Andrew P. Duffin

A Long, Strange Yarn

Ken Kesey and the Pendleton Round-Up

Readers of western fiction have a seemingly endless capacity to enjoy accounts of heroes in white hats overcoming long odds to emerge victorious in the end. For over a century, there has been a steady demand for stories about such festive events as the Pendleton Round-Up, where man and beast have engaged in epic combat since 1910. According to Ken Kesey's Last Go Round: A Real Western, the early days of the Pendleton Round-Up, the social event of the year in northeastern Oregon, resembled a three-day western bacchanal. Cowboys were tossed from bulls and broncs that made them eat plenty of dirt, dogies got punched, and local bars were "packed tighter than a three-wire bale of green alfalfa." Eager rodeo fans and tourists filled the stands, and the riders usually did not disappoint. This was a combination of sport and buffoonery, of carefully judged competition and the mayhem that often followed. In one episode, Kesey writes about the famous bronc Long Tom, which had launched itself and its African American rider over the retaining fence and into the ritzy VIP section, creating "a hellacious sight, that black horse and horseman invading their privileged world like something escaped from the pit." And therein lies the appeal of Kesey's last book. He simultaneously exults in creating a rowdy western novel — the likes of which have entertained readers for years — and moves it beyond those rather narrow limits to include a critique of race and class in the American West.¹

Kesey, the Oregonian who first came to the national literary spotlight in 1962 with One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, consistently avoided the patronizing criticism directed at many western writers. For most of the 1960s and 1970s, Kesey was best known as the "leader" of a Bay Area commune and as the central figure in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but by the 1990s he showed a renewed interest in writing about his home state. In 1994, he published his last book before his death in 2001: Last Go Round, a kind of updated pulp western that focuses on the 1911 Pendleton Round-Up. At first blush, the story merely traces the traditional outlines of the western novel. Cowboys and townsfolk collide on a disappearing frontier as each tries to separate right from wrong, with varying degrees of success, and characters can readily be pigeonholed as heroes, villains, and victims. The book includes lengthy descriptions of the standard physical elements of most westerns, from the sage-scented hillsides of Pendleton to minute details on local bars and their rough-hewn patrons. Last Go Round, like countless other westerns, can be read and enjoyed on a simple level by people attracted to the West and to its cowboy culture.

George Fletcher demonstrates his skills at the 1915 Round-Up. Bright orange chaps were his signature attire, tied loose to his pants to create the illusion of more movement as he rode.

Lee Moorhouse, photographer, OHS neg., OrHi 12527

Yet the book is more than a simple tale. Kesey tells his story through the eyes of John Spain, who revisits the scene of his past glory. From his sometimes hazy, other times lucid memory of events, he recounts an improbable journey from Tennessee and even more far-fetched adventures with George Fletcher, an African American cowboy raised in Pendleton, and Jackson Sundown, a famous Nez Perce cowboy from Culdesac, Idaho. Together, these three historical figures and the literary characters Kesey creates share the literary spotlight as they vie for the top prize in the 1911 Round-Up. Along the way, Kesey, using historical and imagined characters and situations, analyzes a multitude of historical angles germane to the early twentieth-century inland Northwest: race relations and racial diversity, the ubiquity of market capitalism and acquisitive behavior, growth and development problems, and the cultural meaning of rodeos. We end up with a modernized dime western, one that complicates the old formula by giving nonwhites leading roles and by exposing the pecuniary impulses that affected heroes, villains, and everyone in-between in the Northwest.

John Spain, looking less youthful than Kesey described him, rides Long Tom on his way to winning the 1911 Round-Up.

OHS neg., OrHi 105341

Although last go round is a pulp western, replete with stereotypical images and a paper-thin plot, Kesey emphasizes race issues with far more complexity and sensitivity than progenitors of the western novel such as Owen Wister or Zane Grey.² African American cowboy George Fletcher is far more than a stock character, both in real life and in print. He was a rodeo champion and local legend in the arena, and his celebrity was unsurpassed in the 1910s. Fletcher's daring and creativity, in addition to his race, made him stand out. When performing on an angry horse, his body would shake and bob at the slightest movement, his head, torso, arms, and legs all moving in wild gyrations, to the delight of the crowd and judges. Kesey describes Fletcher, after his most memorable Round-Up ride in 1911, openly basking in his celebrity as he shows off a flair for the dramatic:

The crowd is on its feet and howling its appreciation. George doffs his hat and sweeps it low in one burlesque bow after another. When he finally straightens back up he doesn't return the ancient hat to his head. Instead, he turns back to the dignitary bleachers and sails it side-arm, up over the splintered pine into the VIP seats, like a bullfighter slinging the bull's tail to a señorita.³

Kesey then expands on this rodeo star's domain by making Fletcher a mentor and father figure to Jonathan E. Lee Spain (who went by John Spain during his rodeoing days), the young, white rodeo star of the future. Fletcher dispenses wisdom on such important topics as ornery bulls, rodeo etiquette, games of chance, music, and affairs of the heart with equal veracity, and Johnny Spain is his eager student. Kesey is careful to give Fletcher, in addition to Spain, a leading role. The book's sharpest verbal exchanges punctuate Fletcher's numerous encounters with evildoers and the scrapes that result. The black cowboy is simply smarter than his competition, or at least more clever. He is the most talented, most flamboyant, and least marketable of Kesey's rodeo participants. Yet he curries favor with readers for the same reason that Chief Bromden did in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: the underdog deserves our affection. Fletcher is also depicted as something of a ladies' man, which is unremarkable except that one of the objects of his affection is a white woman — perhaps improbable in 1911, but a strong reminder of Kesey's vision for an updated western novel. As a New York Times reviewer quipped, Kesey creates "an equal opportunity rodeo."⁴

Fletcher won over the hearts of the fans but not the minds of the judges. He lost the 1911 overall championship to Spain in spite of his jaw-dropping ride on Long Tom, a bronc nearly as famous as the cowboys who dared ride him.⁵ According to Virgil Rupp, who wrote a popular history of the Round-Up in 1985, "although Fletcher easily made the most showy ride to the average spectator, the judges, all experienced stockmen, had a different perspective. They ruled that Spain's form was better and that he had a harder mount to handle."⁶ Kesey offers a completely different explanation. He writes that the title was decided in part by "a clubfooted stockbroker and a perfumed periwinkle [a barber, actually], neither of which knew anything about horseflesh beyond what the limited vista from the seat of a buggy afforded them." Although the crowd delighted in some of Fletcher's rides and antics, Kesey states firmly that the controlling oligarchy in Pendleton would never allow "a wooly-headed George Fletcher" to be crowned champion. In this telling of the story, racism is a constant spectre.⁷

Fletcher also serves as the moral compass for all cowboys and townspeople. When racial taunts are hurled, whether directed at Native Americans, African Americans, or Chinese immigrants, Fletcher assumes the role of frontier sage and voice of reason. On a toteboard for rodeo oddsmakers, he calmly erases a racial epithet attached to his name and insists that he is "Mister George Fletcher." He also chastises his love interest, Louise, for referring to the "howling savages" at an Indian encampment outside of town. Fletcher is clearly agitated: "Loo-eez! ... You've got to stop behaving in ways not becoming of a lady. We're in the twentieth century." In the pre-rodeo buzz of humanity and liquor in downtown Pendleton, he notes that the town is really "racin' its engine." But when Fletcher notices that someone in the crowd had just tied firecrackers to an unsuspecting Chinese man's pigtail, he quickly adds, "it just that sometimes I ain't sure it's my race."⁸

Fletcher's temperament changes, however, in the company of certain people of authority. Kesey does not give this likable character overwhelming strength against his adversaries. Instead, when engaged with men of prestige, Fletcher retreats into the role of subservient minstrel. At a dinner engagement with a Mr. Meyerhoff, a Pendleton scion and Round-Up judge, Fletcher abandons his normal speaking voice and adopts a caricatured vernacular, reeling off such phrases as "Dat's right," "Nawsah," and "Much obliged jes' de same." A startled Spain notices immediately, remarking, "George's entire appearance had changed. He looked shorter, bent over. Shambling and subservient. Even his breathing seemed to have an obsequious wheeze to it." In a discussion with Oliver Nordstrum, a wealthy financier, Fletcher again retreats verbally and socially. When asked which cowboy was in the points lead early in the rodeo, Fletcher tells Nordstrum, "Ah calc'late Brother Sundog [one of Fletcher's many nicknames for Jackson Sundown] be about twenty dollah in de lead, 'cause he win de Saddlebronc." Although Kesey goes to great lengths to empower Fletcher, he resists the urge to remove him completely from his 1911 context. If Fletcher wanted to survive in a white-dominated society and thrive professionally, he needed to behave in prescribed ways. That meant occasionally sacrificing dignity for fortitude.⁹

Perhaps because of the long-standing sins committed against African Americans, Kesey allows Fletcher to crack racial jokes with impunity. Last Go Round is, for the most part, written for a general audience, and the black cowboy uses race to tease his friends playfully without alienating readers. Jackson Sundown, a Nez Perce from Culdesac, Idaho, nephew to Chief Joseph, and rodeo star in his own right, often is the victim of Fletcher's attempts at comedy. After Spain leaves his belongings unattended at the Indian encampment, Fletcher says, "Don't worry about your gear.... Injuns are famous for not stealing." And when Sundown makes excuses for why his rooster lost in a cockfight, Fletcher chides, "That's the trouble with you redskins.... You never want to admit you're whipped." But Fletcher's intentional tactlessness is permitted because of the obvious bond he has formed with Sundown. The two are drawn together because of their shared rodeo experiences, made all the more poignant because of the dangers of the arena, and because both men represent cultures that have felt the wrath of racial violence. It is a kind of gallows humor that Fletcher portrays, and he is fully justified in using it.¹⁰

Sundown, like Fletcher, was a real person who Kesey dresses up for greater literary purposes. He, too, was in the finals for the 1911 Round-Up crown, and he later won the title in 1916 at the amazing age of fifty-three. Like his rival, Sundown was a fan favorite, striving for what one writer called "a more stately approach" to the craft, riding broncs and bulls with an efficiency of movement and a quiet flair that many favored over the showy stunts of his longtime friend and competitor.¹¹ Kesey writes that in the moments before a ride, Sundown "walked out as if on his way to a funeral." Instead of trying to conquer his ride, "There was a moment of truce between man and animal, a brief motionless peace while the ponies backed away. Then Sundown raked him [with his spurs] and Boneshaker sailed violently skyward. Yet a kind of accord prevailed, even in the violence: man and horse were partners in some ancient dance."¹²

In contrast to contemporary sources and most histories, the literary and the real Sundown tell us that Native Americans have not disappeared from the land in the twentieth-century West. Although the American Indian population was near its historic low point in 1911, Kesey uses Sundown and other Northwest Natives to portray a culturally vibrant and highly visible people.¹³ To literary critic Joan Burbick, the historical Sundown "twisted the plot" of standard western tales, as he "stayed in the spotlight, refusing to vanish," despite the relatively recent Nez Perce military defeat and after decades of disease outbreaks and territory loss.¹⁴ Both in the novel and historically, the encampment outside the fairgrounds serves as temporary home for Sundown and thousands of other Nez Perce, Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla, and other tribespeople who had been congregating at this approximate site for centuries to trade, socialize, and gamble. As Spain says, "This little river-carved arena has been a showplace since before we lost our tails." Kesey seizes the opportunity to describe the cacophony of languages and cultures present and highlights the long-term significance of this annual convocation.¹⁵

The larger message is that the American West has always been a place of cultural diversity. Indians from sharply different cultural and linguistic stock frequently gathered at key sites at various times of the year. At the turn of the twentieth century, the spectrum of skin colors and cultures expanded at these rendezvous points. African Americans, Native Americans, and a host of other races and ethnicities became cowboys, who were integral parts of rodeos and other local celebrations from their inception. A new history — or a new dime western — must reflect these very real racial and ethnic complexities.¹⁶

A popular western event like a rodeo was a prime opportunity for mainstream Americans to experience what they believed was an authentic Indian setting. From its inception, Round-Up organizers featured local tribes at staged events such as the Happy Canyon show, a rendering of traditional Indian life and the struggles associated with the arrival of Euro-Americans. The Westward Ho! parade documented the subsequent conquering of the land by the few heroic, noble souls who dared take on the hardscrabble landscape. Both spectacles featured Native Americans in roles designed to educate outsiders and locals alike about Indian culture and to typecast Natives as primitive, simple, and generally benign entities who exist on the margins of civilization. Last Go Round does not focus on either event at length, but Kesey is critical of any attempt to transform Indian culture into a commodity to be sold to tourists. At one point in the novel, Jackson Sundown poses for a promotional photographer, much to Spain's dismay. Apparently, Sundown could not resist the monetary rewards of self-exploitation. According to Spain,

He'd been costumed to fit some kind of New York publicity agent's fantasy of the American Indian. In place of his stiff serge suit and flat-brim hat, he wore a beaded breechcloth. He was tricked out in all kinds of barbaric fetishes, feathers, and cones and a couple dozen cheap bead necklaces. His face was striped with warpaint. Worst of all was his hair ... [it had] been deliberately hacked off in uneven lengths, then waxed to stand up in an outlandish coxcomb. That publicity agent must have read the illustrated adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans at an impressionable age.¹⁷

In this undated photograph, Jackson Sundown holds an advertising handbill for Hanley and Co. Sundown earned a considerable income outside the rodeo ring through endorsements and photo opportunities.

OHS neg., CN 008730

Even though his intentions seem commendable, whether or not Kesey has a right or the ability to comment on the Native experience is an open question. Non-Indians have been writing about Indians for centuries, and most stories they tell have ranged from inaccurate to offensive to romantic and back again. There is an immediate and understandable credibility issue any time an Indian story is told to a general audience.¹⁸ To literary critic Kathryn Shanley, however, non-Indians may engage Native culture so long as they adhere to certain rules and attempt to understand them on their own terms: "Learning to read 'real Indians' in American cultural art media requires a subtlety of mind, a clarity of purpose, and a willingness to hear 'the silence of heard stories in translations.'"¹⁹ Granted, Shanley's requirements are vague, but her argument seems to be that it is incumbent upon writers like Kesey to do their homework — to study Native Americans, understand the multitude of tribal nuances, and appreciate Native cultures on their own terms.

In most cases Kesey fulfills these criteria, but on some counts he does not. For all the praise Kesey heaps on Jackson Sundown, both as a rider and as a person, he remains a wooden figure without much individuality. The book's opening description is of a man bereft of personality: he is "thin and straight," with a blank face and eyes that "didn't even blink. They bored, like a pair of carbon-tip drills."²⁰ Kesey's Jackson is at times a lifeless carving taken from a cigar shop doorway. Nor does he speak much. Jackson's persona appears lifted directly from Chief Bromden in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest— dignified but mute. The most obvious flaw with this book is that its most intriguing character, the middle-aged Nez Perce cowboy who survived the carnage at both the Battle of Big Hole and Bear Paw Mountain and whose skill in the ring dissuaded dozens of cowboys from competing against him, does not get the attention he deserves.

While the text suffers from a lack on depth on Indian culture, one topic that Kesey explores at great length involves Pendleton's economic maturation process. The emergence of the rodeo as a magnet for regional capital and the manipulation of events by outside actors mirror the economic forces in play in the early twentieth-century Pacific Northwest. Pendleton, like most towns in the Columbia Basin, was hardly a finished product in an economic or social sense in 1911. Serviced by railroads since the mid-1880s, the town prospered as a cobweb of rails covered the interior Northwest over the following two decades.²¹ Still, Pendleton suffered from an inchoate business infrastructure and a cowtown image that implied underdevelopment. Kesey often informs readers that the town is young, naïve, energetic, vulnerable, and overwhelmed by the influx of visitors. The historical record supports his claim. The Oregonian reported in 1912 that revelers rode their horses into saloons and were served beer while on horseback. A police contingent imported from Portland kept a modicum of order. People slept in cots in churches and fraternal halls, and it was reported that "not a few cowboys are sleeping in haymows." By 1912, an estimated sixty-five to seventy-five thousand people attended the three-day celebration, numbers that taxed the city's financial and social services.²² Kesey contends that locals suffer from a "boomtown fever" that made the Round-Up a gigantic affair and encouraged the kind of ceaseless, unorganized growth typical in countless western communities. Even the county courthouse was built askew to the street, and townspeople worried about crooked buildings and justices alike: "... things a little off kilter tends to remind us that it was once all off kilter, and might get that way again, wild and untamed, if we don't watch out." The rodeo attracted plenty of solid citizens and an equal number of con men, gamblers, and drunkards. For the vast majority of all parties, according to Kesey, "profit fueled their passion." A disappointed Johnny Spain, uninitiated in such legal and illegal business activity, bemoans, "my frontier Camelot was turning out to be infested with rats and riddled with weakness and greed."²³

Hanley and Co., one of Pendleton's leading tack stores, maintained a large selection of goods in 1907. Even before the Round-Up existed, the town had a considerable demand for horse-related merchandise, including flashy chaps much like those worn by George Fletcher and Jackson Sundown.

OHS neg., OrHi 61776

Spain, Sundown, and Fletcher are under constant pressure from monied interests and market forces. At its inception in 1909, the historical Round-Up was a small affair, with rodeo events staged at the beginning of a Pendleton baseball team's home games. When the team went bankrupt late that year, a group of local investors bought the team and its park, and the Round-Up became a major event at the site a year later. A three-day competition and accompanying hoopla was a massive undertaking, however, requiring more capital than was readily available. Kesey dramatizes this situation early in the novel with the introduction of Buffalo Bill Cody and Oliver Nordstrum.²⁴ Both are invited, not to participate directly in the festivities but rather to attract wealthy investors from Boise who are needed to promote and expand the show. The investors sign on only when they see on the bill strongman Frank Gotch, who is part of Cody's entourage and whose "performance" is a harbinger of the sideshow atmosphere that permeated rodeos of the day.

The one character who consistently avoids the trappings of Pendleton's growing pains is Cecil Kell, one of the area's first white ranchers and an unabashed friend to George Fletcher. To Spain, he is "equal to any Southern gentility I ever encountered. Kell was a Westerner of a special cut," a man who "struck me as both exceptional and regular at the same time, high-minded, but with both boots planted firmly in the dirt." Kell is ambivalent about Pendleton's shift from unknown rail siding to national rodeo destination. He admits that "the unexpected success of our harvest-time punkin roller has made us folks a little loco," but he bristles at the notion that the Round-Up needs more professional management and an infusion of outside capital.²⁵ He protests loudly to Buffalo Bill that

This ain't show business. What us brush poppers have here isn't a invesment, it's a tradition! The Indians have been coming to this valley every fall since before Jesus was a pup! For powwows and Indian wrestling and pony races! Don't get me wrong, sir. I aint saying there's anything wrong with treating a traveling show like a business, the way you folks do, but our little whoop-te-do is strictly for the purpose of tradition and good, clean, sport.²⁶

Kell was in a distinct minority, however. The historical evidence supports Kesey's impression that Round-Up organizers were not content to stage a small, folksy harvest celebration every September. Instead, they wasted no time in expanding the number of events and facilities in the hopes of creating a major regional sporting and cultural extravaganza. Through the 1910s, the Round-Up's nonprofit governing body, the Northwestern Frontier Exhibition Association, solicited investors who paid for bringing in the best livestock and improving amenities. The association established ties with local Indians to ensure their participation, and it arranged for expanded train service to deliver hordes of tourists. It expanded the bleacher seating from six thousand in the first year to ten thousand the following year to over twenty thousand by 1912, and it built a state-of-the-art public address system. It even arranged to sell the film rights for all events to a Seattle man. As a result of all the promotion and improvements, visitors spent over $1 million in the city of Pendleton in 1913, and rodeo gate receipts alone generated an estimated $1.5 million from 1911 through 1920.²⁷

Kesey tells us that the unequal relationship between locals and outsiders demonstrates how the importation of capital subverts local interests and relegates Pendleton to colonial status. In the novel the non-rodeo events — which include wrestling, a greased pig chase, and the Squaw Race (dragging contestants on a piece of cowhide behind a horse) — threaten to undermine the integrity of the sport of rodeo. But cruelty and slapstick are popular with the fans, and if rodeo organizers hope to keep their investors happy, they have to give consumers what they want. Although the three protagonists participate in some of the gimmicky contests (they, too, want as much money as possible), they also sense that they are compromising their professional standards. Fletcher wishes aloud that the Round-Up would "outgrow these shenanigans," but later acknowledges that "this affair has gotten too big to be simple." He also admits that "the essential requirement of the profession ... is that you got to make it entertaining." The message is that rodeos have long been tied to profitability — a relationship that results in consumer-driven entertainment and shifting priorities for athletes.²⁸

The most vilified character in Last Go Round is unquestionably Buffalo Bill Cody. He represents for Kesey all that is wrong with the Pendleton Round-Up specifically and with the Gilded Age American West generally. Kesey portrays a charlatan obsessed with self-promotion, conspicuous consumption, and racial exploitation. He rides in a lavishly appointed Pullman car, in stark contrast to the saddleworn image he tries to convey. He uses Frank Gotch and a gang of Pinkertons to manipulate rodeo events in hopes of making John Spain part of his Wild West show. He sizes up Spain by giving his shoulder "an appraising squeeze, like a housewife shopping for a roast," and he looks over Sundown, another potential gate draw, "like he was inspecting livestock." Everything about the western icon is larger than life and totally fabricated. As the master of ceremonies for one of the bullriding events, Cody fires off a Sharp's rifle, but it discharges only a symbolic plume of fake smoke. Even Cody senses that his persona is more style than substance when he admits, "You wake up one day to discover you're just a moth-eaten saddlebag full of memories and miseries." This faux-western huckster tells readers about important recurring themes — boosterism, consumerism, and racial tension — that have dominated this region since Euro-American settlement.²⁹

The Roman Race was an extremely dangerous and popular Round-Up event.

Lee Moorhouse, photographer, courtesy of the Division of Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene

Readers also learn about the importance of heritage as they find Kesey's characters deeply concerned about the rodeo and how outsiders perceive their town. Pendleton businessmen are particularly interested in the creation of tourist facilities and in cleaning up the seamier aspects of the town. Out-of-town media representatives serve as a constant reminder that new communication links can cut both ways, advertising and chastising at will. Most important, the rodeo gives Pendletonians their identity. They need the Round-Up as an annual reminder of who they are and where they came from. It is not enough to sit quietly and contemplate one's place in the world. In the American West, it necessary to act it out. The Round-Up is about more than roping and riding; it is a public demonstration of culture.³⁰ Historian Henry Nash Smith discovered as early as 1950 that "men cannot engage in purposive group behavior without images which simultaneously express collective desires and impose coherence on the infinitely varied data of experience."³¹ The Round-Up plays out a litany of images that residents find meaningful and worth preserving: the subjugation of nature to function for human ends; the paradoxical removal and celebration of Native Americans and their culture; the definition and re-definition of gender roles; and the inherent goodness of an agrarian life. All are key components of western history, and all can be scrutinized in Kesey's book.

The story of the Round-Up reveals a great deal about the people of Pendleton and its environs and also something about the notion of place. This concept, as described by historians, novelists, and others, is the sum total of society, a particular place, and time.³² It enhances our understanding of a people as prescribed by their race, class, gender, and especially by their environment. As Wendell Berry explains, "if you don't know where you are you don't know who you are."³³ Location and avocation define Pendleton, its rodeo, and its people. All exist in the semiarid Northwest and all are engaged in an endlessly changing dialectic between land and people.

This suggests that the greater Pendleton area is unique. Kesey's story is an excellent means for understanding the Pacific Northwest subregion of the American West after Euro-American settlement. As historian Donald Worster suggests, "a region emerges as people try to make a living from a particular part of the earth, as they adapt themselves to its limits and possibilities."³⁴Last Go Round helps us understand better a place set within a region that functions according to its natural surroundings. Pendleton emerged as a ranching mecca in response to the limitations of the area for growing certain annual crops, its abundant grazing lands, and its proximity to the Columbia River system that connected it with distant markets as well as to the valuable resources of the Blue Mountain range and the mining districts of Idaho. The makeup of the landscape contributed greatly to Indian and white cultures, just as human decisions about and impressions of the land altered its nature. Moreover, this book informs those not familiar with the Pacific Northwest that much of it is hot and semiarid, correcting a common impression of a perpetually wet and cool region. Last Go Round reminds us that geology, climate, and topography channel human energies in certain directions.

For all that this text can teach us, there is also much it cannot do. The book is, first and foremost, a historical novel, and it will never suffice for those seeking a comprehensive accounting of the Round-Up or complete biographies of its early champions. Nor can it give us a precise reading of turn-of-the-century racial hostility or tolerance or define the exact conditions that led developers to make the rodeo a major undertaking. Kesey seems most intent on righting the wrongs of the past in a literary sense. His book is a response to the promoters, dime novelists, journalists, and other writers who oversimplified the racial and economic dynamics of the American West, making the place appear as an egalitarian frontier — a bygone era that will never again return. Last Go Round is the counterpoint especially to Charles Wellington Furlong's Let 'er Buck: A Story of the Passing of the Old West, published in 1921 to educate the "blasé, effete, lily-livered youths" of America about the values of an "honorable physical contest."³⁵ Though Furlong provided a fair description of the rodeo's early days, references to "swarthy Mexicans" and Indian dialogue such as "Ugh! Hi-yu-skookum saddle" would make most contemporary readers cringe.³⁶ Similarly, Alice Day Pratt, who in 1922 published a memoir of pioneering in Oregon, wrote of Native Americans at the Round-Up as "savage-looking squaws," "sullen squaws," and others with "hideously striped and stony visages."³⁷ More recent popular accounts, such as J. Granville Jensen and Richard Highsmith's Pendleton: World's Round-Up City (1950) and Jayne Frink's "Biggest Frontier Celebration Ever: The 1910 Round-Up" (1988), deliver uncritical antiquarian information and do little to further our understanding of the incredible mix of cultures that converged on Pendleton.³⁸

Kesey is far from an omniscient observer, and he certainly bends the truth in order to tell the truth. He has his own set of preconceived notions about how events might have unfolded, or should have unfolded, and he is just as presumptuous as his forerunners in claiming authority — the subtitle of the book claims it to be a "real" western. Yet readers can glean a feel for the Round-Up in ways not possible with traditional historical monographs or from "the cold facts and half-baked truths served up by library stacks," which Kesey believes "read like a slanted crossbreed of Jimmy the Greek and Howard Cosell." In his folksy postmodernist vision, "the True is generally uncertain, wishy-washy, vague, while the False is often downright positive."³⁹ In other words, suspect primary and secondary sources, notorious in the West, have skewed our understanding of events like the Round-Up for years. It is an opportunity for novelists to inform us in ways that boosters and historians cannot. The dialogue and some of the characters may be contrived, but to Wallace Stegner, "it is often necessary for a writer to distort the particulars of experience in order to see them better."⁴⁰

The Round-Up grew in size almost every year in the 1910s, and organizers scrambled to add seating and accommodations for cowboys, horses, and steers alike. This aerial photograph from the 1920s shows the Round-Up and fairgrounds as well as the Indian encampment in the background. The encampment was an annual Round-Up event that drew curious onlookers from near and far.

OHS neg., OrHi 65116

In a recent book, writer, playwright, and bookseller Larry McMurtry succinctly explains why westerns — and thus Kesey's book — matter. "It's a sad, but, to my mind, inescapable fact," he wrote in 2001, "that most of the traditions which we associate with the American West were invented by pulp writers, poster artists, impresarios, and advertising men ..."⁴¹ For all their flaws and to the dismay of academics — even after the New Western History has been totally ensconced into the curricula — popular, rough-and-tumble western novels, television shows, and movies dominate the nation's thinking about the history of the region. Simply put, many more Americans read Louis L'Amour than Patricia Limerick.

Popular writers will always outsell academics because novels are more popular than textbooks. This is not necessarily a bad thing; society needs a well-told story just as it needs laughter, no matter the historical accuracy or relevance to contemporary people and places. But the truly special literary work can both spin a good yarn and make readers think about weighty matters, forcing them to reconsider outmoded paradigms and encouraging analysis. To a great extent, we learn about things in the world through the narrative form, and historians and the wider public alike can learn a great deal from those who specialize in telling smart stories that are also fun to read.

Notes

^1. Ken Kesey with Ken Babbs, Last Go Round: A Real Western (New York: Penguin, 1994), 2, 216. Babbs, Kesey's longtime cohort, contributes to the book's forward, but his involvement in the body of the text is not clear.

^2. Overviews on the pulp western genre include Richard W. Etulain, Re-Imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Etulain, Telling Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill to Larry McMurtry (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999); Fred Erisman, "The Changing Face of Western Literary Regionalism," in Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain, eds., The Twentieth Century West: Historical Interpretations (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989); Daryl Jones, The Dime Novel Western (Bowling Green, Ky.: Bowling Green State University Press, 1978); and William T. Pinkington, ed., Critical Essays on the Western American Novel (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980).

^3. Kesey, Last Go Round, 217.

^4. Janet Burroway, "An Equal Opportunity Rodeo," New York Times Book Review, July 10, 1994. See also Washington Post, July 26, 1994; "Last Go Round," Publishers Weekly, April 25, 1994.

^5. John Spain was the cowboy who actually rode Long Tom in 1911.

^6. Virgil Rupp, Let 'er Buck! A History of the Pendleton Round-Up (Pendleton, Ore.: Pendleton Round-Up Association, 1985), 8.

^7. Kesey, Last Go Round, 224.

^8. Ibid., 25, 53, 90.

^9. Ibid., 81, 115.

^10. Ibid., 62, 31, 185.

^11. Morgan Baillargeon and Leslie Tepper, Legends of Our Times: Native Cowboy Life (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998), 191–5.

^12. Kesey, Last Go Round, 113.

^13. Recent overviews of twentieth-century Native American history include Peter Iverson, We Are Still Here: American Indians in the Twentieth Century (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan-Davidson, 1998); Mary Davis, ed., Native America in the Twentieth Century (New York: Garland, 1994); and Donald L. Parman, Indians and the American West in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

^14. Joan Burbick, Rodeo Queens and the American Dream (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 23. Burbick also notes that at many rodeos, Indian women often played prominent roles and exhibited a competitive spirit: "Their roles in the rodeo were not merely decorative" (p. 86).

^15. Kesey, Last Go Round, 79. For more on the multicultural aspects of the Pendleton Round-Up, see Clifford P. Westermeir, Man, Beast, Dust: The Story of the Rodeo (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1947); Philip Burnham, "The Return of the Native: The Politics of Identity in American Indian Fiction of the West," in Michael Kowalewski, ed., Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and L.G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Image of American Indians, 1883–1933 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). For more on the seasonality of inland Northwest tribes, see Eugene S. Hunn, Nch'I-Wéna, "The Big River": Mid-Columbia Indians and Their Land (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990); and Alvin Josephy, The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965).

^16. For broader studies on the multicultural West, see Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983); and Sara Deutsch, "Landscape of Enclaves: Race Relations in the West, 1865–1990," in William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992).

^17. Kesey, Last Go Round, 167.

^18. Philip Burnham, "The Return of the Native: The Politics of Identity in American Indian Fiction of the West," in Kowalewski, ed., Reading the West, 199–200.

^19. Kathryn Shanley, "The Indians Americans Love to Love and Read: American Indian Identity and Cultural Appropriation," in Gretchen M. Bataille, ed., Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 46.

^20. Kesey, Last Go Round, 12, 14.

^21. See Carlos A. Schwantes, Railroad Signatures of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993); and Peter J. Lewty, Across the Columbia Plain: Railroad Expansion in the Interior Northwest, 1885–1893 (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995).

^22.Morning Oregonian, October 1, 1911, September 27, 1912; Sunday Oregonian, September 29, 1912; Morning Oregonian, September 28, 1912.

^23. Kesey, Last Go Round, 41, 167.

^24. Nordstrum would seem to be a purposeful misspelling of Nordstrom, the Seattle-based retailer.

^25. Kesey, Last Go Round, 32, 46.

^26. Ibid., 46–7.

^27.East Oregonian, August 16, 1910; E.N. "Pink" Boylen, Episode of the West: The Pendleton Round-Up, 1910–1951 (Pendleton, Ore.: Pendleton Round-Up Association, 1975), 1–15; Charles Wellington Furlong, Let 'er Buck: A Story of the Passing of the Old West (New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1921), 24; Morning Oregonian, September 14, 1913.

^28. Kesey, Last Go Round, 107, 170, 75 (emphasis in original). See William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994); Kristine Frederickson, American Rodeo: From Buffalo Bill to Big Business (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985); and Alf H. Walle, The Cowboy Hero and Its Audience: Popular Culture as Market Derived Art (Bowling Green, Ky.: Bowling Green State University Press, 2000).

^29. Kesey, Last Go Round, 190, 22, 189. See Richard White, "Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill," in James R. Gossman, ed., The Frontier in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).

^30. Clyde Milner insists that "The best-sustained understanding of western selfhood will start at the bedrock, in a local context" ("The View from Wisdom: Four Layers of History and Regional Identity," in Cronon, Gitlin, and Miles, eds., Under an Open Sky). See also Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, Rodeo: An Anthropologist Looks at the Wild and the Tame (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982); Robert Murray Davis, Playing Cowboys: Low Culture and High Art in the Western (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).

^31. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), ix.

^32. See William G. Robbins, ed., The Great Northwest: The Search for Regional Identity (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001); William L. Lang, William G. Robbins, Mark Spence, and Sara Dant Ewert, "Beyond Place: A Forum," Oregon Historical Quarterly 103:4 (Winter 2002): 414–51; Dan Flores, "Place: An Argument for Bioregional History," and William L. Lang, "From Where We Are Standing: The Sense of Place and Environmental History," in Dale D. Goble and Paul W. Hirt, eds., Northwest Lands, Northwest Peoples: Readings in Environmental History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999).

^33. Quoted in Wallace Stegner, The Sense of Place (Madison: Wisconsin Humanities Committee, 1986), 1.

^34. Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 27.

^35. Furlong, Let 'er Buck, xiii.

^36. Ibid., 28, 30.

^37. Quoted in Gordon B. Dodds, ed., Varieties of Hope: An Anthology of Oregon Prose (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1993), 32, 33.

^38. J. Granville Jensen and Richard M. Highsmith, Jr., Pendleton: World's Round-Up City (Pendleton, Ore.: Pendleton Public Schools, 1950); Jayne Frink, "Biggest Frontier Celebration Ever: The 1910 Round-Up," Pioneer Trails 12:3 (Summer 1988): 1–14.

^39. Kesey, Last Go Round, vii, 41.

^40. Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction (New York: Penguin, 2002), 7.

^41. Larry McMurtry, Sacagawea's Nickname: Essays on the American West (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 19.

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