Now this was a find! During our stay in London we looked around Blackheath before walking through the park to the river (recommended, you get a fabulous view of Docklands with Greenwich in the foreground). Of course we stopped at the wonderful Bookshop on the Heath, a small shop but I certainly felt there were discoveries to be made there. The cover of this book at once caught my eye and I quickly knew it was one for me.
I have to say though that maybe the cover is the nicest thing about this book! Haydie Yates does not really tell a story, instead she bombards you with an endless stream of anecdotes, some of which are so far fetched I began to doubt how much of the book is true.
After a trip to Europe, Haydie and her husband Ted quickly decide city life is no longer for them. They quit their jobs, sell up, pack their belongings and drive to Wyoming, where Haydie has worked before, on a dude ranch (a farm that caters to tourists and offers such activities as riding and camping).
They buy land (and cattle) near Sheridan, build a basic log cabin and buy horses. There is an endless stream of visitors, two of which, Lester and Hallie, pitch their tent near them. They strike a deal:
'They could get logs off the mountains for us and then help us build a barn for them.'
Their first winter is very hard, they are quickly snowed in and have a hard time remembering what date it is. 'We had caught New Year's Day on the radio just before the batteries petered out. That's how we knew it was February when our food ran short.'
Here is an example of Haydie's weird anecdotes: they build a sleigh for the horses to pull to take them into town to buy provisions. On the return journey the runners fall off the sleigh, after which the horses pull the box until that too falls apart. They then find their old car, which the horses pull until that falls apart too. I found myself thinking: yeah, right.
It is unclear what Haydie and Ted do themselves in running the farm. They employed people to cook, to put up buildings, start a garden and an irrigation system etc. Sadly Haydie does not tell us anything about that, the garden is just suddenly there. Their income comes from selling cows. That is until they find themselves publisher and editor of the local paper. This is another improbable tale: they are staying in town after the birth of their son Ted when a man walks in who announces that they will be running his newspaper from now on.
The next few years they spend the week in town, running the paper, and the weekend at the farm (which is presumably run by employees). We get lots of anecdotes of Sheridan's excentric inhabitants.
There is the banker's wife: 'She always appeared at our modest after-dinner poker parties dressed in a British Guardsmen dress uniform which set off her trim boyish figure very smartly. The effect however was slightly marred by a small beaded reticule clutched in her hand in whose interior reposed a flask of gin.'
At first a nurse is hired to look after Ted, later a tutor arrives to teach young Ted and Eames, Haydie's son from her first marriage. A schoolroom is added to the property for this purpose.
Haydie observes: 'It was not easy to conform to the white-collar conventions of a small-town newspaper editor's job, and furthermore I had no will to do so. (...) Most of the sparse female population in the cow country is tied to the cookstove and cradle. (...) I wanted to do it or I probably wouldn't have. But it was a big quid to chew.' It is hard to get used to office life: 'I was conditioned to an eighteen-hour day - each one of them a serious skylark - wrestling something, throwing something, riding something, pushing, pulling, lifting, or hanging on for dear life.'
Changes in federal rules and regulations start making life difficult for Haydie and Ted and, in need of money, they head back east in search of jobs. They find a place to live outside New York. The book ends with their departure for Florida, where 'There are great chunks of land in remote corners that nobody has ever lived on, new and rugged and rich.'
An amusing tale, but don't expect to get much information on how to run a farm in the American West!
I could not find any more information on Haydie Yates. As far as I know she did not write any more books. She passed away soon after finishing this book, in 1950. Her son Ted became a documentary filmmaker. He died while covering the Six Day War in the Middle East in 1967.
Add found in the book
