Cowboy Tales

Four generations of an extended mixed-race family live with the problems we've all heard about, yet thrive amidst hardship, turning the myth of the Old West on its head.

Prize-winning story writer Sallie Bingham's latest group of tales reverse commonly held assumptions about the American West. The Hispanic, Native, and white members of this rough and tumble family pivot around an outrageously funny and fallible rodeo rider known as Cowboy. They live with alcohol and drug addiction, dependency on a fraying welfare system, poverty, violence, and deep-held loyalties. Unlikely learning and unlikely sources of wisdom abound. "During those long winter nights when Dad took off for Sheridan—no liquor allowed on the rez but Sheridan is only about twenty miles west," Fat Annie tells the boy known as Sure Enough some truths about women that will guide him for the rest of his life. Running away on horseback from the imposition of ashes at his Jesuit boarding school, eleven-year-old Jimmy James finds "this little lady priest" in the town park. She makes the cross with ashes on his horse's head, then turns to him, and he feels the cross "burn into him worse than any brand." A bizarre accident in "How Daddy Lost His Ear" results in an equally bizarre wedding. And one of the many "white ladies" who appear briefly and disappear fast finally gets Cowboy to tell the truth.

These men, women, and kids don't just endure. They thrive in their own peculiar style, turning seemingly tragic outcomes into sources of madcap humor, and nourishing indelible family ties. This is the West as it was and is, a complex web of traditions and surprising, even shocking, ways of finding triumph.