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The Buffalo Wallow: A Prairie Boyhood
Book by Jackson Ct
253 pages, Softcover
First published January 1, 1952
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 31, 2024
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 28, 2024
Set in 1883 Nebraska, just after the Bison ecocide, The Buffalo Wallow: A Prairie Boyhood is Charles Tenney Jackson (né Jack Tennison)'s 1952 Bildungsroman about the homesteaders on a small cattle farm at the back-end of which is a large dugout "waller" i.e, large indentation where the large populations of buffalo indeed wallowed. No memory where I came upon this title, but it's adjacent to another "Bison" book from the University of Nebraska Press, namely Maria Sandoz's The Buffalo Hunters, as well as Wright Morris' Bison book, The Territory Ahead, and Faulkner and Twain's work, more generally.
My own family is from a farm community in West Central Illinois that was formerly known as The Buffalo Wallow (now, Golden, Illinois), so as the historical circumstances suggest themselves to me from reading Jackson's book, the phenomenon is repeatable. Jackson's narrator, a nine-year old adoptee named "Chick," is one of a homestead that include his uncle Lige, his aunt Effie, his slightly older cousin Ellis, and two cowhands who live on the farm, Marion and Earl. The novel has farcical elements, including those involving the romance of a cowhand Earl and a young German emigré to the region, Fraulein Freida Westenhoffer, and what the cat-napping Chick and his cousin do at the dugout fort they keep in waller. Jackson's argot is a demotic of Northern European semi-literacy, and most of the novel's hijinks involve the inevitable Twainian pains taken to avoid the civilizing processes of education, eros and society. There's one very moving chapter here, however, where the author's relentless exposure of his narrative point-of-view (the novel is, after all, autobiographical, one assumes) relents, and Chick and cousin Ellis, stampeded during a cattle run across the waller, themselves adopt a lost longhorn steer thin, weak and nearing death, who gets stuck in some of the waller brush and is nursed back over a couple of weeks to some health by these boys, who nonetheless are surprised by a fall blizzard and split school to rescue the longhorn, only to discover that it's taken up hiding during the storm in their dugout hideaway. In this chapter, some of the symbolic power of steer ecocide, prairie geography, boy's adventure, and compassion for the more-than-human world does the important civilizing work the novel professes to project. It's quite complex and transforms the book's materials into something magisterial.
I can find out little about Charles Tenney Jackson, btw, other than that several of his books (not Buffalo Wallow) were optioned for the movies in the twenties and thirties -- he's an exact contemporary of Willa Cather, e.g., and it would be interesting to know if they're connected. . .
My own family is from a farm community in West Central Illinois that was formerly known as The Buffalo Wallow (now, Golden, Illinois), so as the historical circumstances suggest themselves to me from reading Jackson's book, the phenomenon is repeatable. Jackson's narrator, a nine-year old adoptee named "Chick," is one of a homestead that include his uncle Lige, his aunt Effie, his slightly older cousin Ellis, and two cowhands who live on the farm, Marion and Earl. The novel has farcical elements, including those involving the romance of a cowhand Earl and a young German emigré to the region, Fraulein Freida Westenhoffer, and what the cat-napping Chick and his cousin do at the dugout fort they keep in waller. Jackson's argot is a demotic of Northern European semi-literacy, and most of the novel's hijinks involve the inevitable Twainian pains taken to avoid the civilizing processes of education, eros and society. There's one very moving chapter here, however, where the author's relentless exposure of his narrative point-of-view (the novel is, after all, autobiographical, one assumes) relents, and Chick and cousin Ellis, stampeded during a cattle run across the waller, themselves adopt a lost longhorn steer thin, weak and nearing death, who gets stuck in some of the waller brush and is nursed back over a couple of weeks to some health by these boys, who nonetheless are surprised by a fall blizzard and split school to rescue the longhorn, only to discover that it's taken up hiding during the storm in their dugout hideaway. In this chapter, some of the symbolic power of steer ecocide, prairie geography, boy's adventure, and compassion for the more-than-human world does the important civilizing work the novel professes to project. It's quite complex and transforms the book's materials into something magisterial.
I can find out little about Charles Tenney Jackson, btw, other than that several of his books (not Buffalo Wallow) were optioned for the movies in the twenties and thirties -- he's an exact contemporary of Willa Cather, e.g., and it would be interesting to know if they're connected. . .
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews