Elizabeth Lester Ward - No Dudes, Few Women

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Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.

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NO DUDES

FEW WOMEN

BY

ELIZABETH WARD

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER

TO MY SON

IRVING ROSS STUART, USN

... because the boiler-room of a fighting ship is a far cry from the wide desert spaces ...

BY

LIFE WITH A NAVAHO RANGE RIDER,

FRANK WATERS

Who of us are not familiar with the romantic happy-ending of our favorite stock movie? The American Cowboy and the Girl of the Golden West married at last, and riding hand and hand into a technicolor sunset which outlines an Arizona cactus and a feathered Indian on the horizon.

This is the beginning of Elizabeth Wards engrossing autobiographical book. She did marry a lanky cowhand who reminded her of Gary Cooper. And she did ride away with him to work in the 25,000-square-mile Navaho Reservation in New Mexico.

It is a tribute to her courage and sense of humor that she survived all hardships and disillusionments; and to her sharp eye and tolerant understanding that she won through to a love for the land and The People. This is the real story of a real woman who had what it takes.

A one-room plank shanty, miles from the nearest neighbor. Weeks of aloneness. Cold, heat, wind, and dust. Indians banging on the door any hour. A race between a blizzard and the arrival of a new baby. All these, in a womans account of a womans life in the wilderness, vividly recall the pioneering life of our forefathers.

Yet the time is contemporaneous and significant: hardly a decade ago, during the Navaho stock reduction program of the United States Indian Bureau. In this firsthand account of her husbands activities as a range rider, we see sketched with searing humor the effects of academic bureaucracy upon a proud, resolute people. There in Washingtone are They-Who-Spend-Much-Money ordering them crates of choice, individually wrapped Delicious apples from Washington state, while sixty miles away, along the San Juan, a bumper crop is rotting on the ground. Here are the Nahtahnis , the local Powers-That-Be, taking from the Navahos a large number of their sheep, their sole means of support. And everywhere stand the useless, gaunt, starving horses known as Johncolliers, the symbol of a tragic, idealistic fiasco. Yet here too we observe the efforts of many Government employees to cut through red tape and the bureau caste system to render actual serviceto avoid, as the mimeographed directive states, The tendency to treat these socio-economic factors typologically and as independent variables rather than regionally and functionally tends to obscure in our scientific procedures the significant interrelationships and local variations...

Threading all this is a sympathetic description of Navaho life. The author does not sentimentalize. She shows us the dirt, the lice, but also the inherent freedom, honesty, and vitality of this largest Indian tribe remaining in the United States. Customs, viewpoints, traditions, frequent glimpses of those complex ceremonials we call Sings. The stench of a sheep-dip. The creak of saddle leather. The fragrance of rain-washed sage and fresh-cut cedar. The collective face of a people whose heritage stems back to an America beyond the written memory of mankind.

How fresh, simple, and spontaneous it all emerges from these pages! To remind us of our own heritage, our own years, and that in the hurlyburly of city life, we also can become homesick for the clear, blue skies and wide, peaceful silence, and say with her: Yahteh-hey! It was good!

FRANK WATERS

This is Dans story, and only indirectly mine, so I can write it, even in the face of comments that the public may possibly be weary of clever books by clever girls who have done odd things in odd places. The answer to that is, Im not clever. A really smart gal would have known better than to marry a cowboy in the first place, according to Joe Cline, who was manager of the biggest ranch in Arizona, and therefore in a position to know. And I think an honest account of a cowboys life among the Navaho Indians needs no elaborating.

But you have to be more romantic! a wailing chorus protested. You cant picture things as they are!

Cant I? It seems to need no embroidering, that picture. Not when I remember days when my only knowledge of the Navahos was that the outline of their Reservation makes an extremely wide blank space in the lower section of any road map of the western United States. And not if you think that in these modern days the West exists only in the movies, as I did when I didnt even know from which side of a horse one mounted, or that real cowboys are actually very different from those in the movie versions.

Thats another thing. It might be difficult to convince the average person that it is entirely possible to grow up in Texas without seeing cowboys, or knowing anything about their way of life. But its true. I knew about oil fields, newspaper work, and social service, but I didnt know about cowboys. This is Dans story, as I said, but it is also the story of my learning his way of life. And of the two of us learning about the Navahoswhat we taught them was negligible; what they taught us was immeasurable.

E. W.

My girlhood dreams did not center about a tall knight of the saddle whod ride out of the west and carry me off on a big black charger; they ran more to visions of a rich oil man, whod carry me off in a Cadillac coupe. They came true, too, or nearly enough so; the oil man materialized, and at least a Buick, and two children, all very quickly, and life was fairly well settled until the stock market crash, when the dreams died lingeringly and I found myself back where I had started.

All of which leads up to Dan, and the inscrutable effect of the attraction of opposites. I knew nothing about cowboys or ranches, and he knew practically nothing else. I did know that he looked almost exactly like Gary Cooper, which was enough for me, and that he rode a horse like poetry in motiontall and easy in the saddle, with a certain quiet informality. Everything about him was quiet and sure. There was no way to tell what he thought, or whether he thought at all, because he didnt talk, not then. He remained silent, and he let his audience place its own interpretations upon his silence; interpretations which were almost always flattering, I being the audience. He still insists that I asked him to marry me, and its entirely possible. I was never at a loss for words, but my younger brother would have had a name for that, too. He it was who advised me: Never marry a cowboyif you want to eat regularly! I disregarded that advice, not being too interested in food, anyway. The decision was mutual, and Dan and I were married. This was the beginning of the story, rather than the usual ending.