Long Winter Gone

FROM THE AUTHOR

I was born on the first day of 1947 in a small town on the plains of Kansas. That great rolling homeland of the nomadic buffalo has remained in my marrow across the years of my wandering.

From Nebraska to Kansas and on to Oklahoma, I’ve spent a full third of my life on those Great Plains. Another third growing up in the desert Southwest an arrow’s shot from the wild Apache domain of Cochise and Victorio. The most recent third of my life has passed among the majestic splendor of the Rocky Mountains—from Colorado and on to Washington state. In less than a year, I am back in Montana, here in the valley of the great Yellowstone River, in the veritable heart of the historic West. The plains and prairies at my feet, the great Rockies as my backrest.

The Great Plains and all its history run in my blood. I suppose they always will. More than merely growing up there, my roots go deep in the land that over the last hundred-odd years soaked up about as much blood and sweat as it did rain.

My maternal grandfather came from working-class stock in St. Joseph, Missouri, where he first became a carriage-riding sawbones doctor who as a young man moved to Oklahoma Territory, finding it necessary to pack two small thirty-six-caliber pistols for his own protection while practicing his medical arts from his horse-drawn buggy. In later years he would be proud to say he never stepped foot in a motorized vehicle.

It wasn’t long before Dr. David Yates met and fell in love with the schoolmarm teaching there in Osage country, Pearl Hinkle. My grandmother had bounced into The Strip, formerly called “Indian Territory” or “The Nations,” in her parents’ wagon in June of 1889 during the great land rush that settled what is now the state of Oklahoma. With immense pride I tell you I go back five generations homesteading on the plains of Kansas—Hinkles, simple folk with rigid backbones and a belief in the Almighty, folk who witnessed the coming of the Kansas Pacific Railroad along with the terrifying raids of Cheyenne and Kiowa as the Plains tribes found themselves shoved south and west by the slow-moving tide of white migration.

My father’s father wandered over to the territory from the vicinity of Batesville, Arkansas, when he first learned of the riches to be found in what would one day become south-central Oklahoma. It was an era of the “boomers”—when oil money ran local governments and bought law-enforcement officers both. Yet in that violent and lawless epoch, Oklahoma history notes a few brave men who stood the test of that time. I’m very proud to have coursing in my veins the blood of a grandfather who had the itchy feet of a homesteader turned justice of the peace in that of times rowdy, violent, and unsettled frontier.

Still, it was more than what Scotch-Irish heritage ran in their veins that both my parents passed on to me—more so the character of those sturdy, austere folk who settled the Great Plains. From my father I believe I inherited the virtue of hard work and perseverance. And from my mother, besides her abiding love and reverence for the land, I have inherited a stamina to endure all the travesties that life can throw at simple folk. Those traits she has given me, along with a belief in the Almighty—the selfsame belief that helped those hardy settlers endure through hailstorms and locust plagues, drought and barrel-bottom crop prices.

Brought up in the fifties during the era of Saturday matinees and some twenty hours of prime-time westerns on these small boxes we fondly called TV, early on I found myself bitten by the seductive lure of the West. Yet it was not until 1965, during my freshman year in college in Oklahoma, where I was studying to become a history teacher, that I was finally able to separate the history of the West from the Myth of the West. Over the intervening twenty-five years I have happily found the historic West every bit as fascinating as the mythic frontier.

You would be hard pressed to find a man happier than I—still teaching as I am thousands of readers outside the confines of the classroom about a magical epoch of expansion that roared rowdy and rambunctious across the plains and mountains of our Western frontier. A man is a success when he can put food on his family’s table doing what he loves most to do.

Over the years I’ve been cursed with the itchiest of feet, moving on frequently as did the rounders and roamers of this mountain West more than a hundred-odd years before me. In the last three years we have been nomads, moving from Colorado to Montana to Washington, and now to these windswept foothills of the Prescott valley. My wife, Rhonda, hopes we can stay put for awhile, here in Billings along the Yellowstone, under the sun hung in that Big Sky, while we raise our two children, son Noah and daughter Erinn.

There’ll be time enough to move on, time enough for me to see what’s over the next hill. Time enough still to follow the seductive lure of tomorrow and the next valley across the years to come …