Report

Lisa Vickery
09/11/2010
HST 130 Book Review

Wondrous Times on the Frontier-Review

Wondrous Times on the Frontier by Dee Brown is an amusing and enlightening collection of short stories that allow us a peek into some of the happier and more jubilant aspects of pioneer life. Despite low rations, grueling physical labor and the constant threat of disease Pioneers found ways to amuse themselves, friends and others in their communities.

I found one story particularly amusing, mostly since it took place here in our own Ozark.
1860- “[A] visiting stranger had removed his shoes, and his big toe was showing through a hole in his sock. After heating a poker red hot, the practical joker held it closer and closer to the sleeper’s bare toe…Closer and closer the red-hot poker neared the naked toe. The heat caused the sleeper restlessly to move his hands. [The] Practical Joker was just about to apply the poker when the sound of Click! Click! arrested the situation. He looked at the stranger, who with one eye had been watching the proceedings, and silently brought a pistol to bear… In a voice just audible he muttered in a tone of great determination ‘Jist burn it! Burn it! And I’ll be dammed if I don’t stir you up with ten thousand hot pokers in two seconds.” (pg.26)
The Pioneers of the old west often found entertainment in the bars, dance halls and Inns of their times. Dee Brown’s novel often recounts stories that occurred in these dingy and often rat infested places. Several of the stories give us a glimpse into the poor living conditions suffered by miners, travelers and town residents. He is seen quoting several places as having “snakes, lizards, scorpions, centipedes, bugs and flees.”(pg 26) Dee does a fantastic job of allowing us to view the old west with a sense of tribulation as with our practical joker, while still showing us historically the conditions and tough times that made such drinking and debauchery a social normality.

Even our great president Theodor Roosevelt was a western “tenderfoot” this title was quickly striped when he rode a wild bronco which some “jokers” had used to replace his real horse. After riding the wild steed about the town being bucked and kicked the whole way, young teddy returned to the bar with only a grin and an explanation that manners meant he should return the horse to it’s true owner and reclaim his own. The jokers, so shocked at his return bought him a round of drinks and quickly made him one of the boys.
Dee Brown grew up fascinated with the old west. His reading of History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark was what led him to become a librarian for George Washington University. He attributes writers Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Joseph Conrand as being most influential on his works. From 1948 to 1972, he was an agriculture librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he had gained a master's degree in library science.

I found Wondrous Times on the Frontier to be an enrapturing book. At first I choose it since I figured not all of the short stories could be dull accounts of Indian scalping and noon-time shoot outs. I quickly became interested within the first few pages and could hardly put the book down when I found the quirky stories of gambling, lawyers and priests not only living in such a harsh environment but also finding joy and comedy. The stories tell of the true lives these people led which always depicted seem to be depicted in T.V by “Little House on the Prairie” romance. They also showed how the pioneers joked and sometimes fought their ways through life. Although some of the stories seemed to be over-embellished, each one was fascinating and written with the tall-tale style of our frontiersmen.