JACKSON HOLE JOURNAL

by Nathaniel Burt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1983

Engaging reminiscences of pre-mass-tourism days in Jackson Hole, Wyoming--by the writer-son (People and Palaces, First Families) of writer-parents who ran a duderanch as far back as 1915. When Burt was growing up in the 1920s, the Jackson Hole valley in northwest Wyoming was a wilderness, but one that had been discovered by a few adventurous upper-class Easterners (primarily from Philadelphia); so the special quality of the Butts' Bar B C ranch was the blend of ""dude and roughneck, Leatherstocking and Silkstocking, wildness and sophistication. . . ."" (Nathaniel himself was born in a log-cabin, delivered by a psychiatrist-student of Freud.) Burr recalls the fiver-and-mountain landscape, the childhood feeling of vast ownership, a world of outhouses, ditches, candles, rodeos, folk music, nature-worship--but also a world of visiting countesses, heiresses (like fabled Cissy Patterson), and artists: ""The sad fact of the matter was that, despite all my western snobbery. . . I was by nature and temperament more of a dude, if not exactly a tenderfoot, than I was a roughneck."" He tells stories of wild foremen and cooks, of the local ""fast set""; the family moved from dude-ranching to less intensive ranching-with-guests in the 1930s, but things got pretty unmanageable (eloping waitresses and such) after the war. And Burt devotes separate chapters to: the conservationist battle for the Grand Teton National Park, led in part by father Struthers (""If the valley isn't the remote frontier my father saw in 1910, it at least is not the hideous scrambled egg of commercialism and crud that it would have been if the park had not come in""); the new tourism boom; and Jackson Hole's long association with painters, writers, even a few movies. Not very involving or intimate as ""an autobiography with digressions""--but a nice scrapbook all the same, leanly stylish and strongly evocative of a unique time-and-place.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION