Review by Jeanne Englert
Western history – September 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
One Man’s West
by David Lavender
Republished by University of Nebraska Press
ISBN 0-8032-5855-0
DAVID LAVENDER died recently at age 93. Of the more than 20 books he wrote, my favorite is One Man’s West. If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading it, you must. If you have, you will discover, as I did, that it’s even better than you remembered.
Originally published in 1943, the book is a first-person narrative of life in the mines and stock grazing areas of southwestern Colorado. Lavender’s own view of it, looking back, was that he sensed that “something unique in the nation’s experience was ending, and I tried to capture a segment of the passing on paper — the breakup of the great cattle ranches and mines and the last efforts of the old-timers to hang on in the face of declining profits and increasing mechanization they themselves could not afford.”
In a note to the third edition, Lavender accuses himself of being unabashedly nostalgic. He’s wrong.
True, One Man’s West has nostalgic memories, just as we all have. The chapter “Christmas in the Rimrock” more than fills that bill. One almost longs for this Christmas of yore until Lavender jerks us back into reality, by describing what it took to get the cows down a steep, slippery trail with five-hundred-foot drops and across the San Miguel River one Christmas Eve.
I’d say it’s technical writing at its best. Handling a hoist — Lavender’s job at the Camp Bird mine above Ouray to earn his stake to marry the girl of his dreams — is typical of the complex activities he describes in the book. He walks the reader through the job, including the complicated bell system, how the miners handled dynamite, and what a lagging is.
Lavender’s description of life in the boarding house at the Camp Bird is also replete with fascinating details. Contrary to the movie cliche, the only time the boarders played poker was on payday. The rest of the time they were fanatical bridge players, and in the summertime they graced their bridge tables with wildflowers picked by the camp’s blossom gatherer, a miner who filled old coffee and lard cans with “the exquisite blooms that spread in a sea of color above timberline.”
And no writer I know has mastered the power of verbs better than the author. Here’s a particularly gripping passage about a mishap on his ascent to the mine after enjoying a rare bath in town.
“The horse did what I couldn’t. He rolled over and I slipped free. I spit out a great gob of snow, clawed my way to the surface, and blinked my eyes clear. The horse had stopped a few feet farther on, flat on his back, his feet waving feebly in the air. I bulled my way down to him through the clinging drifts. After considerable labor, I mashed out a trench around him and by pulling now on his tail, now on his legs, now on his head, I got him over on his side. He struggled the rest of the way to his feet under his own power.”
Not only is the book full of vivid description, packed with action, it’s funny. A story titled “High Country Athletics,” about a Colorado Mountain Club expedition to Telluride to climb Mt. Wilson, is hilarious. The only readers who won’t enjoy Lavender’s subtle sarcasm of floundering mountain groupies would be Colorado Mountain Clubbers, a group not known for having a sense of humor.
Although full of autobiographical detail, as one would expect in a first person narrative, it is not an autobiography.
For example, the chapter “Mormon Cowboy” tells the story of the Mormon hole-in-the-rock expedition to Bluff, Utah, in 1879, long before Lavender was born. The LS Church had ordered some of its members to colonize southeast Utah, unaware of its steep gorges and impenetrable mazes. It was, Lavender said, “the most amazing and fruitless expedition in history.”
They blasted dugways, literally ruts in the rock to keep their wagons from toppling over the canyon sides. They lowered wagons and horses to the river with rope pulleys. Though we may view their blind obedience to their faith as crazy, their feat nonetheless commands respect.
The same chapter records the Posey-Tsenegat Ute uprising of 1915, known as the last of the Indian wars. Whether these renegade Utes, who lived in San Juan County, Utah, near the Colorado border, were cattle rustlers or not, we’ll never know; some say the real culprits were cowboys wearing Indian moccasins. But the Utes got blamed for it, and Tsenegat’s Denver trial upstaged news of the war in Europe for a while.
THE THIRD EDITION ends with a look back at changes in the area since the 1943 first edition. It, too, is not nostalgic, but poignant, a feeling I share with Lavender because it evoked my own mixed emotions revisiting Hite Crossing. In 1967, the only way to Hite Crossing was a twisting, dusty unimproved road through White Canyon; fourteen years later it was a speedy, improved highway to Glen Canyon Recreation area above its rim. It saddened us that our son could no longer see the awesome rockscape at the confluence of the Dirty Devil and Colorado rivers, now submerged in water.
But, like us, Lavender bows to the inevitable in his look-back trip with his son. At Uravan they spy the swimming pool, still supplied with river water from the San Miguel. Lavender remembers the cistern at the ranch, the washday scum.
“Last one in is a monkey!” his son yells; he does not remember any cisterns.
But it was too hot for nostalgia, says Lavender who shouts, “‘Who’s a monkey?’ And the shock of the water sliced through thought like a silver knife.”
One Man’s West is a silver knife that slices through time. We should be grateful David Lavender had the acumen to record his memories of that time and to Bison Books for keeping them in print.
— Jeanne Englert
