From Rattlesnakes to Road Agents: Rough Times on the Frio by Frances Bramlette Farris (1986)

Reviews 139 group of Catholics, Indians, and transients. The tales reveal that “out” status was readily conferred upon the weak, the disenfranchised, the unlucky and the nonconforming. Seventeen North Dakota Tales suggests that the rural Dakota town remains a staunch throwback to earlier days and ways. Kenmare today is relatively prosperous; as the population diminished, the “out” group all but disappeared. Male and female roles are strictly prescribed, and conformity to community values is highly prized: “Most everyone is exactly the same— reserved but happy, one-hundred per cent American, and granted eternal salvation.” This book supplies a useful counterstatement to idealized portraits of our Dakota heritage. For a balanced picture, we need these tales from the dark side. ROSEMARY L. SMITH Moorhead State University From Rattlesnakes to Road Agents: Rough Times on the Frio. By Frances Bramlette Farris. Edited by C. L. Sonnichsen. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1985. 137 pages, $14.95 hardcover; $7.95 paperback.) This slender volume is the third in the TCU Press Chisholm Trail Series, a series directed at Texas social history from both fictional and non-fictional perspectives. Frances Bramlette Farris was born in 1865, was reared south of San Antonio in Frio County, and in 1944 committed a number of her mem­ ories to paper, encouraged and aided by Professor Sonnichsen. The memoirs found no publisher at that time, but by 1985, as Sonnichsen notes in his intro­ duction : “The well was dry and the water had become precious.” The living voices from the 1870s have indeed vanished, and particularly the recent heightening of interest in frontier women’s experience encourages this pub­ lication. The style of these memoirs is casual and anecdotal; the narrative has the overall feel of oral history. Farris’greatest talent lay in her keen eye for detail, particularly for the vivifying detail which brings the past moment to life. The reader interested in the social history of Texas from 1870 to 1890 will discover helpful detail of domestic life as well as amusing anecdotal episodes. Farris appears to have been a scrappy tomboy whose curiosity and competi­ tiveness took her close to several dramatic adventures and confrontations, but the real center of her memories lies in domestic detail and relationship. The centerpiece for many readers will be her recollections of Bigfoot Wallace, who lived with her family for decades and died in their home. Farris’ Old South background, with its family pride, concern for appear­ ances, and casual racism, sets the general perspective, but her own independent assertiveness produces an interesting counterpoint in the flow of memory. The 140 Western American Literature book does present one irritating problem for the social historian; it is struc­ tured rather randomly by topic area and dates are frequently absent. Thus, dating the particular episodes will prove a bit of a headache. RICHARD MOSELEY West Texas State University The Good Old Boys. By Elmer Kelton. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian Uni­ versity Press, 1985. 257 pages, $16.95.) Time & Place. By Bryan Woolley. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1985. 245 pages, $16.95.) In an auspicious debut, the TCU Press has re-issued two fine Texas novels in its Texas Tradition Series, Elmer Kelton’s The Good Old Boys (Doubleday, 1978) being Number One and Bryan Woolley’s Time & Place (E. P. Dutton, 1977) Number Two in the series. Kelton and Woolley rank among the best contemporary writers of fiction in Texas, and these books well represent Kelton’snarrative power and sense of character and Woolley’s sensitivity to the human condition and sense of place. Each novel has a comic as well as a deeply serious side, and each masterfully delineates a lost time in our western past. Both books are sheer pleasure to read. With his 1971 publication of The Time It Never Rained, Elmer Kelton emerged from his role as writer of a string of undistinguished Westerns to that of a writer committed to serious craftsmanship and concern with character and theme. The Good Old Boys is not so celebrated, but is as fine a work. Comic in mode, it is serious in intent: a lament for the passing of a freer way of life. Set in West Texas...