Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album by Teresa Jordan (review)

Reviews 387 rily earned her living by needlework. Her clients ranged from major trading companies to dance hall girls (when they arrived—Anna was there before them), and her friends were as widely assorted. Deep in old age, for instance, DeGraf supported herself as wardrobe mistress at the Pantages Theater, entre­ preneur “Alec”Pantages having been a north country associate. Many episodes are simple stories of warm, supportive acquaintances or humane strangers, but DeGrafsurvived grave hardships aswell, including a plot to murder her (and jump her claim), being lost and alone on the trail, and losing everything by fire. Amusing and jolly times also figure prominently in these stories—evading Canadian customs by a spirited rendering of “God Save the Queen,”a dance lasting from one evening until the next noon, and homely but heart-warming Christmas celebrations. Recorded for her descendants in unadorned, directlanguagewhichvivifies frontier life, Pioneering on the Yukon is enjoyable in and for itself. It is also a worthy addition to the growing body of female autobiography rescued from oblivion to enrich the history of this nation. JANE S. BAKERMAN Indiana State University Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album. By Teresa Jordan. (New York: Pantheon, 1993. 219 pages, $21.00.) When Iwas in high school, mymother bought me a copyofTeresaJordan’s first book, Cowgirls: Women oftheAmerican West. I read it and reread it, fascinated with the personal accounts of strong western women. Jordan’s newest book, Riding the WhiteHorseHome, is another one that I will read again and again. Jordan, raised on a Wyoming ranch owned by four generations of her family, combines family and community portraits, personal essays, and depic­ tions ofranching to tell about, asshe says, “a place and the people attached to it, about a wayoflife that has almost disappeared.”Her descriptions of her family evoke vivid pictures: we see, for example, her Grandfather Sunny, a “grand old ranchman,”who disliked “children and cats,”and his wife Effie, who managed “to undermine even her generous impulses,”and would neither “live with nor divorce” her husband for “forty years of a fifty-year marriage.”And in spare, beautiful passages Jordan reminisces about her mother, who died suddenly whileJordan was in college. Likewise, we see, even feel, life on a ranch, where only injuries with “major plaster”count and where “you rise at five-thirty each morning,”even ifit’stoo dark outside to work, because “a neighbor mightdrive by and know you were still abed.” 388 Western American Literature Yet this is about much more than family history and one family’s connec­ tion to a particular piece of land; it is also Jordan’s attempt to understand herself, understand what shaped her. The book details Jordan’s movement through loss and the grieving process. Loss figures prominently in the book; besides the sudden and haunting death of her mother,Jordan also depicts the loss of land and rural life. Through this loss she comes to realize how easilywe are taught to castaside our sense ofplace. Besides lossand grief, however, there are moments ofjoy and new starts, such asJordan’s exuberant (maybe a little sentimental) description of calving. And the book ends on a positive note: Jordan’smarriage in the Iron Mountain Community House, surrounded byher community family. Just like Jordan’s first book, this graceful and beautiful memoir about families and place will staywith me. BETSYWARD Utah State University Being in the World: An Environmental Readerfor Writers. Edited by Scott H. Slovic and Terrell F. Dixon. (NewYork: Macmillan, 1993. 726 pages, $19.50.) This book is designed to be a reader for both introductory and upper level creative non-fiction writing classes or as a text for an environmental studies course. Slovic and Dixon have taken great care to select pieces, the majority from this century, written by experts on the environment who are also master stylists. The text is divided into four broad sections (Nature: “Out There,” Human Visitors, Belonging to the World, and Abstractions: Thinking about the Environment) which in turn are divided into three or four chapters each. Each chapter contains usually six essays written by writers known for their focus on nature, like EdwardAbbey, Peter Matthiessen, and BarryLopez...