Graceful elegy to a way of life

At the outset of his memoir of cowboy life in the 1930s, Dayton O. “Hawk” Hyde strikes a curmudgeonly pose: “Walk down any eastern Oregon street, and amongst a pollution of Californians and you’ll likely tread on the faded footsteps of men better than yourself because they lived at a time better than ours.”

But Hyde is not quite the hard-nose he makes himself out to be. Rather, he is a deeply sentimental fellow and much given to rhapsodizing about the “leather-hided, strawberry-nosed, bull-voiced, ham-fisted, broad-shouldered, mule-skinning, yarn-spinning” cowboys and Indians whose tales he tells in “The Pastures of Beyond.”

At 13, Hyde ran away from his childhood home in Michigan and joined his uncle on a ranch in Oregon. “No matter now that I had neither spare clothes nor money, nor had I ever been more than sixty miles from home,” he recalls. “I had yet to ride a horse but at that moment I was already a cowboy.” He was underwhelmed by his uncle on first sight -- the old man wore a cardigan sweater and a slouch hat instead of Levis and a Stetson -- but the 11,000-acre spread and the cowhands who worked it were the real thing.

“[T]he BarY was a great old-style livestock outfit,” Hyde writes, “a rough, tough cattle and horse operation running seven thousand head of fine Hereford cattle and two hundred and fifty mostly Percheron broodmares.”

Not every aspect of ranch life was romantic, however. When Hyde was sent into the “cool room” at suppertime to slice a few steaks off a side of beef, his uncle’s lover -- another man’s divorced wife -- instructed him to use the “cheap cuts” of the meat, which “was already covered with green mold.” And he soon discovered that his uncle was always happy to have him as a passenger as he tooled around the ranch in his four-door Chrysler, because “[he] hated to open gates and would put up with anyone handy ... as long as he didn’t have to get out of his car.”

Now and then, a cowboy might be called upon to engage in a heroic effort. At 17, for example, Hyde was charged with the task of moving a herd of 600 cattle to the ranch, where he would spend the bitter winter, assisted only by two other young hands and a “chore man” in his 80s who followed up in the chuck wagon. Along the way, a monstrous storm threatened the lives of the cowboys as well as the cattle. When World War II drew the older cowhands into service, Hyde writes, he was plagued with guilt at the thought that he was “probably the safest man in America.”

Some of the book’s most enlightening moments are the oblique glimpses of a cowboy’s workaday life. He might have a favorite mount -- the author’s was a horse called Whingding -- but he needed a string of six, one for each day of the workweek. Ranch hands also were sent into the fields to mow, rake, pitch and stack hay. A hundred tons, explains Hyde, was only sufficient “to take fifty cows through the winter.”

Recreation was mostly a rough-and-ready affair. A favorite hangout was the local Montgomery Ward store’s saddle department, which was run by the reigning world champion bronco rider. A cowboy who was skilled or lucky or both might win a few bucks at a rodeo. On Saturday nights, the cowboys would visit the perfumed ladies who worked at places like Irene’s or the Iron Door, where they “sought out what they had come to town for,” as Hyde delicately puts it.

But even the wildest ones subscribed to a code of chivalry, especially in the presence of the boss’ consort. “The cowboys were bilingual,” explains Hyde. “They had one language they spoke in her presence and another while chasing a wild cow out of the brush.” But it turns out that his hard-of-hearing uncle’s “old lady” was not quite so genteel. “When I heard [her] in an argument with my uncle, I knew why he took the batteries out of his earphones.”

As a youngster, Hyde needed a stump to lift himself into the saddle, but so did a cowboy called Roy who was “fighting old as though life had gone too fast and there were still places to go and things to do.” It was Roy who taught Hyde how to rope and break a wild horse, a thoroughly practical skill. “Being young or old doesn’t matter half as much as knowing how,” Roy told him. Later, Hyde recalls the day Roy’s horse returned to the ranch house without him. “Roy had been one of the lucky ones,” concludes Hyde, “avoiding old age.”

Hyde eventually enlisted in the Army and saw combat in the invasion of Normandy and in Gen. George S. Patton’s celebrated drive through France, Belgium and Germany. When the war ended in Europe, Hyde volunteered to stage rodeos in the Roman coliseum at Arles, France, while awaiting orders for the South Pacific, a task that occasioned some further heroics because the only available bulls had been trained for bullfighting. “We came up with a sprinkling of suicidal GIs who had rodeoed some before the war and were willing to trying to ride those murderous fighting bulls,” he recalls. “I also took on the job of rodeo clown, whose responsibility it was to draw the fighting bulls away from fallen riders.”

After the war, Hyde returned to the ranch, but started photographing rodeos rather than riding in them. This career choice eventually turned him into a professional writer and photographer, although it did not remove him from harm’s way. One young rodeo clown was astounded at the risks Hyde took in getting close-ups: “Kid,” the pre-Hollywood Slim Pickens told Hyde, “you’re either the bravest man I ever saw or the dumbest.”

“The Pastures of Beyond” ends on a bittersweet note. “Nowadays, with a normal human life span, an old cowboy like me will have said good-bye to about three of his favorite saddle horses or about five of his favorite cowdogs,” writes Hyde, who spends his time on a wild horse sanctuary he established in South Dakota. “Seasons slide into each other, and the wild horses and I grow gracefully old together.” More than a memoir, this book is an elegy to a world and a way of life to which Hyde long ago said goodbye. *