty years ago."
Not only is the book filled cowboy poetry and legends about the West but Furlong even prints the music of a song about the Pendleton Round-up.
Worth the price of the book is his tale about the capture of the gunmen who shot and killed the famous Umatilla County sheriff Tilman D. Taylor, during a bank robbery. No fictional Western writer ever wrote as exciting account as Furlong did in his nonfiction book. The captured men were in the county jail when word spread in the community they had been secreted into the jail through a sidedoor.
"The crowds outside, increasing every moment, were threatening. As evening wore on, the tense atmosphere indicated that a break was inevitable…Then above them in the open door of the courthouse appeared a figure with bared head and in shirt sleeves. It was the newly appointed sheriff.
‘Boys, if Til were alive, he would want you to let the law take its course…I ask you do as he would wish if he were alive. Rest assured justice will be done.’
"Slowly, haltingly, still in a state of partial indecision, the crowd turned its back on the jail and trailed to their homes. As the sheriff had promised, law took its course and justice was done."
At the end of the book, Furlong has a glossary of the book of terms a tenderfoot might not understand. He explains that a cowboy, or a vaquero in Spanish, is a cowhand, one of that adventurous class of herders and drovers of the plains and ranges of the Western United States who does his work on horseback and is famed for his hardiness, recklessness and daring.
If you have ever seen a rodeo, that is a pretty apt description of a cowboy and typical of Furlong’s incicisive writing.
(Bill Duncan is editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column each Thursday for the News-Review’s Opinion Page.)