Bill Croke

The Pastures of Beyond

Halfbreed

YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE from West Virginia to notice that America is having a bluegrass renaissance. Call it rural renewal. It's made bluegrass pioneer Ralph Stanley, at age seventy-six, a bona fide superstar, thanks to the overwhelming success of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and its bestselling,…

American Massacre

Jesse James Last Rebel of the Civil War by T.J. Stiles Knopf, 491 pp., $27.50 LONG BIOGRAPHIES of short lives must seek subjects who did a whole lot of living in their brief spans. In "Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War," T.J. Stiles uses Jesse James's bloodsoaked thirty-four years as an…

Watershed The Undamming of America by Elizabeth Grossman Counterpoint, 320 pp., $26 THE UNITED STATES Bureau of Reclamation, begun in 1902, celebrated its centenary earlier this year with a reception at Hoover Dam, attended by Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton and other political and…

Lone Star Justice The First Century of the Texas Rangers by Robert M. Utley Oxford University Press, 370 pp., $30 THERE'S A MOMENT in Larry McMurtry's novel "Lonesome Dove" when the retired Texas Rangers Woodrow Call and Augustus McRae--now in the cattle business--pass a new farm settlement with a…

WHAT IS John Steinbeck's place in American literary history? This year marks the centenary of his birth--the fortieth anniversary of his contentious 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature--and still we're not sure what to do with him. Certainly, his three great contemporaries overshadow him. Ernest…

Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt Knopf, 320 pp., $24 ONE OF the most interesting literary genres of the contemporary American West is the ranch memoir. Unlike the pretty volumes that issue from the novelists who move to Montana for the fly fishing, or the delicate work of the poets who come seeking the…

Buffalo For the Broken Heart Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch by Dan O'Brien Random House, 254 pp., $22.95 THE GREAT PLAINS ARE A WRECK. In a northward swath from western Kansas to eastern Montana, birth rates have plunged, towns are dying, schools and stores are closing. The landscape is…

Elko, Nevada

It's "Burning Man," a bizarre hightech Woodstock held annually on the Black Rock Desert. It's U.S. 50, "The Loneliest Road in America." It's state-sanctioned prostitution (and the final closing last month of the infamous Mustang Ranch, complete with tearyeyed hookers caught on TV). It's the…

The American historian Bernard DeVoto died in 1955 at the age of fifty-eight, and in the years since he died, the academic study of history has become entirely the province of those whom the critic Harold Bloom once labeled "the resentniks." The topics of multicultural grievance that purchase…

Before he died in 1993 at the age of eighty-four, Wallace Stegner was asked what the difference was between his view of the American West and that of Louis L'Amour, the enormously popular pulp western writer. Stegner laughed and replied, "About two or three million dollars."

Eighty-one languages are spoken in Los Angeles. In California's Orange County, where self-absorption reigns and philanthropy is rare, people who shop in high-toned malls are soothed by the sounds of live string quartets. In booming Tucson, Arizona, a public referendum concerning a badly needed…

In 1890, the superintendent of the Census Bureau declared, "Up to and including 1880, the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line."

In 1890, the superintendent of the Census Bureau declared, "Up to and including 1880, the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line."