A Beautiful, Cruel Country by Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce (review)

166 Western American Literature A Beautiful, Cruel Country. By Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce, with wood engrav­ ings by Michael McCurdy. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987. 318 pages, $19.95.) There are books that are constructed—and there are books that are lived. What immediately draws the reader to A Beautiful, Cruel Country is this sense of living history, of the author’s immersion in the land of her childhood. Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce retells her experiences from age three to five (1907— 1909) on a ranch in southern Arizona Territory. There is little authorial intru­ sion in her story to distract the reader from the audacious and wondrous perspective of a young girl educated in a harsh country. The education of Eva Antonia Wilbur is as distinctive an American story as that of Henry Adams. Tutored mostly by her father, Eva learns joy in “gifts of the moment” such as spying a Monarch butterfly-laden tree or climbing El Cerro, the mountain that dominates the landscape. She also discovers that a pretty multicolored rope can actually be a dangerous snake. From vivid and dangerous experiences she learns to see when she looks, to hear when she listens. Young Eva’s education is costly, however. Her practical split riding skirts offend the neighbors and her frank language appalls her paternal grandmother, who fears ranch life has made her grandchild a heathen. It is clear from this narrative, however, that Eva holds a deep reverence for the llano, the land. As Willa Cather described it in O Pioneers! and as Annette Kolodny has docu­ mented in The Land Before Her, women are often the ones who set their faces toward the land with love, rather than a spirit of conquest. The book’s title masks Cruce’swonderful brief portraits of the people who lived near the ranch and touched her life. The people who frame the book are the Indians who come to the ranch to share stories, food and wisdom. At its close the Indians leave their homeland en masse for the reservation as more Anglos settle in the area, a sign of changing times that will eventually affect the ranch Eva loves. This beautiful story goes from a sense of joy to one of impending loss— of childhood innocence, of the land Eva roams in untethered freedom. A ranch hand tells her: “All this—the horses, the corrida, too—those things are dying. All you will see there on that road will be the machines—those new automo­ biles. . . . Maybe you will live to see it, Chicquita. If you do you must tell the world how beautiful this country was, for even the land will be dead, too, in a way—like us and like the remuda, the corrida.” Cruce has proved true to the task, recapturing this land and its people in a narrative unlike the conquistador’s, the soldier’s or the ethnographer’s. Her book reflects great love and brings to her country a gentler Muse singing of vanished Arizona. JUDY NOLTE LENSINK University of Arizona ...