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I was born on a ranch only seven years removed from no electricity. My oldest sister, who still drives long haul big rig trucks in her late sixties (perhaps she’s inherited the pick-up-and-go trait from our forebears depicted in Outlaw Ford) remembers the days of no refrigerators. There was no television here on this ranch until the mid 1980s. From toddlers on up, all of us kids participated in herding cattle and sheep. On foggy nights Dad would invariably say, “Good night to burn,” and we’d all go out, armed with redwood branches to tamp down the flames, and help burn off sections of the hillside. This helped renew the grazing land for sheep. The cattle ranged free for miles up and down the Albion River, so my siblings and I spent many days rounding them up on mini-cattle drives when it came time to send part of the herd to the auction yard on the other side of the county. One of my uncles helped run the auction yard on the outskirts of Ukiah. Though my father had been born and raised on the Macdonald Ranch, it was my mother who regaled me with bedtime tales of my great uncles. My favorite story then was of Great Uncle John Finley Robertson in a tobacco spittin’ contest with the woods boss. It ended with “Uncle” John spattin’ so far his chaw and juice went down his sister’s stove pipe and smothered her fresh baked pie, which she, of course, had planned to serve to him for supper. These stories also included the true tale of a horse accused of shooting and killing a bandit, which I recounted with only slight variation in the first chapter of Outlaw Ford.
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I suppose those childhood stories about my great uncles is the reason why uncle-nephew relationships play such a large part in the novel, Outlaw Ford. Many, if not most, of the events detailed in Outlaw Ford, are reconstructions of family history from both my father’s and mother’s families. The large family at the core of the novel comes from my maternal grandmother’s brothers, sisters and parents. They actually moved around, almost at the drop of a hat, from the West Coast to Nebraska and Kansas, Louisiana for a year and back to the Nebraska Sandhills, thirty miles or so above the North Platte River. The narrator of Outlaw Ford, Les Ford, is closely based on one of my mother’s uncles who did, as a juvenile, gamble at cards in Ogallala as well as Omaha. He did wrestle alligators in Louisiana with his brothers and did lead a good sized cattle drive when only a teen.
Just as the novel depicts, his mother and sisters were no slouches at frontier life either. The real life figures the sisters are based upon grew to be accomplished horsewomen and ran ranches and farms of their own.
From my mother I learned that one of her uncles had a favorite saying: “Sometimes you have to lie to get at the truth.” The ability to laugh when faced with hard times is what sustained the uncles and aunts, grandparents, and great aunts and uncles I knew as a child and young man. As the youngest child of parents who were younger children themselves in large, extended families, my first influences were people who had lived through the real life of the Old West, nearest neighbors with a one channel TV set who could tell you what was fact or false on Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, or Rawhide. It’s no wonder my favorite first grade reader was about a character called Cowboy Sam. I graduated to Zane Grey then Mark Twain and on to Charles’ Portis’ True Grit (I first encountered it serialized in the Saturday Evening Post), before discovering Louis L’Amour’s Conagher and, of course, McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. Hopefully, Outlaw Ford retains the twinkle of humor that often glimmered in my forebears’ eyes as well as the literate action of our finest western writers.
Just as the novel depicts, his mother and sisters were no slouches at frontier life either. The real life figures the sisters are based upon grew to be accomplished horsewomen and ran ranches and farms of their own.
From my mother I learned that one of her uncles had a favorite saying: “Sometimes you have to lie to get at the truth.” The ability to laugh when faced with hard times is what sustained the uncles and aunts, grandparents, and great aunts and uncles I knew as a child and young man. As the youngest child of parents who were younger children themselves in large, extended families, my first influences were people who had lived through the real life of the Old West, nearest neighbors with a one channel TV set who could tell you what was fact or false on Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, or Rawhide. It’s no wonder my favorite first grade reader was about a character called Cowboy Sam. I graduated to Zane Grey then Mark Twain and on to Charles’ Portis’ True Grit (I first encountered it serialized in the Saturday Evening Post), before discovering Louis L’Amour’s Conagher and, of course, McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. Hopefully, Outlaw Ford retains the twinkle of humor that often glimmered in my forebears’ eyes as well as the literate action of our finest western writers.