Riding the White Horse Home : A Western Family Album (Vintage Departures)

Rating:
Summary: A great book about the west, focusing on women's experiences
Review: I have really enjoyed this book. It's rare to get such an intimate view of ranch life, and especially of the women who made/make their lives out West. Teresa Jordan is a terrific writer. I admire her spare, evocative prose. This book should not be overlooked in the current craze for memoirs.

Rating:
Summary: Great book with a deeper meaning
Review: I thought, "This will be a nice distraction." Boy, did I underestimate this book. Ms. Jordan takes you with her through her life and her relatives' lives. You feel the draw of the west and the power of the Wyoming wind. Getting caught up in the struggles of the various generations, and Ms. Jordan's, sheds light on your own life. As Ms. Jordan heals, the opportunity to resolve one's own conflicts seems more possible. This is a wonderful escape and marvelous therapy all rolled into one.

Rating:
Summary: Great book with a deeper meaning
Review: Jordan's book was much more than ranching and her life, she tells us about her feelings and thoughts that are associated with her life events. The reader becomes indulged in her feelings are can feel empathy for her. This book is a down to earth, real life story that is worthy of reading by most people.

Rating:
Summary: Learning to See
Review: Riding the White Horse Home is appropriately subtitled "A Western Family Album." In it, Teresa Jordan explores her family's history as cattle ranchers in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth. She compares the life she has lived to the land from which she originated through anecdotal snippets of her ancestors' lives, searching out the "unconformities" in her history and linking herself to her family's past. Jordan grew up surrounded by generations of family living together on a ranch in Wyoming. She begins the book by describing her experiences walking with her great- grandmother on the rugged land, awestruck by her almost magical ability to find arrowheads and crinoids: "It's was a matter of looking, she said, of learning to see." By writing the history of her forebears, Jordan looks into her own life, learning to see who she is. She speaks of a troubled time when she was sorely in need of reviewing her life, "It was then, I suppose, that I first started trying to excavate the unconformities of my life that connect my heritage with who I am now, that I began to learn how to see." Her great-grandfather J.L. came to the land from the eastern Untied States to carve out a place for his family in the temperamental Western soil. From him sprang a procession of proud cattle-ranchers whose indomitable spirit helped them break the land like a stubborn colt is broken for riding. Jordan describes the curious, continuous war between the necessity for self-sufficiency in such an isolated setting and the people's need for community. Early in her life she strove for the same independence her grandfather did: "'I kill my own snakes,' Sunny was wont to say, 'and bury my own dead.'" So, too, she describes the other men of her family: "I believe it comes directly from the primitivist urge that glorifies man alone and makes him believe he should be able to succeed entirely by himself." Jordan boarded with relatives in the city when she was young, and there was introduced to the urban prejudice against being from a rural community. She struggled with this for years, trying to become her own individual, distinct from the provincial taint of her upbringing and yet at the same time like her mother, who "had chosen to be fully herself. Early on, she had decided not to make sacrifices she couldn't make willingly; from that authentic core she was able to marry and mother free of martyrdom and guilt." Midway through her college career her mother passed away, and with that extra support gone, she writes, "Now I have to confront how scared I am to go on alone." She took a semester off college and worked on her senior project studying the history of the American West and found the sense of community and belonging that she had been searching for, right back where she had started: "My mother was dead and the ranch was for sale, but in the study of the American West, I had found a way to come home." Later in life she returned to the wilds of her home for her wedding, and the everyone in the entire area lent a hand to make the event possible, from digging the barbecue pit to hanging the decorations. She comments, "For a hundred years, the community worked because its people had been tied by land and labor and shared destiny. . . . I left Iron Mountain half by choice and half by necessity. I returned because I needed healing." She found the healing that she needed in the land that she loved. That sense of welcome hominess colors all of Jordan's writings about her family. They seem as familiar as the uncle at one's family reunion who puts whoopee cushions on Grandma's chair or the cousin who hides in the corner reading a book. Her ancestors have the same commonalities and quirks that everyone does. Her writing gives the West an enchanting and realistic immediacy, like her description of the calving season: "We come in each evening splattered with mud and milk and manure, stained with blood and amniotic fluid, stinking of afterbirth. It's hard to convey the sheer satisfaction of it all." She holds back nothing from her past, recording even her prayers for a broken bone so that she could prove her strength and immortality like the rest of her family. Riding the White Horse Home is a charming and thoughtful piece of writing: a bouncy pickup ride through the years of a young woman's life in rural Wyoming.

Rating:
Summary: Good Book
Review: Teresa Jordan's Riding the White Horse Home is appropriately subtitled A western Family Album. Her book explicitly describes life on her family's cattle ranch and her experiences growing up in Iron Mountain Wyoming. Through her book and family's experiences, I was able to understand and know my own ancestors better. I have been on Wyoming cattle ranches but no experience I have had at the family reunions on dad's cousin's ranch in Evanston compares to the stories Teresa Jordan tells. My father was born and lived in Wyoming until moved to Midvale Utah as a teenager. Riding the White Horse Home has special meaning for me because it helped me visualize and understand what it is that my father has been telling me about the hard work done on a ranch in Wyoming. I now understand the work my ancestors did. My great grandparents were ranchers in Wyoming. I have relatives that still call the cattle ranches of Wyoming home. These relatives raise cattle on land that has been in my family for generations just as Teresa Jordan lived on the land her great grandfather originally owned. The book was as entertaining as it was informative. The life of a rancher is revealed and understood as Jordan tells her behind the scenes story of this dying American subculture. Ranching is for people who love being outside and caring for animals. Satisfaction is what drives a ranchers life, ranchers don't get rich quick but they do love their work. The book is the memories and experiences of the author and her life growing up as a cattle rancher's daughter in Wyoming. It begins with her earliest memories of ranch life, to her wedding, which was held in the community house in town. She tells about the shameful feelings she had of the ranchers life when she moved into town to begin elementary school. As well as the pride she felt recalling the lives and accomplishments of her grandparents and especially her mother the ranchers wife. Jordan dedicates each chapter to telling the story of a different relative or other significant person in her life and the influences they had. She pays a special tribute to her great-grandmother Nana in the opening lines of the book and recalls the lessons she learned from her. She walked with young Teresa picking up Indian relics and teaching her how to look for them. Jordan's book in many ways is the story of my life and your life. There is nothing extraordinary about her story, just that it is hers, everyone has something to say, the difference is that Teresa tells her story better then most. She successfully intertwines the lives of the people with the land surrounding them and what the sum of these influences has done to her. She is unique in her honesty and clarity. She tells her family's story of survival and day to day life. For me the story was real. It is the history of a dying people and the cowboy culture. The death of Teresa Jordan's mother caused great sorrow to enter her life and sent her in to a long period of mourning and soul searching. Teresa was away at college when she died, her death triggered a sort of return to her old way of life. She left school for a period of time in which she worked on the ranch she grew up on. In her youth, her experiences with the ranch were observational. Often times she became part of the stories she had heard, but hearing them so many times they became her own. As an adult, she returned to live the experiences she heard so much about. She returned to work on a friend's ranch during calving season, because that is when the real work is done. This was to be therapy for her broken heart and a way to prove to herself that she could do it. Her mother played an integral part of her life, it was a part that she did not fully recognize until it was missing. She grew closer to the father she loved as they helped each other through the pain of death and healing process. This is the white horse home she rode home. She went home to land she loved and is now telling its story.