New West Book Review

True West: Jeannette Walls’ “Half Broke Horses”

By Jenny Shank, 10-12-09

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
by Jeannette Walls
Scribner, 288 pages, $25

In her author’s note, Jeannette Walls explains how she came to write this novel about her singular grandmother: “This book was originally meant to be about my mother’s childhood growing up on a cattle ranch in Arizona.  But as I talked to Mom about those years, she kept insisting that her mother was the one who had led the truly interesting life and that the book should be about Lily.” Walls’ mom was right: Lily Casey Smith is a one-of-a-kind horse-breaking, whiskey-drinking, poker-playing, moonshine-selling, ranch-running, airplane-flying, pistol-packing, school-teaching, indomitable pioneer. 

The Phoenix-born Walls previously wrote a bestselling memoir, 2005’s The Glass Castle, about her unconventional childhood.  Although Half Broke Horses records the actual events of Lily Casey Smith’s life, Walls writes it in the first-person and creates vivid scenes that she wasn’t present for, so as she puts it, “the only honest thing to do is call the book a novel.” Whatever you call it, it’s a fascinating book, packed with harrowing situations, colorful characters, and beautiful description of the southwest landscape that Lily knew intimately from her years ranching it.

Half Broke Horses is structured simply, in short, mostly chronological chapters in which Lily tells a vividly described story of a particular episode from her life.  It’s the sort of no-nonsense recollections that anyone’s grandmother might share, except that Lily Casey Smith’s life was especially eventful.  Lily’s voice rings out from the page, such as in her memorable use of synecdoche when she refers to east coast “broads” unaccustomed to life in the West who’ve hired her to drive them to see the Grand Canyon as “lace panties.” When a man Lily’s daughter is dating is thrown from a horse, she says that he’s “just had the lace knocked off his panties.”

The book begins in west Texas, where Lily’s parents had a homestead in Salt Draw.  The first scene is riveting: Lily is walking through the pasture with her little brother and sister to bring the cows in for milking.  “But when we got there,” Walls writes, “those girls were acting all bothered.” Lily presses her ear to the “hard-packed dirt” and hears the rumbling that announces the arrival of a flash flood.  The kids run, but don’t have time to make it to higher ground, so Lily has them scramble up a cottonwood tree. 

As the storm waters rise underneath them, Lily keeps her siblings awake all night by drilling them on multiplication tables and U.S. presidents, and orders them to shift positions whenever they feel they can’t hold on any longer.  The next morning after the water has stopped moving, they wade through it to find their parents.  Lily’s overjoyed mother tells her to thank her guardian angel.  Lily tells her dad there wasn’t a guardian angel, and he says, “Well darling, maybe the angel was you.”

This story beautifully sets the stage for Lily’s remarkable life, during which she will find herself in many situations that require mental and physical fortitude, stamina, ingenuity, and persistence.  Lily, born in 1901, doesn’t have much use for people who don’t have the “gumption” or “moxie” to get the job done, people like her mother, a delicate beauty who refrains from ranch work and faints often due to binding corsets.  “Your mother is a lady,” Lily’s father tells her.

Lily’s father suffers a speech impediment and a “gimp” because a carriage horse kicked him in the head when he was three years old.  Still, he has a knack for gently training horses, a technique he passes along to Lily.  Lily also helps her father give instructions to the hired hands on their ranch, because few people can understand what he’s saying.  After a tornado, the family moves on to a ranch in southern New Mexico. 

Lily yearns for an education, and spends a brief stint at a boarding school, but must come home when her father says they don’t have the money.  In reality, he needed Lily to help with ranch work.  But when World War I begins and there is a shortage of teachers in the West, the nun who taught Lily in boarding school invites her to apply, even though she has only one year of formal schooling.  She’s granted a job teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Red Lake, Arizona, and at age fifteen she sets out on a horse she broke herself to travel 500 miles across the desert to reach her post. 

Lily teaches, travels, ranches, marries a “crumb bum” first husband in Chicago, marries a second, steady husband in the West, and along the way she comes up with ideas to make money and thrive, selling moonshine from out of her children’s nursery during prohibition, and just barely keeping her family financially afloat during the Depression.  Lily gets into trouble time and again for expressing her views, such as when she teaches in a polygamous Mormon community in the Arizona strip and she won’t stop lecturing the girls about women’s rights.

Lily Casey Smith has a voice as memorable, forceful, and distinctive as that of Mattie Ross in Charles Portis’s True Grit, and it’s possible to imagine Mattie Ross growing up to live an adventurous life a lot like Smith’s.  Packed with first-class yarns and detailed, sensory writing about an inspiring, unyielding woman, Half Broke Horses, is a true Western narrative with a heroine every bit as entertaining and larger-than-life as the outlaws who populate traditional Western stories. 

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