An accurate portrayal of living in the West

Those of us who spent our early years watching 1950s television remember the golden era of the TV Western.

Taking up where the movies left off, the television Western series – from “Gunsmoke” to “Bonanza” and, later, the likes of “The High Chaparral”– offered up the standard stereotypes: the hardy pioneer, the lonely cowhand, the plain-speaking schoolmarm, the tough town sheriff, the cattle baron, the saloon gal, the gunfighter … and so on.

In “The Jump-Off Creek,” Portland author Molly Gloss’ novel about homesteading in 1895 Oregon, few of these stereotypes exist. Which is one reason why it seemed only fitting to pick the book as the October read for The Spokesman-Review Book Club.

There are others reasons, too. One is that the book was a 1990 Pacific Northwest Booksellers winner and runner-up for the PEN/Faulkner award.

And another is that it has amassed the kind of critical acclaim that goes usually to books written by writers with much more familiar names. It’s even been made part of various college courses exploring the literature of the American West.

“The Jump-Off Creek” is “not a standard ‘Western,’ but a novel of the West notable for its accurate portrayal of life on a homestead and for the quality of writing that will make readers linger,” wrote a reviewer for Library Journal, adding that the book is “a rare treat of a first novel.”

A reviewer for the Boston Globe went even further, calling it “far more inspiring than all the inflated heroism of the big-sky epics most of us grew up on.”

Which brings us back to where I started. If what you’re looking for is “The Wild, Wild West,” Gloss’ book is not for you.

“The Jump-Off Creek” (Mariner Books, 192 pages, $12) involves the story of Lydia Bennett Sanderson, a woman who, once widowed, heads West without a glance back. She ends purchasing a parcel of land, bought sight unseen, in the Blue Mountains of northeast Oregon.

And there her struggles begin, because what she finds is a virtual wreck of a log cabin. With work everywhere and no time to lose, Lydia starts in, patching, mending, digging gardens and fence posts, working hard and long.

Characters come and go, with some returning. These include the cattle man, Tim Whiteaker, who first guided her to her land near Jump-Off Creek; his Indian partner, Blue Odell; and even a band of wolf-trappers who prove to be the story’s main antagonists.

But the larger plot points in “The Jump-Off Creek” are secondary to the everyday reality that Gloss puts on the page and the spirit of the people who dwell there.

A good representation of Lydia, body and spirit, comes during her first meeting with Tim as she rides into his campsite, atop one mule, leading another and accompanied by “two filthy goats on a long tether.”

He invites her to share his coffee, and Gloss, with a precise use of language, introduces her protagonist:

“She sat a minute, watching him, and then she swung a leg across and stood down stiffly beside the mule. She had kilted her skirt up so she could ride astride, bringing the back hem up between her legs and tucking it into the front of her waistband. Without busyness, she pulled the skirt free, shook it out, smoothed it with the palms of her hands. The coat she had one was too big, mouse-colored, the collar standing up high around her neck. She looked pipe-thin inside it, her arms thin as sticks where they stuck out of the folded-up sleeves, her face thin too, but for a big chin, a wide straight mouth. In the shadow beneath a floppy man’s hat, her skin looked coarse, he could see the set-in creases by her mouth and between her brows.”

Tim tells her, “I’ve got no cup.” But, Gloss writes, Lydia “seemed not to care. She came across the little distance to him, took the pot solemnly and tested the spigot against her mouth. It was bitter coffee, but she drank it without making any face. When she had taken a few swallows, she gave him a stiff smile over the edge of the pot. ‘Good,’ she said.”

And just like that, you know everything you need to know about Lydia Bennett. The rest is Gloss presenting her in action, placing her in a time and place drawn almost as if Gloss herself had been a personal witness.

“The author’s intimate understanding of the harsh physical conditions and of the rituals and practices of frontier life (there are long descriptions of how to brand cattle and how to mend a roof) sometimes overshadows a deeper delineation of character,” wrote a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.

“However, most of the scenes are handled with a restraint that communicates the characters’ endemic loneliness, and the dialogue, though spare, is rich enough to convey their emotional conflicts.”

Not exactly what you would have found out near that “Little House on the Prairie,” but still pretty good.