Bøger af Jim Hoy

"Gathering Strays is a collection of vignettes about Kansas, Great Plains, and Western life--historical and contemporary. Jim Hoy has gathered short essays into sections: Cattle Towns, Outlaws, The Cowboy, and several others. He introduces us to folks we've not met--such as failed train robber Elmer McCurdy, whose arsenic-embalmed body went on tour and made money for the undertaker, Joseph Johnson of Pawhuska, KS--and those with whom we're more familiar, such as Jesse James and Buffalo Bill. He tells us about the origin of the cowboy and about Black cowboys and Mexican Vaqueros. He recounts stories about rodeo and cattle drives. And throughout, his style, easy to read yet authoritative, describes the people, places, and events that make the region distinctive and celebrated"--

Between the Nebraska border and Osage County, Oklahoma, are the Flint Hills of Kansas, and growing on those hills the last of the tallgrass prairie that once ranged from Canada to Texas, and on those fields of bluestem, cattle grazeand tending the cattle, someone like Jim Hoy, whose people have ranched there from, well, not quite time immemorial, but pretty darn close.Hoy has always called the Flint Hills home and over the decades he has made a study of themtheir tough terrain and quiet beauty, their distinctive folk life and cattle cultureand marshaled his observations to bring the Flint Hills home to readers in a singular way. These essays are Hoys Flint Hills, combining family lore and anecdotes of ranching life with reflections on the regions rich history and nature. Whether its weaning calves or shoeing horses, checking in on a local legend or a night of high school basketball in nearby Cassoday, encountering a coyote or a badger or surveying whats happened to the tallgrass prairie over time, summoning cowboy traditions or parsing the places plant life or rock formations, he has something to sayand you can bet its well worth hearing. With his keen eye, understated wit, and store of knowledge, Hoy makes his Flint Hills come alive, and in the telling, live on.

The Flint Hills are America's tallgrass prairie, a green enclave set in the midst of the farmland of eastern Kansas. Here, the author blends history, folklore, and memoir to conjure for readers the tallgrass prairies of his boyhood. He traces Flint Hills' cattle culture from the days of the trail drive through the railroad years to trucking era.

"Regionalism at its best. A wonderfully entertaining book, stuffed with sparkling and insightful stories, yarns, and sketches."Richard W. Eutulain Professor Emeritus of History and former director of the Center for the American WestIf it is true that a region is defined by its people and their culture, then Jim Hoy and Tom Isern have taken a second giant step in defining the Great Plains. Plains Folk II: The Romance of the Landscape continues that story. As in the first volume, Plains Folk: A Commonplace of the Great Plains, the authors write about hardy plains dwellers-a rare breed who feel out of place anywhere except on the prairie-and their cultural heritage, derived from many countries in both the Old World and the New. Here are stories about plains folklore, animals, food, lifestyles, and artifacts in a land of buttermilk and blabs, Bigfoot and bindweed. Sharing their experiences of the plains region, Hoy and Isern convey their sense of place and their affection for the area. They see beauty in landscapes that others, used to mountains or forests, deem barren. They look beyond the seemingly flat surface into the lives and culture of those who turned the Great American Desert into the Garden of the World.Jim Hoy, professor of English at Emporia State University, writes about Flint Hills history and folklife. Tom Isern, professor of History at North Dakota State University, writes on farming, ranching, and rural life on the plains. They are coauthors of the newspaper column "Plains Folk" and Plains Folk: A Commonplace of the Great Plains.