Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album by Teresa Jordan
Nonfiction - Memoir
1993
Finished on January 26, 2024
First read on March 4, 1997
New Rating for 2024: 3/5 (Good)
Original Rating for 1997: 4.5/5 (Very Good)
Publisher's Blurb:
"A haunting and elegant memoir, evoking the ghosts of... family and those spirits inherent in the landscape.... Riding the White Horse Home becomes the story of us all. ~ Terry Tempest Williams
In 1887 Teresa Jordan's great-grandfather bought a ranch in the Iron Mountain country of southeast Wyoming. Four generations later her father sold it, under the economic pressures that have made ranching a dying way of life. This superbly evocative book is at once Teresa Jordan's family chronicle and a eulogy for the West her people helped shape.
Riding the White Horse Home is about generations of women who coped with physical hardship and killing loneliness in a landscape at once beautiful and inhospitable. It is a book of practical information--how to keep a cold from shying; how to tell when a cow is about to calf--conveyed with such precision that reading it is like a fast gallop across the prairie. Teresa Jordan has made a gift of her heritage--and has taught us something about our own.
Original Rating for 1997: 4.5/5 (Very Good)
Publisher's Blurb:
"A haunting and elegant memoir, evoking the ghosts of... family and those spirits inherent in the landscape.... Riding the White Horse Home becomes the story of us all. ~ Terry Tempest Williams
In 1887 Teresa Jordan's great-grandfather bought a ranch in the Iron Mountain country of southeast Wyoming. Four generations later her father sold it, under the economic pressures that have made ranching a dying way of life. This superbly evocative book is at once Teresa Jordan's family chronicle and a eulogy for the West her people helped shape.
Riding the White Horse Home is about generations of women who coped with physical hardship and killing loneliness in a landscape at once beautiful and inhospitable. It is a book of practical information--how to keep a cold from shying; how to tell when a cow is about to calf--conveyed with such precision that reading it is like a fast gallop across the prairie. Teresa Jordan has made a gift of her heritage--and has taught us something about our own.
My Original Notes (1997):
Marvelous! I love this book. Makes me want to write my own memoirs. I identified with so much of the author's views and feelings. Very sad in places - brought tears to my eyes, yet also humorous. Great look at life on a cattle ranch in contemporary time. Insightful. Touching. Spellbinding.
My Thoughts in 2017 (for my Looking Back post):
Yes, I still own a copy of this wonderful memoir and plan to read it again. I read it for my Great Plains Lit class, many years ago, but still remember how much I enjoyed it. Flipping through my copy, I see a lot of underlined passages and notes jotted down on the pages... far too many to share here, but this particular passage caught my eye and I think it speaks to the author's love of the land she grew up on:
Marvelous! I love this book. Makes me want to write my own memoirs. I identified with so much of the author's views and feelings. Very sad in places - brought tears to my eyes, yet also humorous. Great look at life on a cattle ranch in contemporary time. Insightful. Touching. Spellbinding.
My Thoughts in 2017 (for my Looking Back post):
Yes, I still own a copy of this wonderful memoir and plan to read it again. I read it for my Great Plains Lit class, many years ago, but still remember how much I enjoyed it. Flipping through my copy, I see a lot of underlined passages and notes jotted down on the pages... far too many to share here, but this particular passage caught my eye and I think it speaks to the author's love of the land she grew up on:
When my family tells the story of the ranch, we say we left because we had to--we could not afford to pay the estate taxes after my grandfather's death. This is true, but it is only part of the story. My family left the land because for four generations we had yearned to leave. We had lived in a culture that taught us that a professional life is more respectable than one tied to the land. This attitude shaped the decisions my family made, and it continues to shape the larger political and economic decisions, made by educators and policymakers far removed from the land, that affect the few who still hold on.I'm willing to bet that none of you have heard of Teresa Jordan or this book. If you enjoy memoirs or novels such as A River Runs Through It (Norman Maclean), Dancing at the Rascal Farm (Ivan Doig) or All the Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy), this is sure to be one you will love. I'm so happy to see that it's still available for purchase
My sadness over the loss of the homeplace is my dark side, my grief, but it is also the source of my deepest knowledge. Perhaps it is only through this experience of loss that I can value a sense of place, that I can question how thoughtlessly--even how contemptuously--we are taught to cast it aside.
Update in 2024:
After blogging about this book in 2017, I finally made time to re-read it this past month. I wish I could say that I loved it as much as I did in 1997, but I didn't. I enjoyed revisiting Jordan's memoir, and I didn't skim the familiar passages, but it didn't strike me as a great book this time around.
Snow doesn't melt, people say, it just wears out. Someone who asked if the wind ever quits is likely to be told that it does, long enough to change directions. I once ran across a list of nearly four hundred winds from around the world and wondered why Wyoming, so dominated by wind, has so few names for its variations. The only one that came to mind was chinook. "I can think of a few more," our neighbor, Wayne Bonham, suggested. "There's the wind, the damned wind, and the goddamned wind."
I think it is really interesting to see what we loved in a book in the past. I often wonder why I ranked it so high at the time if I don't love it as much the second time through. I do think art and literature speak to us differently at different times. It depends on our mood, our stage of life, and more.
ReplyDeleteI agree, Helen. Part of me thinks I should never re-read a book, but I can't help myself!
DeleteYeah it's sad and disappointing when books don't live up to what we once thought of them, argh. I liked McLean's book and McCarthy's book you mention and I still need to read Doig! I'll jot down hopefully for this year.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sorry that I re-read it, Susan. I enjoyed parts, but it didn't have the same magic as the first time back in the late 90s. I wonder if part of that original enjoyment was due to the fact that I read it for a Great Plains Lit class at UNL. I remember we had some good discussions about the memoir in that class. I've yet to read Doig, but my mom loves his books and I have a few on my TBR shelves.
DeleteI'm so sorry that the story didn't quite hold up for you. I often wonder if some of the books I consider my favorites would read as well thirty or forty years after my original read.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sorry I re-read the book though, Deb. I found a few nuggets of wisdom; it just didn't wow me as it did originally. With that said, I won't stop re-reading my books. At the least, it frees up space on my keeper shelves.
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