Jackson Hole News

New West Book Essay

Old West Traditions Become Modern Burdens in Two New Jackson Hole Books

By Matthew Irwin, Guest Writer, 1-14-11

An enigmatic and rough ranch hand meets a gregarious socialite on a guest ranch, they fall in love, and though they live separate lives, they remain close until her death. This real life, turn-of-the-century affair between Wyoming cowboy Enoch Cal Carrington and East Coast publishing heir Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson is an obvious plunder for Western fiction. The unlikely relationship is also an analogy for a Jackson Hole where Western live-and-let-live ideals converge, often begrudgingly, with East Coast sophistication. In 2008, Alta, Wyo. resident, Earle Layser retold Cal and Cissy’s story in I Always Did Like Horses and Women: The Enoch Cal Carrington Story. The nonfiction account caught the attention of valley novelist Tina Welling, who studied Layser’s book, among others, for her latest novel. That Welling released Cowboys Never Cry (NAL Trade, $15) around the same time late last year that Layser issued his new collection of essays, titled Green Fire (Dancing Pine, $21.95), at first seemed to be just coincidental, but turned out to be opportune, the result of a shared interest in the paradox that Westerners whose livelihoods depend on the land often find themselves at odds with its preservation.

Cowboys Never Cry begins, as many Jackson Hole visits do, with a hike. In a state of what she labels “jubilant sorrow,” Cassie Danner climbs a trail “deliberately left off tourist guidebooks” for an overnighter, before beginning work as a ranch cook, a position for which she has zero experience or qualification. Cassie took the job because she’d never attempted a “real career,” and she needs money after her famous rock-climber husband died while fulfilling his duty to his sponsors in some exotic location about three years earlier. At her destination on Whitebark Lake, Cassie runs into a drunken cowboy who upon seeing her mutters, “Well, have I been a good boy or what?” He makes a few more verbal advances before he passes out, so she hides his boots to prevent him from acting on his words. She knows who he is; she knows his reputation; and she isn’t impressed by Robbin McKeag, Hollywood star or no. The next morning, Cassie leaves without seeing McKeag, as planned, but he turns up when she reports for work at the ranch. Robbin’s father, Boone McKeag, owns Cross Wave Guest Ranch and Cattle Company.

Initially, nothing about Cassie’s predicament tilts to her favor. Robbin, angry because Cassie forgot to return his boots, threatens to derail her attempt at camp cooking earlier than she’d expected, always watching her every move, yelling at her, telling Boone to fire her. Fortunately, Boone is a tenderhearted old wrangler, immune to bickering youths. When Robbin and Cassie finally stop pretending they hate each other, “Cass” holds back on the goods until “Robb” can commit to one woman, preferably herself. At times her love for him feels like a clever idea she once had more than a gut-wrenching necessity.

I hadn’t ever read a women’s fiction novel before Cowboys Never Cry. I picked up Welling’s book because its setting is Jackson Hole, my home over the better part of the last 13 years. As a fiction writer myself, I’ve occasionally attempted to capture the valley’s nuances in my work, but I’ve so far stumbled, incapable of diverging from my view of this place as a never-never land, a Disneyfied West free from real conflict, that impetus of fiction. Welling’s use of actual locations like Snow King Center and Grand Teton Music Festival or people like former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson are not very convincing, because she either mentions them so casually that they don’t seem relevant or she is so hung up on the actuality of these places that she loses momentum. As playwright Tom Jacobson wrote in The Twentieth Century Way, the truth is no good if it’s not believable. In fairness, my reading may be influenced by my own impressions of these people and places, not represented in Welling’s depictions.

Nonetheless, Welling’s archetypal figures do feel like Jackson Hole: ski bums, mountain athletes and pleasure seekers, artists looking for inspiration and escape, ranchers who think that they get first say on the land, East Coasters who get caught in the currents of Snake River, even the paradox of a hippie like Cassie drinking Pepsi. Then there’s the story of Cal Carrington and Cissy Patterson. Robbin is writing a screenplay about them that he periodically shares with Cassie, part of his courtship of her. The story is legendary in Jackson Hole. We know it like we know that certain valley residents inspired Ed Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. Sure, we allow hyperbole to fulfill our desire for a relevant cultural history, but the tales nevertheless contribute to the region’s “Wild West” mythology. Welling likes the story of Cal and Cass, she says in her book’s conversation guide, because “Cissy lived for society and the accumulation of status; Cal lived for a sense of oneness with the land and wildlife. The two of them were full of opposite qualities and yet the legend is that they fell in love.” Cassie and Robbin aren’t all that different from Cissy and Cal, with a contemporary twist: “My two characters began to embody in my dream world the opposition of the older value system of ranching and the newer realities of the shrinking wilderness,” Welling says.

So, the setting feels real enough, but I picked up Cowboys Never Cry because I was curious about where in Jackson Hole Welling would find an external conflict to complement the tête-à-tête of budding love. In the opening pages, she goes right for the conflict between conservation and ranching: “People who make their living ranching were the enemy of a woman like her, one who loved the natural world … left natural.” As guests pour into the ranch and she becomes comfortable with her duties, Cassie also begins to question ranch practices. They waste a lot of plastic on water bottles. They have a leaky irrigation ditch. The ranch dump is full of recyclables.

Cassie warns Boone that cattle fall way down on the list of economic resources for Wyoming, only one percent of the total revenue; tourism is first. (Both Welling and Layser offer wilderness tourism as an alternative to the slaughter of wildlife.) She objects when Cody’s father, Fee Barlow, explains that he’ll have to kill a young coyote or two to teach the litter “to stay the hell out of the stock.” Though Robbin teases and taunts Cassie for “diaper-training” her Golden retriever and for being prude, Fee is her adversary when it comes to how they manage the ranch, and he doesn’t want any interference. He’s on the Wyoming legislature, so people listen to him. “The cowboy philosophy of live and let live might apply to people, but it wasn’t a typical perspective on anything that got in the way of raising cows – wolves, bears, coyotes, the very creatures that made the wilderness wild and beautiful to her,” Welling writes. In Green Fire, Layser describes this phenomenon as “biophobia,” or the irrational fear of animals, predators in particular. A friend calls it “predator envy.”

Where Welling concerns herself with traditional ranching practices, Layser troubles himself over wildlife management policies and practices. In the introduction to his collection of imaginative essays, he writes, “The biggest challenge conservationists and resource managers face is understanding and resolving anachronistic mindsets, particularly indifference, fear or blind hatred for particular wild animals and wildlands; mindsets that appear to be passed down through generations within some segments of our society.”

Layser took the title Green Fire from the legendary conservationist Aldo Leopold, who wrote, “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” Pulling from his own experience as a wildlife biologist, ecologist and forester over more than 40 years, Layser paints a big-picture view of wildlife management with 13 individual portraits. From Yellowstone National Park to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, he tells the stories of animals hunted, caged, forgotten and cut off from their land by humans – caribou, bison, big horn sheep, wolves and mountain lions, among them. The accompanying photos of proud hunters and trappers with stacks of carcasses, heads or pelts, provide some of the most painful evidence that the road to conservation has been plowed by the few hunters, trappers and government agents whose guilt and regret has forced them to see differently.

The tales in Green Fire pull from myth, history, science and memory, often in the tradition of Native American storytelling, and at their best, they achieve for animals what stories by Mari Sandoz and John Neihardt did for Native Americans – he depicts their lives with compassion and, sometimes horrifying, truth. The best example is “Castor the Snake River Beaver.” In his notes, Layser describes how a friend asked him to trap some beavers that were, “doing what beavers often do: damming culverts and ditches.” “One of the beavers turned out to be a very large, old, and battle-scarred veteran,” he writes. “It made a deep impression. It was the last beaver I ever trapped.”

After a brief summary on the role beaver pelts played in western expansion and their importance to regional ecosystems, Layser’s narrative follows a young kit whose father had succumbed to coyotes after a fierce battle. Castor and his sibling snuggle in their burrow while their mother brings food. But they grow quickly, and eventually follow their mother outside, where a bald eagle scoops up his sibling. Many more challenging times follow: he looses toes in a trap; he listens to his mother dying, herself a trap victim; and he fights with other beavers. Before stepping in the trap that killed him by dragging him to the bottom of the river, Castor built a veritable beaver city, with a dam and a lodge and kits of his own.

Though Jackson Hole was a center of trapping and trading during the Mountain Man era, Layser writes, the beaver has returned to the area. “It’s a tribute to nature’s resilience that Castor’s kin have returned to [these] headwaters. And all the ecological restoration work the beaver is doing doesn’t cost us, nor government agencies or conservation organizations, a single penny.”

The anthropomorphic approach employed in “Castor” succeeds less in other pieces, like Part 1 of “The Pack’s Memoirs,” which imagines the derision, struggle and triumph of Wyoming’s wolf packs through a first-person account by one of the wolves. The wolf gives a brief history of his “people,” but it reads like a history lesson given by an animated figure at a theme park. The section is nonetheless important because it describes the fear, or biophobia, that nearly drove wolves to extinction. “My kind were demonized and labeled the Devil incarnate, ‘hell hounds,’” Layer writes in the wolf’s voice. “Our annihilation was demanded by the Church.”

Layser also compares the eradication of wolves to the genocide leveled on Native Americans at the birth of our nation. He writes, “the Euro-American settlers devoured our ecological habitat and usurped our long-standing role as top predators.” The eradication of wolves became synonymous with the taming of the West, though not without some protestation from naturalists such as Henry David Thoreau who wrote, “I cannot but feel as I lived in a tamed, and as it were, emasculated country.”

Sadly, attitudes toward wolves have not changed all that much in Wyoming. The state is subject to federal regulation concerning wolves because the state officials won’t deviate from the point-of-view that ranchers and hunters should be able to shoot wolves on sight, under the auspices that they are protecting livestock and big game. And they continue to demonize wolves, buying ads in local papers describing wolves as spiteful, cruel and sadistic hunters. Yet, humans respond with cruel methods such as poisoning wolves and removing or wiring shut their jaws. To hunt cougars, outfitters send dogs out with GPS tracking and wait for them to tree the scared animals, sometimes for days while waiting for clients to fly in from all over the world. Layser details the complete lack of sport involved in modern, technological hunting in “Miller Butte Mountain Lion: A Wild Emissary.”

Layser self-published Green Fire under his new imprint, Dancing Pine. In an email, he explained, “I decided I’m as much a publisher as some of the small presses or publishers that I’ve become familiar with along the way.” While I agree that Layser and his team did well overall, he could use more organization and structure. “The Great Escape: Free-Ranging Bison Return to the Hole” and “North America’s Last Great Wildlife Migration,” for example, begin with unnecessarily detailed background that makes it difficult to understand what the stories are about or why we should care. In the case of the latter tale, caribou aren’t identified as the subject until several pages in.

Still, Green Fire is essential reading for Westerners concerned about conservation. The book makes real the abstraction of “wildlife” through individual accounts, where bleeding-heart-type appeals to change policies or people often fail. In the introduction, Layser stresses that he is not anti-hunting, but that he is an advocate for coexistence in “an age of rapidly diminishing habitat.” He also has some obvious bones to pick from his time as a government employee: “Because people are successful in terms of their specialty, career, or politics it does not automatically translate that they are cognizant or sympathetic to the needs of wild animals or to preserving wildland habitats.”

Welling isn’t quite as specific in her accusations and desired outcomes, but her book is a fiction work with an entirely different aim. She uses opposing views on land-use as a broad, external conflict paralleling a romance between a damaged woman and the man she’s going to fix as a means of healing herself. Part of a fiction writer’s job is to demonstrate that there are no sides, just individuals pulled to one side or the other out of the need for solidarity or the comfort of the mob. According to a conversation guide in the back of her novel, Welling is sympathetic to ranchers and concerned about “the conflict between past ranching traditions and present realities.” She wrote Cowboys Never Cry in part to resolve her own struggle with the issue, to attempt to “keep the good parts [of ranching] while healing the practices that would protect the land and its wildlife.”

I’d say that Welling hasn’t quite resolved this question, however, because Cowboys Never Cry wraps up too neatly for my taste. I prefer the battle-won-but-war-still-to-come approach, in which we don’t know what will happen, but we feel confident our heroes will prevail, even if their obstacles remain rooted in the past, attitudes handed down. The conclusion does take its lead from actual events concerning industrial tycoon John D. Rockefeller and the land he bought in Jackson Hole—I won’t spoil the ending by saying any more.

“Most [conservationists] remain hopeful that common ground can be found,” Layser writes in “The Pack’s Memoirs,” “but there is much history to overcome.” Welling and Layser believe that like Cal and Cissy, like Robbin and Cassie, like the whitebark pine and the Clark’s nutcracker in “The Nutcracker and Whitebark Pine’s Covenant,” humans and wild animals can learn to live together in the still quite wide open American West.

Matthew Irwin is editor of the alt-weekly JH Weekly and editor-in-chief of the recently revived literary journal JH Review.

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