Outlaw: The True Story of Claude Dallas by Jeff Long (review)

Reviews 171 It breathes fresh air, though, not a library’s dust. Beginning with an episode from Athearn’s own boyhood on his grandfather’s Montana ranch, The Mythic West crops its way through the real West in an effort to explain how the twentieth century has adapted the clichés of frontier experience. Juxtaposing the idealism of expansion and progress with the realities of resources and politics, the author exposes the ironies inherent in our notions of the West. At the same time, he explains our need for those notions and shows how the Edenic dream sustains us. Ranging from that ranch in Mon­ tana to the boomtowns of Colorado and from Owen Wister’sworld to Ronald Reagan’s, he examines just why the nation has remained captivated by the West’s individualism turned archetype. Since this is a book that cultivates familiar territory, it unearths little new scholarly ground. Athearn often relies on secondary sources—liberally quot­ ing John Milton, for example, when discussing fictional patterns, and citing Bernard De Voto in almost every chapter. But the fields into which he leads the general reader—or anyone who wants to gather a vast acreage of knowl­ edge—yield the harvest of a lifetime. An overview, The Mythic West is a thought-provoking consolidation of the ironies and truths about today’s—and yesterday’s—frontier experience. So any reader, no matter how knowledge­ able, ought to enjoy grazing through its pages and tasting its perceptive grains oftruth. ANN RONALD University of Nevada-Reno Outlaw: The True Story of Claude Dallas. By Jeff Long. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1986. 218 pages, $4.95.) In the spring of 1980 in Humboldt County, Nevada, two game wardens were shot to death as they attempted to arrest Claude Dallas for poaching. Evading the law, the skilled outdoorsman wandered far from Nevada, but eventually made his way back, only to be captured and tried. Two years after the shootings, he was found guilty of two counts of voluntary manslaughter— maximum sentence, thirty years. On Easter evening, 1986, he escaped from prison; he was recently recaptured. Jeff Long’s narrative, designed for maximum dramatic force, begins with the attempted arrest and shootings, then informs readers about Dallas’sback­ ground and career as a twentieth-century cowboy turned mountain man. Dallas embodies for Long the mountain man mythos. Dallas grew up in Ohio and as a youth visited the West first in imagination, devouring the works of Zane Grey, Jack London, Louis L’Amour, and such classics as The Log of a Cowboy and The Virginian. After graduating from high school, he moved West, dismissing the possibilities for adventures in self-preservation that his classmates would find in Vietnam (he would later be arrested for draft eva­ sion) . Becoming an expert marksman, Dallas placed himself beyond the law. 172 Western American Literature With the Nevada killings, he also became something of a cult hero; for many Westerners he personifies an old spirit of defiance. Jeff Long accents the mythic dimension, twice even comparing Dallas to Ulysses. But Long himself does not succumb to such hero worship. He gives detailed attention to Bill Pogue, one of the fish and game wardens who had gone after Dallas. Pogue’s commitment to the West was different from that ofDallas. Pogue was touched “deeply,” Long says, by the clash between civilization and wilderness and was himself also an embodiment of the mountain man as he had found him in Vardis Fisher’s Mountain Man. It is doubtful that Claude Dallas ever experi­ enced the same nostalgic ache. Hence, Long, like many observers at Dallas’s trial for murder, is struck by the ironic twist that had made the dead Bill Pogue seem the defendant, for Dallas proved as adept on the stand as he had been with his guns. The account of the trial, the most intense part of the book, transcends what actually hap­ pened in the courtroom. We sense the meanings the trial has to the public at large—and what a slippery thing human justice is. In fiction and in fact, in the West people often expect little satisfaction from the law. Those tempted to act...