Notices

Cowboying in Canyon Country: The Life and Rhymes of Fin Bayles, Cowboy Poet

By Robert S. McPherson and Fin Bayles

Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing, 2017. 235 pp. Paper, $20.00.

Through the words of Fin Bayles, a cowboy icon in San Juan County, Robert McPherson examines the life of a high-desert cowboy during the 1930s and 1940s. Bayles successfully captures excitement and emotion as he tells of his experiences through his homespun stories and poems. The reader gets a real sense of what it was, and still is, like to chase wild cattle over thousands of square miles of cedar trees and rocky labyrinths.

Although Bayles’s recollections of his years in the canyons are extremely entertaining, a reality of hard work and danger also emanates from them. He recalls, for instance, the story of a horse and cowboy falling from a tall embankment and rolling over several times before hitting the bottom. Despite the serious injuries received by the rider, there was no modern rescue team complete with helicopter and EMTs. Bayles, although just a boy, put the man on a horse and escorted him many miles over rough country, finally reaching a spot where a Dodge Power Wagon could crawl up a dirt road and meet them.

Cowboying in Canyon Country may center on the collections of Fin Bayles, but it is enhanced by the skills of a master writer in organizing the story flow. McPherson begins each chapter with a narrative history of life in rural Utah during the Great Depression and a world at war. This sets the stage for Bayles to pick up the story and gallop away with it. Cowboying is not your typical collection of wearisome cowboy poetry but rather the entertaining and informative story of a man and his family trying to scratch out a living with horses and cattle in the canyon country of southeastern Utah.

Dime Novel Mormons

Edited by Michael Austin and Ardis. E. Parshall

Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books. 254 pp. Paper, $22.95.

Dime Novel Mormons, part of The Mormon Image in Literature series, is a collection of dime novels edited and introduced by Michael Austin and Ardis Parshall. It demonstrates how these ubiquitous and inexpensive stories reinforced common stereotypes about Mormons in relation to polygamy, savagery, and violence on the western frontier. The collection includes Eagle Plume, the White Avenger. A Tale of the Mormon Trail (1870); The Doomed Dozen; or, Dolores, the Danite’s Daughter (1881); Frank Merriwell Among the Mormons; or, The Lost Tribes of Israel (1897); and The Bradys Among the Mormons; or, Secret Work in Salt Lake City (1903). The authors of these works referred to Mormons as Danites or Destroying Angels who befriended Indians and enslaved young women. These fictitious portrayals of Mormons contributed to negative public perceptions and fed into the mythology of violence in the West.

Pioneer Women of Arizona, 2nd edition

By Roberta Flake Clayton, Catherine H. Ellis, and David F. Boone

Provo: Brigham Young University / Deseret Book, 2017. 960 pp. Cloth, $49.99.

The latest edition of Pioneer Women of Arizona expands on Roberta Flakes Clayton’s original 1969 anthology of Arizona women whom she interviewed and researched during her employment with the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers Project. Catherine H. Ellis and David F. Boone saw Pioneer Women of Arizona as an under-used resource, and their new edition puts Clayton’s work into a larger context of Mormon and western American history. It highlights what daily life was like for women living on the frontier. This edition also provides a biography of Clayton that details her own pioneer experiences. Ellis and Boone left Clayton’s work largely untouched, focusing instead on restructuring the book to be easily accessible and providing a historical background of the region that can be useful to wide audience.