 |
 |
 |
|
Beyond the Desert By Eugene Manlove Rhodes
What the railroad meant to the last westering of a restless breed, W. H. Hutchinson writes in his eloquent introduction to this western classic, was a part of Gene Rhodes own life.
Just so the plot of Beyond the Desert comes directly from the supreme need of the El Paso & North Eastern to find pure boiler water as it built across the alkali flats of the Tularosa Basin.
Here in this story the life of the cowboy comes in direct conflict with the emerging railroad...
EXCERPT : ... On a blazing afternoon in July, three men journeyed from afar toward La Huerta, from three points of the compass.
Shane McFarland road south and south from Gallows Hill and Malhecho through a cloudless day. A blistering day on the desert, far below him and to his right; no worse than a warm and friendly day where he rode high athwart a mighty slope toward a mountain on a hill; Star Mountain, pine black above a golden pedestal. A pedestal like an inverted saucer for shape, a pedestal which needed a hundred miles and fifty to make a circuit at the base of it.
At his left, abreast him and far behind him, a long and loitering star-point of Old Star stretched far into the north. A short star-point of Old Star plunged headlong to westward, dead before him, barring his way. The great triangle between the long rampart and...
Cowboy chronicler Eugene Manlove Rhodes was born in Tecumseh, Nebraska on January 19, 1869. He moved to New Mexico with his parents in 1881, and immediately fell in love with
New Mexico. By age 13, he was an accomplished well digger; by age 16, he was accomplished as
a stone mason, road builder (he built the first road from Engle to Tularosa, over the San Andres
Mountains), and horseman. Rhodes was largely self-educated. He was an avid and eclectic reader.
Rhodes' philosophy, master of no man, servant of none permeated his life and his writing.
Many of his works appeared in magazines including Land of Sunshine, Out West,
McClure's, Redbook, Sunset, and Cosmopolitan, and much of his fiction was serialized in
the Saturday Evening Post prior to being published as a book. Ten books by Rhodes
were published between 1910 and 1935. Several of his works sold as motion pictures. Bernard
DeVoto praised Rhodes' works as the only body of fiction devoted to the cattle kingdom which is
both true to it and written by an artist in prose. Despite his apparent success as a writer, for most
of his life, Rhodes was broke or in debt.
CONDITION:Soft cover, used lightly, shows mild wear. University of Nebraska Press, copyright 1934, First Bison Book printed October 1967. Introduced by W. H. Hutchinson
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
