Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album [Paperback]

Teresa Jordan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 31, 1994

The daughter and granddaughter of Wyoming ranchers, Teresa Jordan gives us a lyrical and superbly evocative book that is at once a family chronicle and a eulogy for the land her people helped shape and in time were forced to leave. Author readings.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Through four generations Jordan's family lived on a ranch in southeastern Wyoming. When it was sold, she felt she had lost a way of life. She attempts to resolve that loss in this charming memoir, recalling incidents in her childhood and examining the lives of female family members. We meet Jordan's paternal grandmother ("a difficult woman"), her mother and her great-aunt--all women who had to accept difficult lives that included hard physical labor and its attendant dangers. Noting the decline of the family farm, Jordan regrets that our culture teaches us to value a professional life more than one tied to the land. Her community, Iron Mountain, numbers 30 today, down from a population of 2000 a century ago.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Jordan grew up on a ranch in the Iron Mountain area of southeastern Wyoming. She presents a family album of memories about grandparents, parents, brothers, aunts, friends, and hired hands who had an influence on her thoughts and actions. The result is a no-holds-barred description of the joys and sorrows of ranch life, the hard economic times, the injuries and broken bones, and the endurance required for survival. Jordan relates how she longed to return to the ranch when she was away or living elsewhere. She describes the excitement of calving time and of breaking and riding horses and the importance of cattle in the ranch environment. Readers who like stories about life on the ranch will identify with many events in this book. Recommended for collections on Northwest lore.
- Irwin Weintraub, Rutgers Univ. Lib., Piscataway, N.J.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Departures (May 31, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679751351
• ISBN-13: 978-0679751359
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #443,403 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A loss of a way of life, March 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album (Paperback)

Reading Teresa Jordan's novel Riding the White Horse Home inevitably inspires a sense of regret and loss. Throughout her portrayal of the rugged untamed wilds of Iron Mountain Wyoming and its people, she paints a vivid picture of a culture and a way of life that has all but died out. Using her own personal experiences with her friends and family, she shows the reader what ranch life was like. Her detail and imagery is superb as she takes her acquaintances one by one, chapter by chapter, and tells us their story. We learn of Sunny the grandfather who took pride in his way of life, of her mother who loves her yet is hard to understand, of her friend Kelley and how their kind are not socially accepted today, her small local wedding, childhood experiences, and more. She shows us the stark differences between ranch culture and the culture of progress. We see the unspoken rules and laws of her people and their stoicism. We come to admire their discipline and stubbornness, their ethic and devotion. And we feel the same sense of loss that Teresa must have felt as this way of life slowly drifted away. For me, it was this central message of the book that was most touching. As someone who grew up in and frequently visits Idaho, I can at least partly relate to her sadness at the change. Like her, I feel an odd sense of pride whenever anyone speaks with disdain of the old fashioned methods of my state. I enthusiastically tell all my friends the Idaho state motto; "Idaho IS, what America WAS." This is the way that Jordan displays the ranch life. She shows an honor and pride that has since been lost to the world. Her people respected hard work over hard cash, and took satisfaction from their endless labor. Despite crop failures, drought, loss of livestock, and tiring years with no seeming gain, they trudge on, unbending. My own father is much like this, taking a job that pays much less then his previous one because it gives him more satisfaction. The power of her story comes through in its reality--we are made to see through her eyes, and with this new perspective come to love the land and people as she does. We mourn with her the loss of tradition and see the beauty in the harsh terrain of Wyoming. Although it is not written chronologically, the reader can easily see the transition from family owned ranches to modern technology. Each chapter is devoted to one of her family or friends and we learn of them in detail. Jordan expertly takes us into her life and experiences. We see her fierce love for her family and the kind of relationships that they have together. At college when her mother dies, she decides to come home and immerse herself in ranch life as she remembers their connections. She talks of how much she learned from her great grandmother, and of how much she didn't see. The reader learns the trials of ranch life--calving in all its messy glory, getting mauled by bulls, fighting against the land. Her story becomes to the reader representative of the lives of all ranchers, and we come to feel a connection of our own with this unique people. There is sadness at her shame when she goes to school as a child--her people are not accepted there. Her style is frank and open, and her honesty makes her words that much clearer. She tells it like it was. For those who love to farm and for those who are content in their cozy heated homes, this is a wonderful book. It inspires the reader to change his ideals--we come to value work and stoicism like a true rancher. It makes us appreciate our loved ones more, and we realize just how much we take for granted. Teresa Jordan has taken her life and set it out before us, and we should not pass up the opportunity to learn from it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absorbing memoir of a Wyoming ranch family . . ., April 8, 2005

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album (Paperback)

There's a growing literature of memoirs written by women who grew up on ranches, and this is a fine addition to it. Jordan tells of her family, who for four generations raised cattle in southeast Wyoming, north of Laramie and Cheyenne. With some irony, it was more circumstance than a love of ranching that kept the Jordans on the land, until the author's father sold the home place in the 1970s. But the love of that spot on earth lives on strongly in the author, and her book is a tribute to it and to her family who toiled there through good years and bad.

She clearly admires the men who labored on horseback raising cattle, devoting chapters to her grandfather, her father, and the many foremen and ranch hands who worked for them. Fully engaging, too, are her memories of the women and the imprint they have made on herself. Three portraits in particular stand out: her mother, Jo, with a warm, generous, and independent spirit, who died suddenly at an early age; her great aunt Marie, who loved her horses and dogs like the children she never had, and lived happily together with her husband and her husband's best friend; and finally her grandmother Effie, a puzzlingly bitter woman whose wishes for a full life seem to have been frustrated from girlhood because of her gender and social limitations.

There's much in this book to commend it, including a chapter devoted to the calving season and another describing the physically punishing nature of ranch work. Her chapter on her great aunt Marie includes excerpts from her journals, and each chapter is introduced with a photograph from the family album. The book closes with a description of the author's wedding at the community center near where she grew up, an idyllic day poignant for its wholehearted celebration of a way of community life that is rapidly vanishing.

I recommend this book to readers interested in the West, ranching, family memoirs, and personal journeys. Also recommended: Mary Clearman Blew's "All But the Waltz," Linda Hasselstrom's "Windbreak," and Judy Blunt's "Breaking Clean."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Progress replacing simplicity, March 9, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album (Paperback)

This story is simple, yet complex. It is easy to read, yet is very difficult to fully understand. On the surface, this book appears to be the typical biography of a ranch girl in rural Wyoming; telling of the lives of herself, her acquaintances, good friends and family. Looking a little deeper, it becomes apparent that she is setting the ranch culture apart from the rest of society, more or less as a separate entity. Constantly referring to "My people," marks the fact that she is arguing that her people are definitely of a different breed. She speaks of them as if they are of an entirely new ethnicity, which says a lot about how she really thinks of her people. This book is a chronicle of those people. They are ranchers and farmhands that we, our generation, have watched disappear. Her people have a deep sense of history. Her grandfather is so proud of his earlier relatives coming across the plains in the wake of Civil war, and making life for themselves. He determines to live his life the same way. Teresa learns that her people also like to embellish their own history, which makes them all the more colorful. It is, at least in part, this belief that their predecessors were all self-made men that drives Teresa's relatives to work hard for what they have. To work hard, and see the benefits of their work gives them a very real sense of satisfaction; ever hinting that this type of work-ethic is something America today has gotten away from. The work her people perform just to eke out a living is something most today do not understand. She tells of the back-breaking labor she and those around her perform in sub-zero temperatures, the miserable plight of drought and the ensuing cattle starvation, the scarcity of water, and lastly the pain of losing a loved one on the farm ("I seem to lose my loved ones to cancer and accidents,"). She realizes the work they do is difficult, yet, it is what her people live for. Her people are also very stoic. They are deeply committed to a few unwritten laws. Though not exactly enforced, they are known by every member, and everyone is expected to comply. One must never cry in public is an example of such a rule. One should not show any emotion, let alone crying. I guess crying, or showing compassion of any kind, is a sign of weakness, and her people are anything but weak. Her grandfather, one of her personal heros, never once breaks this rule. Nor does her father. Though she found this rule difficult to follow, she understands that it is not to be broken (though she does break it, on occasion). The land made these people. It was from this land that they make their living, raise their families, and foster their relationships. The land is tough, immovable, and harsh; why shouldn't it's people be the same? Jordan goes in to some detail, often in the middle of her relatives' biographies, about how fewer and fewer family farms are operating in this country, documenting the many millions of farm jobs that have disappeared from this country in since 1950. Through her friend Kelley, she talks about how her people do not fit into society today, and they belong on and to the country. She stresses that there is no other place for them; in the outside world, they feel alienated and useless, on the ranch, they are skilled and productive. It is almost as though her people have no place to be, no other place they could be. It is here that I found the book especially powerful: their ties to the land are too strong to live with concrete and steel. They have lived in the country as long as their grandparents can remember. It is part of them. They would choke if they were away from the grass and dirt. "Progress" has taken us, the rest of society, away from this rural American life, and has put us indoors, with flourescent lighting, 8'x6'x4' office cubicles, deadlines, exercise-free lifestyles, and work less, expect more attitudes. Teresa Jordan does not write an essay about the vanishing frontier, or the vanishing lifestyle of hard work and earned satisfaction; but she makes her point all the more concise by telling of her own experiences with individuals who have lived for work and for the land. Her people are strong, immovable, and courageous; just like the land they come from. Her book tells of the rewards ranching and country life offer, which almost forces one to contrast it with the barriers urbanization places on today's society. Her book is both reminiscing life as it once was, and forward reaching, showing life will become if we allow it. In all honesty, I wasn't at all excited about reading this book. Rural Wyoming? Looking at the latter half of the twentieth century not in terms of technological growth and achievement, but in the 19th century lifestyle of ranching? Not heralding the new era of progress and prosperity but looking at the dying art of family farming and ranching? I really didn't see it's application to me. But as I read, I became convinced that Teresa Jordans' is a different way of life. Or, should I say, it WAS a way that man once looked at life that is now gone. Hidden in this novel is an impassioned plea for a return to life as it once was. It is not verbal, but it is there, and it is powerful. Teresa Jordan is not audibly mourning the loss of a civilization, but is doing so very silently, painfully, through telling her family's story. This civilization once was America, but years of progress has pushed this civilization, and all of it's citizens, nearly to extinction.