60 Feet Six Inches and Other Distances from Home: The (Baseball) Life of Mose YellowHorse

by Todd Fuller

"Mose YellowHorse's 1920 fastball traveled "in the neighborhood of ninety-five miles an hour," and Todd Fuller's bio of YellowHorse is a similarly powerhouse affair. Avid and loving in the tribute it pays to this too-neglected American original, but willing to distinguish Mose the myth from the everyday Mose the man, this deeply researched and widely encompassing journey through baseball, politics, poetry, prose, stats, tribal life, and comic strip shenanigans is surely Fuller's equivalent of having all the bases loaded."—Albert Goldbarth Mose YellowHorse (1898–1964), a Skidi Pawnee, played professional baseball for nearly a decade, most notably with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1921 and '22. Aside from his baseball achievements, YellowHorse, as a boy, traveled with and performed in Pawnee Bill's Wild West show, later served in the Army during World War I, and also appeared as a character in Chester Gould's Dick Tracy comic strip. After his death, he earned induction into both the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame and the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame. His baseball glove remains on permanent display at the Baeball Hall of Fame and Museum. Using a structural pattern based on an old-time Pawnee Indian storytelling session, many voices and perspectives collaborate to form a multi-faceted recreation of Mose YellowHorse's life. Poetry, oral histories (from tribal elders), critical essays, letters, cartoons, photographs, and newspaper accounts are all included as a way of focusing on cross-cultural tensions. Todd Fuller teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Drake University. In 1999 he completed his Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Native American literatures from Oklahoma State University, where he researched this book for eight years, with the help of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. The author is donating half of his royalties to establish the Mose YellowHorse Higher Education Endowment.

Genres: Biography, Sports, Baseball

180 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2001

Reviews

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a sort of scrapbook of seemingly everything the author could find about this Major League pitcher who may be little remembered outside of his home community of the Pawnee tribe in Oklahoma. Newspaper clippings, cartoons, text (by the author), appreciative poetry (by the author) -- all these snippets tell (with occasionally contradictory details) about the short-lived baseball career and the life of Mose YellowHorse.
This book, though it wears something of the guise of a biography, doesn't hide its admiration for YellowHorse. While it doesn't shy away from mentioning the less flattering parts of his life (his drinking, his possible domestic violence), it doesn't work hard to get to the bottom of these matters. The book ends with a letter addressed to the Baseball Hall of Fame pleading the case for YellowHorse to be inducted -- a letter that strikes me as an interesting and fitting piece of literature, given the context I have gained from reading the book -- but not a seriously persuasive argument were it to stand alone.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

At last, a biography of a Native American athlete that treats him as a Native! I suspect most baseball fans will hate it; but it sets a new standard for biographies of indigenous people who operate in both the colonisers and the indigenous worlds. I could go on about this for several thousand words, but suffice to say this non-baseball fan loved this book: it is culturally challenging, it forces us as newcomer readers to consider how indigenous and other colonised peoples live, work, and function in the colonial world, and it calls into question the ways we know what we know.

[Terry · Rating 3 out of 5]

The amount of hard information that exists about Moses YellowHorse would justify a long essay, but Fuller stretches it out with multiple accounts of the same incidents, some poetry, pictures, and Dick Tracy comic strips. YellowHorse was alleged to be the first full-blooded Native American to play major league baseball, and there are some interesting statistics and legends about him. Too much of the book was based on conjecture for it to be a truly satisfying read.