Sun Going Down, by Jack Todd, $26. Spanning four generations and taken from actual memoirs, this is the classic story of the trials and the successes of several generations of a single family.
The story opens in 1861 on a Mississippi sternwheeler newly owned and operated by Ebenezer Paint, a young man fresh from the California gold fields. His partner is Lucian Quigley, a freed slave. Though both men are uncertain about the Republic’s future, they share the love of the river and for safety sake have decided to stick together. Their plan is to sell local produce to the soldiers. No worse, they reason, than the war profiteers.
But when Quigley receives word his wife and children might be somewhere around Galveston, Texas, they part. Eb sells the boat to Yankee carpetbaggers, books passage on a steamer and heads west up the Missouri. He meets an attractive young widow. They marry, have twin boys, Eli and Ezra, named after his brothers killed in the war.
Eb decides to start a freight business: Ebenezer Paint & Sons, Freighting and Hauling, but with the expansion of railroads, business is not what it once was. After his death, his sons sell the business, head west again and the story becomes theirs.
Shifting between Ezra and Eli’s viewpoints, the story focuses on the dangers, cruelty and hopes of those who manage to survive. Ezra becomes a translator when troubles with the Sioux erupt. He understands them, admires them, shares their anger when they are herded onto reservations and is furious when the newspapers describe the massacre at Wounded Knee as an act of the soldiers’ heroism.
Meanwhile, Eli has become the area’s most successful and canniest rancher. The two brothers herd 1,000 head of cattle to the Pine Ridge Reservation. But ranching goes against Ezra’s grain, and he soon moves on, this time to help bring cattle back from Arizona.
Though most of Eli’s children are girls, they love the life and ride as well as any man. But the daily demands take their toll on their mother. By now, ill-equipped newcomers are streaming into the area. Towns spring up. Eli becomes richer.
As change ensues, families are uprooted. World War I is followed by the Great Depression. By now, the Paint family is scattered; an entire way of life is only a memory.
In “Sun Going Down,” Todd, the winner of several awards for his nonfiction, takes on a classic family story of daunting proportions that also happens to be his own. Though the author’s characterization of the brothers’ marriages can be heavy- handed, the overall result is a solid, first venture into the world of fiction.
High Country, by Willard Wyman $16.95. The 2006 winner of two Spur Awards and now in paperback, Wyman’s “High Country” is a coming-of-age story as much as it is about the life of trackers who take on the Montana Rockies.
In the last hard years of the Depression and with his family struggling to hang on to their ranch, young Ty Hardin is grateful when famed local packer Fenton Pardee agrees to hire him. Their job: to take easterners up into the high country, where they will hunt a little every morning and spend the rest of the day drinking and playing cards.
Everything about the job, including the supper conversations, astonishes Ty. That includes Cody Jo, who travels with the group as the cook. And there is Pardee’s expertise with horses and mules, his knowledge of the country.
Still, “High Country” is Ty Hardin’s story: not only about what he learns from Pardee, but also from attending a small college where he plays on the football team and from war years spent as a corporal in a mountain-combat division. But by the end of the war, with so much changed, Ty returns to the mountains as he would to “a beautiful woman who always keeps you coming back.”
“High Country” is a finely written novel that explores one man’s place in a changing world.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist who writes regularly on regional nonfiction.
