Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch by Dan O’Brien (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s 1 2 5 optimism” (xxi). If their anthology often seems rather a grab-bag of materials, some of it of doubtful significance, this note of hope and dismay is sounded often in their selections. The general reader who knows little or nothing about the Plains will discover the region’s complexity by reading the selections, and those who know the subject from experience or study will discover a wide range of insights and of subjects for further investigation. A final note: We must hope that the book goes into a subsequent edition so that the editors will be able to correct what seems, at least to this reviewer, altogether too many irritating typographical errors. Two of many examples are “A telephone lines [sic] goes cold” and the bibliographical reference to Bernard DeVoto’s The Courage [sic] of Empire (374, 217). Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch. By Dan O’Brien. New York: Random House, 2001. 254 pages, $22.95/13.95. Reviewed by David Cremean Black Hills State University In this account of leaving cattle ranching for organic buffalo ranching, Dan O’Brien produces his finest book to date, one that stands among the best non-fiction of the last couple ofyears. Author of interesting and readable “New Western” novels, set primarily in South Dakota, as is BrokenHeart, O’Brien has lived on the Plains for over two decades. As in The Rites of Autumn (1988), his fine work on falcons and falconry, BrokenHeart shows not only how the wild and human intersect to mutual ben­ efit, but also how wildness is essential to—in fact, integrally located within— humankind, part of its spiritual essence. He also reminds readers that wildness deserves its own existence outside ofhuman constructs. In the process, O’Brien follows in the wake of authors such as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, and Doug Peacock as he at once engages with and offers differing slants on their ideas about how wildness offers a healing tonic for the societal and the personal—with his own life, along with the lives of his friends and neighbors, serving as the conduit. In addition to the overarching theme of wildness, O’Brien underscores a pair of his most important ideas, which he skillfully interweaves throughout the rest of the work. Roughly two-thirds of the way into the book, he discusses the need for newcomers and change in the West, “to cross-pollinate with the ideas that are already here” by contributing their more cosmopolitan “better sense of what is possible” (178). Toward book’s end—in a memorable passage too long to quote, too interdependent to summarize—he discusses an Abbeyesque earth-bound mysticism, one that inhabits the core ofhis being. This pas­ sage seems to be a philosophical key not only to this book, but also to O’Brien’s other writings. 1 2 6 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 4 At this point, I feel compelled to offer a slight disclaimer and personal note. Since first reading this book and requesting this review, I twice met and enjoyed extended conversations with O’Brien and spent a couple of hours pickup-trucking around the Broken Heart Ranch with Emey, one of the main principles of Rites. 1 like both men, though they are exceedingly different in numerous ways. O’Brien veers toward the New West, Emey more toward the traditional. Yet their friendship serves as a model for cooperation among these two of the West’s often battle-prone major constituencies. And this book sank a spur in my own side: over a year ago, it led away from beefto grass-fed, organic bison as the principal red meat my family buys for home use. The book there­ fore offers constructive means by which our acts and dollars may be put to work toward the common wealth rather than toward a myopic machine prin­ cipally benefiting absent, abstracted plutocrats. Consequently, amid the malignantly cancerous growth...