No man who
camped with a chuck wagon has written anything remotely
comparable to Charles M. Doughty's _Arabia Deserta_, a
chronicle at once personal and impersonal, restrainedly
subjective and widely objective, of his life with nomadic
Bedouins. Perspective is a concomitant of civilization. The
chronicles of the range that show perspective have come mostly
from educated New Englanders, Englishmen, and Scots. The great
majority of the chronicles are limited in subject matter to
physical activities. They make few concessions to "the desire
of the moth for the star"; they hardly enter the complexities
of life, including those of sex. In one section of the West at
one time the outstanding differences among range men were
between owners of sheep and owners of cattle, the ambition of
both being to hog the whole country. On another area of the
range at another time, the outstanding difference was between
little ranchers, many of whom were stealing, and big ranchers,
plenty of whom had stolen. Such differences are not exponents
of the kind of individualism that burns itself into great
human documents.
Seldom deeper than the chronicles does range fiction go below
physical surface into reflection, broodings, hungers-- the
smolderings deep down in a cowman oppressed by drought and
mortgage sitting in a rocking chair on a ranch gallery looking
at the dust devils and hoping for a cloud; the goings-on
inside a silent cowboy riding away alone from an empty pen to
which he will never return; the streams of consciousness in a
silent man and a silent woman bedded together in a wind-lashed
frame house away out on the lone prairie.
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