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cowboys and Indians

Read your way through Tony Hillerman’s literary landscape, and immerse yourself in ranch culture with a look inside 25 homes of the American West.

By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Spring 2010 Su Casa

Tony Hillerman’s Landscape: On the Road with Chee and Leaphorn, by Anne Hillerman with photographs by Don Strel, HarperCollins Publishers, hardcover, $28.99.

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A great writer about place, Tony Hillerman worked the landscape of Dinetah—Navajo Land—into his novels as a character on equal terms with his star detectives, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn. Tony was a deft, economical, unsentimental writer, but when it came to writing about the desert, mountains, and mesas of western New Mexico and eastern Arizona, he was never stingy or indifferent. While he drew plenty of mental eye candy, he knew when to let broad strokes carry the image where another writer might have penciled in heavy detail. Beyond composing pretty word pictures, Tony animated the landscape with human activity and mythological history. People interact with places, each having an effect on the other. In Tony’s mysteries, a geological feature can shape a key plot point—a cave, the corner of a mesa by a hogan, an arroyo with the tracings of a forgotten flash flood carved wavy in the sand.

I think Tony knew that the landscape as much as his Diné detectives drew readers back to his series of novels again and again. Great American writing is often place-centered—think of Hemingway’s Michigan, Faulkner’s Mississippi, Cormac McCarthy’s Texas–New Mexico–Mexico, or Edward Abbey’s Utah. An Oklahoma native, Tony adopted New Mexico early in his adulthood and found in the Navajo people a beguiling culture at once unique yet expressive of universal human ambitions, foibles, generosity, and spirituality. Though he was a devoted Catholic and an Okie farm boy to boot, he wrote about them with such respect and insight that an Indian once told me he thought Tony was Navajo till he saw the writer at a public event.

After Tony died in 2008, some large part of our grief sprang from realizing we’d never read a new Hillerman novel. Filling that void in some degree, his daughter Anne Hillerman’s new book Tony Hillerman’s Landscape: On the Road with Chee and Leaphorn mines her father’s novels in a new way, connecting Tony’s landscape prose and settings with the places they mention. It’s a great conceit for a book. You could map out quite an excursion through Dinetah with it, driving those lonely roads just as he used to do when he was mulling some tricky plot point or simply mainlining inspiration in this majestic country.

A journalist and author in her own right, Anne started the book with her father, who contributed an introduction and an afterword. Tony declined to travel the back roads one more time as Anne crisscrossed that vast region while her husband, photographer Don Strel, shot the evocative images to accompany the text. (Tony wrote that he knew better—traveling with a photographer feels like never getting anywhere.)

Roughly one chapter per mystery novel, Anne gives a summary of each story and some background about the book, includes Tony’s comments, then seizes on an interesting location from the text and writes about that place with Strel’s photos providing the visuals. She quotes passages—a long paragraph or so, a couple hundred words at most—then weaves together reminiscences of her own travels in these locales, stories about her parents (Tony and Marie often traveled together), narratives of her trips to gather information and experiences for this book, bits of history, Navajo mythology, and plenty of Tony’s own words from conversations and other writings.

It all adds up to a terrific pretext for travel, the literary road trip. Somehow you feel you should be driving either a ’70s Ford pickup or a ’65 Chevy Impala, but that’s another story. The Leaphorn/Chee mysteries have an anachronistic quality, even when they touch on contemporary issues—anachronistic in the sense of existing outside a specific era. Maybe that comes from the landscape, a vast reach of inhabited wilderness shaped but not ruined by its people.

In the afterword, “Why Los Ranchos?” Tony particularizes and personalizes his love of place by answering that question—I wonder who asked it? I suppose the proceeds from those best sellers financed his move into a prestigious yet relaxed neighborhood in the North Valley municipality of Los Ranchos de Albuquerque. (Back in my college days, Tony once warned me not to expect financial gain to reward fiction writing. It hadn’t happened to him—yet!) He picked Los Ranchos, he writes, because “Albuquerque is too big for a bona fide country boy, and neither Hawaii nor Hemingway’s little island offers the odd mixture of social, geographical, ecological, and historical delights I enjoy here.” Whether he’s writing about his ditch-bank walks, which vary by season, or the view from Sandia Crest out toward Navajoland, Tony is always an amiable and insightful companion whose consummate skill renders a vivid landscape in a handful of apt words.

At this point in my review, my old writing teacher and late mentor Tony Hillerman probably would have thought I’d spent too many words myself. I’ll wrap up with the kind of sunnily supportive book-jacket blurb that Tony wrote for so many of us former students and literary associates, though mine will have far less influence: If you’re a Hillerman mystery fan, you probably already have this book; if you’re not yet a fan, Tony Hillerman’s Landscape will cure that condition.

Ranches of the American West, by Linda Leigh Paul, principal photography by Michael Mathers, Rizzoli, hardcover, $65.

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Let it be said that ranch culture shares with its kin country music a weakness for self-referential narcissism, which means it often makes itself the subject of its creative expression. (Nothing wrong with that. I’m just saying.) Thus the 25 fine homes in Linda Leigh Paul’s Ranches of the American West, be they new construction or historic renovations, include plenty of the following: antlers, paintings of Native American encampments, cowboy hat–and–holster paraphernalia, antlers, imagery of bronc-riding buckaroos, Native American artifacts, and antlers. Goes with the territory. If you like this style, you love it. And what’s not to like? It’s inhabitable mythology.

Fortunately, Ranches of the American West ain’t all longhorns and windmills. Written with easy grace and an eye for detail, this epic home tour through spectacular western spreads includes the New Mexico classic Bell Ranch—certainly one of our most storied and enduring cattle operations, occupying a huge chunk between Tucumcari and Las Vegas—the equally legendary Vermejo Park Ranch along the Colorado border, the Diamond A down in Lincoln County, and the LaPides rescue-horse spread outside Santa Fe. Home-state partisanship aside, Paul has selected a pleasing assortment of places that show the diversity in contemporary ranch home design and historical reinterpretation, from traditional adobe (in Texas!) to modern limestone-and-metal cladding (oops, Texas again—but fear not, Texas doesn’t dominate these pages).

Paul does a fine job writing up the story of each place, blending history, personal narratives of the current homeowners, and edifying details about, say, design or renovation. Likewise, Michael Mathers’ photographs put you right into the scene—and sometimes it feels like a John Ford Western. Mathers is equally adept shooting home magazine–style interiors or calendar-worthy landscapes, from the snowy Rockies to the immense eastern New Mexico plains.

My favorite outside New Mexico, though, is author Tom McGuane’s. Built long ago by an Englishman come to homestead a ranch in Montana, he re-created a typical Lancashire farmstead with logs in the northern Rockies. That’s a whole other breed of self-referential design, a collision of culture and place through architecture that should feel mighty familiar to New Mexicans, for whom adobe style has long been most common as a hyphenate genre: Territorial-adobe, Zen-adobe, Modern-adobe, Tuscan-adobe . . .

So if you need a cowboy fix between Cormac McCarthy novels and the next Robert Duvall movie, check out Ranches of the American West. Just remember, if you have to ask how much these places cost, you can’t afford one.

Butterfly Landscapes of New Mexico, by Steven J. Cary, New Mexico Magazine, paperback, $27.95.

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Steven J. Cary’s amazing butterfly book is enough to send you to the hills, the valleys, and the mountains with a net in one hand, binoculars in another, and this book in your pack, even if yesterday you couldn’t have cared less about the fluttering critters. Chief naturalist for New Mexico State Parks, Cary has been observing and photographing butterflies for more than 25 years. Safe to say he knows his stuff, which in this case is not just butterflies but their habitat and the landscapes that contain both. And that’s what elevates this book above a typical field guide: it reveals the geography of New Mexico through a fresh filter, a new way of looking at what might be the same old places. No matter where you are, butterflies live there. With this beautifully designed book, you can explore a new dimension of New Mexico, from the top of Wheeler Peak to the bottom of the Pecos River Valley. What are you waiting for?

Connections: A Visual Journal, by Ford Robbins, Red Mountain Press, paperback, $44.95.

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Santa Fe photographer Ford Robbins’ Connections gathers together images of landscapes and water, sky and trees, homes and roads and streetscapes in both intimate detail and sweeping panorama. In his introduction, he writes, “I intend that my image reveal something more than the object in it, and to move you, the viewer, to a higher level of sensual awareness of the world we live in.” The evidence in the book argues that he’s met his goal. These black-and-white images—radiant autumnal cottonwoods, stark eroded mesa-scapes, scale-defying impressions of rock and sand—immerse the viewer in contemplating perception. A great photograph always looks inevitable, as if the object had reversed roles and projected its image onto the film. The best of Robbins’ pictures convey that purposefulness.