Ride South! by C. H. Haseloff (review)

84 Western American Literature Western Writers Series), and her critical analysis provides unimpeachable support for her conclusion that “Mary Hallock Foote deserves a secure place in American letters” (p. 158). Especially helpful is Johnson’s discussion of influences, for Foote’s novels and short stories abound in allusions and are full of parallels to works by Tennyson, Hawthorne, Cooper, Kipling, Stevenson, Browning, and Harte. Surprisingly, though, Johnson doesn’t mention Foote’s allusions to Austen, Meredith, and Tolstoy. I could spot only a few such minor oversights, and they certainly do not mar Johnson’s cogent reading of Foote’s work. Seeing in her subject’s career an early period of apprenticeship and adherence to romantic formulae, followed by a middle period of experimentation leading to an eventual shift to realism, and capped with a successful late phase of excellent auto­ biographical fiction, Johnson places herself in the camp that regards Foote’s last works as her best. To dismiss Foote after reading only her earlier fiction would be like going no further with Faulkner than Soldier’s Pay. Let me mention just a few of the other strengths of Johnson’s book: a discussion of one of Foote’s uncollected short stories that has hitherto been overlooked; a perceptive explanation of a pattern in Foote’s fiction that Johnson calls “marriage by default”; some good brief comparisons of Foote’s works to those of her contemporaries; and a discussion of her considerable stature as one of the leading illustrators of her day. I’ll let Johnson have the last word in explaining why Foote should no longer be ignored by anyone interested in western American literature: “It is the dichotomy between East and West which gives complexity and form to Foote’s work. All her fiction is given to exploring the forces represented by these two — the refined power of the East and the unharnessed energy of the West. Again and again the elements are reexamined and renamed, but always contrasted: East versus West, past versus future, art versus love, security versus adven­ ture, the ideal versus the actual” (pp. 156-57). JAMES H. MAGUIRE, Boise State University Ride South! By C. H. Haseloff. (New York: Bantam Books, 1980. 153 pages, $1.75.) With this novel, C. H. (Cynthia) Haseloff takes her place among two significant groups of popular western writers. One group is the recently emerging women writers — women like Carla Kelly and Michelle McQuaid, both of whom write stories and novelettes for Far West magazine, and J.D. Harkleroad, whose Horse Thief Trail appeared earlier this year. The second and more prestigious group consists of the writers of Bantam westerns, of whom the best known have been Louis L’Amour and Luke Short. Joining both of these ranks simultaneously constitutes a (sub) literary milestone, and accordingly Ride South! merits a moment’s attention. Reviews 85 Ride South! strikes one as sort of an inevitable book, for it is a novel in which the new woman of the 1970’s takes the place of the broadshouldered , manly hero of the L’Amour-Short variety. In the first chapter, Leah Harte’s husband is killed and her twin daughters are kidnapped — the work of Apaches who have jumped the reservation. From there, Leah goes out upon the hostile world and has a series of adventures very similar (and often identical) to those of the male hero. Interspersed with these activities are those that have been translated into new terms. She has a hand-to-hand struggle with a bad man named Raoul, whom she blows away with her Colt, but hers is an act of rape prevention rather than male supremacy. When she gets tangled up in a nest of rattlesnakes (reminiscent of True Grit, perhaps), again her woman­ hood seems at stake. About two thirds of the way through the story, at which point the male hero frequently becomes incapacitated and is tended to by the heroine, Leah gets bonked on the head by a stirrup (it “caught Leah in the right temple and dropped her, as surely as if she had been shot” — end chapter 12) and is administered to by a benevolent and egalitarian rancher. And...