Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1995
Abstract
Bob Ross does not directly explicate MacKichan's photographs. Rather he confronts us with his own sense of place, a place nearer the eastern edge of the hills where he grew up. The best sections of these superb essays feature Uncle Ozro-a humorous fellow who nurtured and drove Ross to manhood while harboring a weakness for strong drink and an unrewarding relationship with money-and a long series of hired men who gave employers and their nephews full measure of work and patient tutorial devotion in between weeklong benders in town. Uncles can break down under the constant vagaries of markets and weather, the idiocy of bankers, and the cruelties of disease. But when they pass, landowner uncles at least leave a mark on the land, if only in a neighbor's giving directions past the "old Smith place." Hired hands depart trackless, their ephemeral legacy a temporarily repaired fence, fresh leathers in a windmill that will soon wear out, a newly broken horse fated to die or be sold, a branded calf that won't be on the ranch past November. When Ross describes walking past a favorite former hired hand, now slumped drunk and broken against a filling station wall, without the barest acknowledgement, not even a silent nod, he writes the poignant epitaph of not only the transient hands that populate ranch country, but of the families that use them up in their constant battle to hang on to land and cattle.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:1 (Winter 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.