A Legendary Read
By: Tim Moore
Tags: Book Recommendations, Books, Texas, Outdoors, Canoeing

How many books are truly “must read”? It’s frankly a small number. I’m talking about books that you could read each and every year of your life — if you had the time — and always feel fulfilled.

Robert Graves’ Goodbye to a River is one of those, in my opinion.

Musing on how the Texas cowboy had been romanticized and sanitized, John Graves wrote:

Are we going to re-redefine the cowboy? Shall we. . .sniff the bathless sweat of our fellows, and hear their hollers and the screams of red-eyed steers, and whale hell out of a runty ill-tempered mustang under us, and eat beans and biscuits and bacon, bacon and biscuits and beans, till we’re loose with diarrhea or drum-bellied with its opposite, and sleep four or five bug-crawling, dust-coughing hours a night on the ground without being able to get the boots off feet swollen with heat and fungus itch, and ford the rivers and ride the stampedes and worry about the Indians in the Territory and get sloppy-sleepy drunk at last in Wichita or Hunnewell where a pasty whore will stash beneath her mattress our wages earned so pleasantly, and maybe in return will give us a lasting souvenir?. . .

I think not.

In the 1950’s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north west-central Texas, a stretch of the Brazos about 200 miles long. John Graves had spent his childhood in the 20’s and 30’s roaming that stretch of the river — fishing, rafting, hunting, and hearing tales from the old ones who still remembered the days of the Comanche, the Kiowas, the Texas Rangers, and the hard life on the northeastern edge of Anglo settlement and the southwestern edge of Comancheria.

So he decided to take a canoe trip down the River from Possum Kingdown Lake at the western end of this stretch and Lake Whitney at the eastern end. He wanted to see the river as he remembered it one more time, to remember the stories and the histories, and say goodbye to a river.

It is a book filled with the gifts of a naturalist’s keen eye, but much more than that. All along the river, at this point and that, Graves retells the stories of each place: the Comanche and Kiowa raids here, the Mitchell-Truitt feud that ended with almost all the adult males killed in each family, the great Comanche chiefs all the way to Peta Nocona and his son Quanah Parker (half white and half Comanche, and the last of the Chiefs), Charles Goodnight and the Goodnight-Loving Trail he made to drive cattle north, and an old fellow known as Old Man Whitley who had lived by himself in a wood shack for as long as anyone could remember.

Quanah Parker, the last Comanche chief

It is a beautifully written book, a book that envelops you within a different time and place. And, like the great fin de siècle novels of Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show), has that bittersweet feel of a yesterday passing.

Graves went on to write 2 more books about this part of Texas, completing what came to be known as his Brazos Trilogy (the other two are: Hard Scabble: Observations on a Patch of Land and From a Limestone Edge), among other books. When he died in 2013, he was hailed as a beloved Texan.

Graves is the epitome of a man who followed his passion, and honed it over many years to become world class.

You might not care a whit about the Brazos river or Texas, but I promise you will care about this book — if you choose to read it.