Book Review - Growing Up Proctor: Life on the Gallo by Alma Proctor Hobbs (2020).

 Growing Up Proctor:Life on the Gallo by Alma Proctor Hobbs (2020).

There it was. Another person wanted me to read, and hopefully review, their book. Sure, it was a Proctor from the Corona area, but I was having health problems, computer problems, handicapped van breakdowns, plumbing problems, etc. I was barely keeping The Westerner, my monthly column, and the Linebery Facebook page going.

So I put it off. 

The big loser in all this...was me.

This is a wonderful book. Full of history, daily livin’, love, hard times and humor.

Alma Proctor Hobbs was raised down the Gallo Canyon in Lincoln County by two tough, creative and industrious parents, along with seven brothers and sisters. These are their stories as seen through Alma’s eyes. Thank goodness those eyes were so observant.

The book is 216 pages and has 125 chapters/stories. Open the book to any page and you will find something delightful. Things like how a mama buzzard protects her young and how to treat a snakebite by slaughtering chickens. One raised on a ranch or in a working-class family will notice things other authors might miss. Hands for instance, and there are chapters of her Father and her mother’s hands. And oh my, where else would an old Prince Albert can bring a tear to your eye?

Look there, on page 192 is a nice chapter on my aunt Geraldine.

If you weren’t raised on a ranch or rural area during this time period, this book will let you experience what it was like. If you were, then you will get a double pleasure out of these tales. First is the wonderful words of Alma Proctor Hobbs and her description of the people, places and events. Second will be the folks and happenings these stories remind you of in your own life experience. Two stories for one.

Hurry up and you have an excellent Christmas gift. Whether for yourself or others, don’t make my mistake of delaying this luscious read. There is a chapter about how her Dad would insist folks read a book he liked, and it was passed up and down the Gallo. My advice to you is the same as he gave, “read this book!”

Edward Borein: Etched by the West

 Edward Borein loved to cowboy. It was all he ever wanted to do growing up in San Leandro, California. He also loved to draw. It was something that he would fill free time with – drawing on anything he could find – paper bags, shoe box lids – anything. He got pretty good at it. Good enough that some of the fellow vaqueros he worked with on the sprawling Rancho Jesus Maria, in northern Santa Barbara County (now the Vandenberg Space Force Base) nudged him into sending some of his sketches to publisher Charles F. Lummis. Lummis took a liking to him and published a number of his drawings in an 1896 edition of his magazine, The Land of Sunshine. Borein received $15 for his work. 

Such was the beginning of a burgeoning art career for one John Edward Borein (1872 – 1945). His art career helped bring the imagery of the Southwest vaquero to a world rapidly moving into the future – where automobiles were replacing horses and electricity was bringing light to the dark. Borein worked in the era of Montana artist, Charles M. Russell, Frederick Remington, Will James and Joe De Yong, among others.

In acclaimed Western historian Byron Price’s new book, Edward Borein, Etched by the West, we are treated to an in depth look at the artist, his life and his work. The author should be familiar with anyone who loves the history and art of the American West as Price is one of the subject’s foremost scholars. His new book will be published in October by the Santa Barbara Historical Museum. The 336-page work, will include more than 400 images, many never before published. Michael Grauer, Curator of Cowboy Collections and Western Art at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum introduces the book with a gracious essay on its subject.

The book shares in great detail the story of Borein’s life and career path from working vaquero to successful illustrator to revered recorder and interpreter of the West “that was passing.” There is no one better to tell Borein’s story than Price, who brings more street cred to the project than any Western scholar living today. Price held the Charles M. Russell memorial Chair and was the director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West at the University of Oklahoma, prior to his retirement in 2020...

With that background, Price has woven together many little-known details of Borein’s experiences in his native California, as well as his time in Mexico and New York, into a fascinating and uplifting story, with an in-depth look at the artist’s abilities in numerous art mediums, especially in etching. Borein’s Western scenes were in many cases romantic depictions of the cowboy world “before the wire.” That being the West before it was fenced with barbed wire eliminating a wide-open West that was the cowboy’s dream. The region he focused on was early Spanish Colonial California, and subjects included the Spanish Missions, Native Americans and cowboys and their ways of living. They were romantic to be sure, but like his friend Russell, the scenes depicted were what they knew and lived and didn’t want us to forget.

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Trust in love, family - and sheep (book review)

The Ranching Heritage: A Collection of Stories, Illustrations and Images by By Martin Torres, Nighthawk Press (2020, 120 pp.)

In this memoir of a bygone ranching life, Martin Torres (born in 1929) writes of his family's once flourishing business of sheep raising. "In the 1500s, my Spanish ancestors forever changed the landscape of the Americas, formerly known as part of the 'New World,' with the introduction of ideologies that often centered on crops and livestock," begins Torres in this family venture. His visionary, enterprising father, Onesimo Valentin Torres, became by the 1950s one of the most prosperous ranchers and businessmen in Northern New Mexico. Born in 1891 and raised in Arroyo Seco, Onesimo branched off from his stepfather's sheep ranching business by purchasing thousands of acres in Tierra Amarilla and Tres Piedras from the 1920s through the 1940s for the grazing, lambing and shearing of his approximately 5,000 head of sheep. Married to Ana née Martinez of Arroyo Seco, who was 16 when they wed, the couple had 11 surviving children to help run these ambitious ranching and farming enterprises, which required enormous labor - the sons, including Martin, one of the youngest, were pressed to aid the breeding and lambing, sheepherding, shearing and harvesting, each component carefully planned and organized at its time of the year. While his two oldest brothers were drafted into the United States armed services after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Martin was too young for World War II but was active in the New Mexico State University ROTC, before he enlisted in the Army just after the Korean War, serving from 1955 to 1956 in the Second Infantry Division, then joined the National Guard Battery for three years. With an eye to the future like his father, Martin undertook a business move that would complement his day job, namely sheep ranching, and opened a movie theater in Ranchos de Taos, El Cortez, in 1957. It showed mostly Spanish-language movies that were a big hit with the locals. Torres also opened the Torres Bowling Lanes in 1959 (where El Taoseño restaurant is now), and he and his brother Luis courted and married the Tafoya sisters, Elma and Bernice, respectively. Ultimately, overgrazing and government quotas forced the Torreses and other sheep and cattle ranchers to diversify and sell off their land, and Martin and his son now run the Laguna Elk Ranch in Tres Piedras - elk being "much easier to care for and more exotic" than sheep and cattle. The memoir captures the relentless cycle of ranch life, where everything had its season and nothing was wasted - there are even some crude, charming (undated) illustrations by Martin, such as a 500-gallon water tank being pulled by a team of horses to deliver to the ewes on the range...MORE

New book on Matt Drudge shines spotlight on reclusive blogger

Joseph Curl

Matt Drudge is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Mr. Drudge, 53, has been painting his version of the world for more than 20 years, cherry-picking stories from various news agencies and posting the links on his website, the Drudge Report. But almost no one knows anything about him, so secretive is he. That’s all about to change with the release of a new book, “The Drudge Revolution,” by journalist Matthew Lysiak. (For the record, the subtitle of the book, which hits book store shelves July 28, is: “The Untold Story Of How Talk Radio, Fox News, And A Gift Shop Clerk With An Internet Connection Took Down The Mainstream Media”). “Matt Drudge’s impact on the past three decades of presidential campaigns has been well chronicled, no more so than the 2016 election in which many credited Drudge for having propelled Donald Trump through the primaries and into the White House,” Mr. Lysiak tells me. “But now that the reclusive blogger has weaponized his powerful site against the president, what effect will it have over the millions of loyal Drudge Report readers who also make up the president’s base?” he asks. And Mr. Drudge has done just that — “weaponized” his site. The reclusive blogger has targeted President Trump of late, posting many stories from liberal sites (which hitherto got little play on his site). No one knows why. But even Mr. Trump has weighed in on the change: “I gave up on Drudge (a really nice guy) long ago, as have many others. People are dropping off like flies!” the president tweeted in April. I know a thing or two about Mr. Drudge: I’ve known Matt (whom I call “Doc” because of his initials, MD) for more than 20 years and I ran the Drudge Report in the mornings for nearly four years. But even I hardly know the guy: I rarely saw him, and we talked on the phone only a few times a year (usually for hours, but not often). So as a longtime fan of Mr. Drudge and his site, I read Mr. Lysiak’s new book with interest. The former investigative reporter with the New York Daily News conducted some 200 interviews and offers some insights into Drudge, including...MORE

Book by Trump's niece reveals she betrayed him by leaking his tax returns

President Trump’s niece, Mary, admits in her new book that she was the source who gave Mr. Trump’s tax information to The New York Times in 2019, saying the moment she handed over the documents to journalists was “the happiest I’d felt in months.” “It wasn’t enough for me to volunteer at an organization helping Syrian refugees,” she writes in the book. “I had to take Donald down.” The book, titled “Too Much and Never Enough,” is scheduled to be published on July 14. A New York state appeals judge has lifted a temporary restraining order against its publication, after the president’s brother Robert initially got a lower court to block its release. In numerous excerpts circulating ahead of the book’s release, Ms. Trump acknowledges that she harbors ill will against the president. A clinical psychologist, Ms. Trump blames the president for the death of her father, Fred Trump Jr., the president’s older brother who died of a heart attack complicated by alcoholism in 1981 at age 42. “Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence, and inaction of his siblings, destroyed my father,” Ms. Trump writes. “I can’t let him destroy my country.” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the book is filled with “ridiculous, absurd allegations that have absolute no bearing in truth.” “It is a book of falsehoods,” she told reporters. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway questioned the media’s emphasis on Ms. Trump’s role as a psychologist, saying that he president is not her patient but her uncle. “Family matters are family matters,” Mrs. Conway told reporters. She also said the president reveres the memory of his late brother Fred Jr. Another “tell-all” book about the first family is due out on Sept. 1. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who was viewed as a confidante of first lady Melania Trump and , is set to publish a book titled “Melania and Me” that is expected to be critical of Mrs. Trump... MORE

The Disgraceful Howard Zinn

Despite many serious scholars’ denunciations, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has enjoyed phenomenal success since its publication in 1980: 2.6 million (!) copies sold, incorporation into the curricula of innumerable schools, and the achievement of almost iconic status in popular culture. Mary Grabar’s Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America performs a valuable service by examining Zinn’s polemical volume and revealing “just how distorted, manipulative, and plain dishonest” it truly is.
A tireless left-wing activist with a Ph.D. in history, Zinn (1922–2010) urged fellow historians, as Grabar relates, to eschew “disinterested scholarship” in order to bring about “a revolution in the academy.” Not all radical academics agreed with his anti-capitalist take on history. Eugene Genovese declined to review Zinn’s opus, which he privately described as “incoherent left-wing sloganizing.” Michael Kammen called it “a scissors-and-paste-pot job” that devoted too much attention to “historians, historiography, and historical polemic” and hence provided “little space for the substance of history.” Kammen acknowledged the need for “a people’s history; but not single-minded, simpleminded history, too often of fools, knaves and Robin Hoods.”
Eric Foner disapproved of Zinn’s “deeply pessimistic vision of the American experience” that emphasized how “stirring protests, strikes and rebellions never seem to accomplish anything.” Zinn’s approach to “history from the bottom up” was “necessary as a corrective” but was “as limited in its own way as history from the top down.” Michael Kazin credited Zinn “with virtuous intentions” but concluded that his book was little more than a “Manichean fable” and a “polemic disguised as history,” a book “grounded in a premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger’s website than to a work of scholarship” and “unworthy of [the] fame and influence” it won. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., regarded Zinn as “a polemicist, not a historian.”

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How White House Rivalries Shaped History

Kyle Sammin

A president’s ideas matter, but without the right people in place to make them a reality, they will never be more than wishful thinking. Competent management requires both vision and execution. As Tevi Troy explains in his new book, Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump, a White House lacking one of these will experience chaos. One lacking both is destined to fail utterly.
Troy, an historian and the author of two previous books on presidential history, begins his tale with the beginning of the modern White House staff structure in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The rise of the first truly massive administrative state in America led Roosevelt and his people to reimagine the way the chain of command should work in the executive branch.
Once, the cabinet was the true decision-making body, confirmed by the Senate, advising the president on policy choices, and largely running their departments as they saw fit. The cabinet was composed of some of the most eminent leaders in the president’s party, forming both his brain trust and his cadre of managers.
At the same time, there had always been unofficial advisors who had the president’s ear. From Andrew Jackson’s so-called “Kitchen Cabinet” to Harry Truman’s poker buddies, to Donald Trump’s children and son-in-law, presidents have sought advice from outside the cabinet structure, usually to the annoyance of the party regulars who were thereby sidestepped. Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though, the unofficial was made official, and the power shift from the cabinet to the White House staff began in earnest.

Chain of Command

With the power went the rivalries, and no White House has been free of the squabbles that are inevitable when powerful people fight for influence. Troy describes the tumult of Truman and Eisenhower administrations as this new hierarchy began to take shape and cabinet secretaries were effectively sidelined, especially those in the newer, less policy-driven departments. In their place rose a series of advisors, led typically by the White House chief of staff.
Whether to have a chief of staff is a major conflict in itself in the early part of the period Troy studies. What seems unremarkable today was once a contentious decision. The question of centralizing the chain of command in the White House staff changed with the political winds. Richard Nixon promised a return to the cabinet system and away from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ constantly feuding non-cabinet power centers. Instead, he centralized power even further in the hands of the national security advisor and the chief of staff.

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Recovering A Strong American Conception Of Property Rights

William Yeatman

Within our constitutional framework, property rights have been relegated to second-class citizenship.
Take the Supreme Court’s double-standard on the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against the government “taking” private property unless it’s for “public use.” For alleged infringements of other guarantees in the Bill of Rights, the Court “strictly” scrutinizes government action. But with the Fifth Amendment’s property protections, the Court allows legislatures to interpret their own constitutional boundaries. If “only” property rights are at stake, then the fox may guard the henhouse.
Or consider the Court’s amorphous review for “substantive due process,” a values-based inquiry into the constitutional legitimacy of state and federal regulatory laws. On this score, the Court candidly concedes that property rights and contractual freedoms enjoy less protection than other, non-economic liberties.
In his new book Property and the Pursuit of Happiness: Locke, the Declaration of Independence, Madison, and the Challenge of the Administrative State, Edward Erler shows how constitutional property rights climbed through the looking glass and came out topsy-turvy. From America’s founding era to the present day, property rights flipped from cachet to low-caste, and what’s supposed to be up, well, is down.
Erler is a professor of political philosophy, so it’s unsurprising this book’s foremost contribution is its discussion of the vital role property rights played in the Framers’ constitutional vision. Tracing an arc of political thought from Aristotle through Locke on to the Declaration of Independence, Erler argues that the Founding Fathers put an inherently American gloss on pre-existing conceptions of property – one that merged natural rights and moral obligation into a synthesis they called “the pursuit of happiness.”
For the Founders, the right to property was the “comprehensive right that included all other rights.” In this spirit, the Supreme Court in 1795 averred that “the right of acquiring and possessing property, and having it protected, is one of the natural, inherent and unalienable rights of man.”
Erler explains the decline of property rights from these sanctified heights. As the economy advanced and governments grew, vested property interests came increasingly into conflict with public policy, and it fell to the courts to demarcate the boundaries between public and private spheres.
For much of our nation’s history, as courts wrestled with these controversies, they hewed to an understanding of property rights closer the Framers than what we see today. The practical result was that property rights enjoyed considerable constitutional protection from overbearing government.
But the scales of justice shifted early in the twentieth century, when “the Progressive forces of history” swept first into legislatures and then into the courts. Progressives rejected the Founders’ conception of property rights because it impeded the “science” of economic planning. As Progressive influence waxed, property rights waned.
Although Property and the Pursuit of Happiness overlaps in subject and tone with Richard Epstein’s excellent 2008 book, Supreme Neglect: How to Revive Constitutional Protection for Private Property, the two books are complementary but not the same. Discussion of the Founding Fathers is largely absent from the latter—arguably the only flaw in Epstein’s seminal work—and this topic is Erler’s strongest contribution.

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What the Anti-Poverty Activists Hath Wrought

Who Killed Civil Society?: The Rise of Big Government and the Decline of Bourgeois Norms argues that “formative” efforts by private organizations to prevent social problems from appearing in the first place have been supplanted by the “reformative” efforts of government programs to remedy problems once they appear. This has only made the problems worse, says author Howard Husock.
It is a point that, in various forms, has been made before—and Husock, formerly director of case studies in public policy and management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and now vice president of the Manhattan Institute and a contributor to City Journal, acknowledges and cites those who’ve made it. His short book makes it somewhat differently, however. It is a collection of profiles of six influential figures, five from history and one from the present, who have tried to fight poverty and its many related consequences.
The six subjects are: Children’s Aid Society founder Charles Loring Brace; Jane Addams, who founded Hull House; social work pioneer and Russell Sage Foundation official Mary Richmond; federal Children’s Bureau leader Grace Abbott; Wilbur Cohen, an official of what was at its creation called the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; and Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone.
Husock’s talents as a storytelling journalist and as a public policy professor overseeing academic case studies are well put to use in Who Killed Civil Society? Placed together as “snapshots,” its profiles help tell a larger story, engagingly tracing an unfortunate development: the displacement of civil society by the state.
...Husock’s question remains, then, and may be even tougher to answer than we all would have thought. Who Killed Civil Society? is essentially an autopsy, and a pathologist is not a midwife. For those wanting a rebirth of civil society and trying to figure out how best to work towards it, the story told by the book’s profiles is a necessary part of the historical background.

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DuBois preface to "Stories That Terrell Shelley Told Me" by Ed Ashurst

Ed Ashurst, Stories That Terrell Shelley Told Me (2019)

At 1:35 p.m. on Saturday, January 6, 1912, President William H. Taft signed the proclamation making New Mexico the 47th state. Present were Territorial Delegate W.H. Andrews, Congressmen-elect George Curry and H.B. Fergusson, four members of the President’s Cabinet and several prominent New Mexicans. Upon fixing his signature to the proclamation, President Taft turned to Delegate Andrews and said, "I am glad to give you life, I hope that you will be healthy.”

Three decades prior to New Mexico becoming a state, Peter Shelley, his wife Emily and their four children arrived at what was to become their home on Mogollon Creek after a long trip from Bell County, Texas. 

A year prior to the Shelley’s arrival, on the road from Silver City to Lordsburg, Judge Hamilton Calhoun McComas (known as H.C.) and his wife Juniata were slaughtered by a band of Apaches led by Chato. Their six-year-old son Charlie, who was with them, was never found. A year after the Shelley’s arrival came the uprising on the San Carlos Indian Reservation. Geronimo and other Apache leaders made their escape and began raiding settlers in the region, including an incident that involved the Shelley family.

On that day in 1884 when Peter Shelley and his family arrived on Mogollon Creek, they had with them 80 head of cattle with the 916 brand on their left side. Shelley would eventually establish an enterprise that included 5,000 head of cattle known as The 916 Ranch. This book is the story of Peter Shelley and his descendants as they endeavored to survive and prosper in some of the roughest country in the southwest.

Terrell Shelley, the great grandson of Peter Shelley, is the primary provider of source materials for this volume. He has provided diaries and other written materials, newspaper and magazine articles, a vast collection of historical photos, family stories passed on by oral tradition, and his own personal remembrances and stories.

The recipient of these materials is the award-winning author Ed Ashurst. Ashurst is the author of nine books, including Charlie Gould Memories of a Cowboy, Real Cowboys Grand Canyon to Mexico, The Life and Times of Warner Glenn, Wagon Boss a True Cowboy Story, and Mavericks. Just as important, in my opinion, is that Ed Ashurst is a third generation cowboy, has worked on   large cow outfits in four states and has managed a ranching operation in Apache, Arizona for twenty-two years. 

Place this provider and writer together and you get a fascinating kaleidoscope of cowboys, cattle and critters. There are stories of the pioneers and the hardships endured and risks taken. There are stories of gathering wild cattle, of firefighting, of rodeos and of horses, mules and wildlife. Given the type of country and the different eras represented, there naturally flows many great hunting stories. As Ashurst explains, “…and expertise about the hunting craft began to spread through families, most of whom were cattle ranchers who grazed their herds in the rough mountains. The flatlanders did not have the problems with the lions and bears that the rough country boys did so the rough country cowboys naturally became the best hunters.”

Herein you will find the story of the legendary lion hunter Ben Lilly and his relationship with various members of the Shelley family. You will also read of Terrell Shelley guiding Dale Earnhardt on his last hunting trip just weeks before his untimely death on the racetrack.

And make no mistake the current day descendants of Peter Shelley have the same knack of bringing excitement to whatever events they encounter. For instance, there is Tissy Shelley (Miss Rodeo America, 1963 and World Champion Barrel Racer, 1970) who beat the hell out of a rent-a-cop at a rodeo in Las Vegas, Nevada who refused to let her enter the contestants section and in the process had knocked a tooth out of the mouth of her three year-old son. Then there is Terrell himself, who slipped on some ice and slid right in between his pack of dogs and the lion they had treed, with the lion promptly biting down on his leggings. Ashurst has the talent to place you right there staring into the face of that lion.

My advice is to put your foot in the stirrup, swing up in the saddle, enjoy your ride into the history of the Shelley family and experience the Real West as told by a master storyteller.

Frank DuBois served as the New Mexico Secretary of Agriculture for sixteen years, held a senior position in the U.S. Dept. of Interior during the Reagan administration and is a former legislative assistant to U.S. Senator Pete V. Domenici. DuBois writes a monthly column published in the NM Stockman and the Livestock Market Digest, and is the author of a blog on western issues titled The Westerner (www.thewesterner.blogspot.com).

The Story of the Florida Panther Is Worth Telling

In 1981, Florida school children were asked to vote for Florida’s state animal and were given a ballot with three candidates: the manatee, the Key deer and the Florida panther. Maybe not surprisingly, they overwhelmingly voted for the dashing, tawny predator. Craig Pittman is thankful. School kids popularized this big cat, a feline most Floridians had never seen or really thought much about, helping to save it from extinction by funneling attention and then money in its direction. They also gave Pittman the beginnings of what he calls a “great yarn,” his new book Cat Tale: The Weird, Wild Battle to Save the Florida Panther (excerpted below). Early on, Pittman says, he realized the story of the Florida panther was worth telling. The Florida panther is an umbrella species, which means that protecting the panther and the land that it roams on is vital to protecting other animals (including humans) and resources, such as water, that we need in Florida. But as in all good books, Cat Tale contains drama and an assortment of heroes and villains: inspiring, devoted biologists (women in science play pivotal, positive roles, he’s happy to say), committed government workers as well as corrupt ones, junk science, powerful developers, a taciturn Texan cougar hunter straight out of Hollywood casting, and a desperate dramatic experiment to introduce new cougar DNA into the Florida panther bloodline. When Pittman started his reporting on the panther, there were about 30 left in Florida. Today there may be as many as 230, and the panthers that are roaming and breeding are healthier. But their survival isn’t assured. Florida’s growth and pressure to develop and the politics of the state continue to encroach on their habitat...MORE

From the Bundys to cheap burgundy: How myths shape the West

 Jenny Shank

Novelist Frank Bergon was born in Nevada in 1943 but grew up in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where his family, of Basque ancestry, owned a ranch. Bergon headed east to earn degrees at Boston College and Harvard University. He taught literature for many years at Vassar College in New York, but his heart and imagination never left the West, the setting of most of his books. In his new essay collection, Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man: The New Old West, Bergon displays an acute awareness of what has changed and what has endured in the West in the past 70 years, especially when it comes to how the region’s myths influence its popular perception and the behavior of its inhabitants.
Bergon juxtaposes the idea of the Marlboro Man — the cigarette company’s most famous model was a rancher Bergon knew well, Darrell Winfield — with the 2014 Bundy standoff over grazing rights in Nevada. The men who instigated that conflict, Bergon writes, were inspired in part by the tobacco company’s promotion of an ideal: the independent, assertive, heroic Westerner of yore. Throughout these essays, Bergon highlights the feedback loop between how myth, movies and advertisements style the West, and how Westerners actually live in it today.
One of Bergon’s friends urges him to write a book about their high school classmate, Fred Franzia, the wine businessman behind Trader Joe’s famed Charles Shaw wine label, more commonly known as Two-Buck Chuck. “He’s brought wine into the homes of more people than Gallo or Mondavi or any other winemaker,” Bergon’s friend says. “In Napa his name is anathema. They don't like good wine at two dollars.”
Bergon portrays Franzia as the sort of independent firebrand the West is known for in a colorful essay that details the origins and underbelly of the California wine industry. Franzia had expected to inherit his family’s wine business, but when his father and uncles sold it to the Coca-Cola Bottling Company, the Franzia name became off-limits to him for business purposes. Scarred by its loss, the scrappy Fred established the Bronco Wine Company, “the largest vineyard owner in the United States.” Franzia styled himself as an iconoclast, battling, for example, with the Napa Valley Vintners Association, which urged the passage of a law forbidding wines made with non-Napa grapes from using the word Napa on the label. In response, Franzia “immediately produced a wine with Napa grapes called Napa Creek,” that retailed for just $3.99. Though critics scoff at Franzia’s inexpensive wines, they have won awards at blind-judged competitions.
Bergon tells his stories in a roundabout manner rather than chronologically, shifting from a present-day incident to an anecdote from the recent past, then detouring into something even further back. His essays have the rhythms of reminiscence, moving casually from one idea, image or memory to the next. At times, this meandering style can be confusing, but the casual structure underscores Bergon’s larger point that all these Western stories are connected, and that the practices and people we associate with the “Old West” survive in the New West today, in surprisingly different but still-recognizable forms.

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How the strange tale of the "Oregon standoff" explains what happened in America in 2016

Andrew O'Hehir

Anthony McCann's "Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff" is one of those extraordinary books that seems to be about one thing, and turns out to be about almost everything. I raved to people a lot while I was reading it, drawing unwise comparisons to "Moby-Dick" and "Beyond Good and Evil." I'm still somewhat OK with those analogies. But rather than going deep on the lit-crit, I would more soberly suggest that "Shadowlands" belongs on the shelf beside Peter Matthiessen's "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse" or Edward Abbey's "Desert Solitaire," as a work of political nonfiction that isn't really "political," at least not in the narrow, normative use of that word. McCann is a poet and writing teacher who lives in the Mojave Desert of Southern California, and was drawn into the now-half-forgotten story of the 2016 "Oregon standoff" by his interest in the geography of the West, Native American messianic spirituality and the way those things intersect with the uniquely American theology of the Latter-day Saints. (Who have officially requested that we no longer call them the Mormons: Everybody gets a safe space.) I want to let my fascinating conversation with McCann tell most of the story, but let's just say that whatever you think you know about the Oregon standoff — when a handful of libertarian loons, associated with the notorious Bundy family of Nevada and drawn together by the internet, took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the remote desert of southeastern Oregon — is probably wrong. The Malheur occupiers relied on a thoroughly nutty interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, and most of them came from the fringes of the far right. But they weren't white supremacists, mostly weren't gun-totin' militia types (except for a few hangers-on), and never resorted to violence or even seriously threatened to do so. ou don't have to agree with anything about the occupiers' understanding of America or God or freedom — and McCann certainly doesn't — to agree that they were responding to something real: a notionally democratic state that has lost much of its popular legitimacy, and a civil society that often feels unmoored or uprooted. Something else, of course, also happened in 2016, and McCann's book becomes an inadvertent chronicle of the weird stew of discontent, on social media and IRL, that led to the election of our current president...MORE

Those stories are my bread and butter': Author Bryan Jones shares tales from the Sandhills in 'North of the Platte, South of the Niobrara'

Author Bryan L. Jones found some surprising customers for his book, “North of the Platte, South of the Niobrara.” “For some reason we’ve sold a ton of books in Tennessee, North Carolina and California,” he said from his home in central Colorado. “That’s something I didn’t anticipate. A lot of these people have good stories of their connection to the Sandhills. One of the guys that just bought a book is an optometrist in Tennessee. He’s related to the Kicken family. Young Jules Sandoz married a Kicken.” Sandhills author Mari Sandoz wrote about her father in the nonfiction book, “Old Jules,” published in 1935. The book detailed her father’s struggles as a pioneer in western Nebraska. “It’s those little threads that lead everywhere,” Jones said of the connections to his readers. “I’m thoroughly enjoying the stories that I’m hearing.” The book features stories told by residents of the Sandhills — ranchers, schoolteachers, bull riders, veterans, historians, scientists and poets...MORE

Review: The American West is dying. Christopher Ketcham’s ‘This Land’ is a rallying cry to save it

Jeffrey Fleishman
 
Once great, wide and untrammeled, the American West, where wolves roamed in gray multitudes and sage grouse puffed and plumed in splendor, is diminishing against cattle herds, gas and oil drilling, and federal agencies that have forsaken their duty to protect the nation’s magnificent and mistreated frontier. Tales of destruction have been going on for decades, but Christopher Ketcham’s important book, “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West, ” is an urgent cry to expose the greed, stubbornness and neglect that is harming public lands. Journalist and wanderer, Ketcham has written a psalm to nature and a manifesto to stop the forces that are threatening a territory that stretches from Colorado to the Pacific Coast. The West is a saga of God and commerce, homesteaders and cowboys, politicians and opportunists, wagon trains and slaughtered natives, grizzlies and coyotes, and mesas, buttes and gorges. Its vistas, forests and canyons are branded in the nation’s imagination, an expanse where the soul is unbound across 450 million acres of public lands. But grazing, fracking, logging, mining and permits for other private interests are imperiling wildlife, soil and vegetation already under siege by global warming. The intention of “This Land” is clear: “We are not safeguarding our public domain. The government agencies overseeing it are failing us. The private interests that want the land for profit have planted their teeth in the government. The national trend is against the preservation of the commons. Huge stretches are effectively privatized, public in name only. I went west to see what we were losing as a people.” Ketcham takes particular aim at cattle barons and what conservationists call the cheap mythology of the cowboy. Cattle grazing herds poison water and ravage the land through desertification. (A cow can deposit 1 ton of waste on the soil every month). But the legend of the cowboy is enshrined in movies and books, and these days in the resistance of men such as Cliven Bundy, whose band of anti-government followers held a standoff in Nevada with federal authorities over unpaid grazing fees in 2014. One of the book’s many paradoxes is that President Teddy Roosevelt perpetuated cowboy lore even as he safeguarded public lands: “The irony is that the beloved Teddy, who as president expanded our national forests, defended our national parks, signed the 1906 Antiquities Act, and said of the Grand Canyon, ‘Leave it as it is ... man can only mar it,’ is the same Teddy who worshipped the cattle culture that produced the likes of Cliven Bundy.”...MORE

There is nothing new in the proposed solutions, either:

“This Land” lays out measures, a few of them drastic, to reclaim what’s been taken: evict all cattle and “welfare-chiseler ranchers” from public lands; rip up 251 miles of paved roads in Yellowstone National Park; sabotage logging and mining equipment; band together against industry; demand stricter stewardship from Washington; and “throw our bodies on the gears of the machine and make it stop.” It is an infuriating battle when the agencies deemed to guard our public lands are the same ones putting them in jeopardy.

 Is their an antidote to all this venom? Yes, the Property and Environment Research Center: The Home of Free Market Environmentalism.
 

Clarence Thomas’s Quest to Recover the Lost Constitution

 Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution, by Myron Magnet (Encounter, 184 pp., $23.99)

Dan Mclaughlin

Picture Clarence Thomas as a legal Indiana Jones, dodging slings and arrows to rescue a valuable and powerful relic from the wrong hands after it fell into undeserved obscurity. That’s the thesis of Myron Magnet’s new book. Magnet, a longtime editor of City Journal, isn’t himself a lawyer, though he is at ease explaining legal arguments for non-lawyers. So this isn’t weighty legal scholarship or a thorough biography. It is, rather, a potboiler, briskly surveying how our founding charter went missing, what impelled Justice Thomas to go looking for it, and what he unearthed. At the end of the journey, the reader will be forgiven for suspecting that the original Constitution will nonetheless be consigned to a dusty corner of a government archive while the capital’s top men insist they can do better without it.
Today’s federal government diverges so sharply from its original design that Magnet compares it to a parasite devouring its host. When he asks, “Who killed the Constitution?” he identifies not one culprit but three. The preference of Woodrow Wilson and his New Deal successors for bureaucratic experts over popular sovereignty was, in Thomas’s words, the “wrong turn” that broke the document’s original structure; racist southern resistance deformed the post–Civil War amendments; and the liberal Warren Court’s overreaching activism upset the federal–state balance and cut the courts adrift from written law. (Executive power gets relatively little attention.) Magnet ties each of these topics to themes in Justice Thomas’s speeches, writings, jurisprudence, and biography. Many of the freshest parts of the book come from Thomas’s words away from the bench.
Magnet surveys the causes of today’s dysfunctions. These include a runaway reading of the interstate-commerce power, which lets Congress regulate a plant that never leaves the property on which it is grown; administrative agencies that write their own laws and flagrantly rewrite the ones Congress sends them; and judges who insert the courts into areas such as regulation of abortion based on unwritten “constitutional” rules while cavalierly disregarding explicit, written limitations on the government’s power to seize private property, restrict political speech, and disarm citizens. The underlying culprit in each case is the same: “experts” who think they know better and are impatient with written limits.
Magnet presents paternalism, condescension, and a spirit of victimization as Thomas’s nemeses. He pulls no punches about the sneering critics along Thomas’s path from Pinpoint, Ga., to the Court, such as a fellow federal judge who snarked that no senator who voted to confirm Thomas would have hired him as his lawyer. Magnet summarizes the story Thomas himself told in his 2007 memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, starting with the grandfather who instilled in Thomas his work ethic and sense of inherent dignity and self-reliance: “My grandfather was no victim and he didn’t send me to school to become one.” Magnet charts Thomas’s drift into and out of black radicalism in the tumult of the late 1960s and how influences such as Leo Strauss, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Sowell led him to understand that “the maxims and example of his grandfather . . . were conservatism.”

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