A rancher, writer and retired English professor, talking about life on the plains. That's some of what readers will get when they pick up a copy of the new book Gathering Strays. We asked KPR Commentator Rex Buchanan to review this work, written by Jim Hoy and published by University Press of Kansas.
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KPR Book Review of Gathering Strays: Stories from Kansas and the Southwestern Plains
By Rex Buchanan
A few years ago, a friend of mine, who had just moved to Kansas, went to the Symphony in the Flint Hills. When he got back, he said that he “sat next to an interesting guy named Jim Hoy.” He got lucky. There’s nobody better than Jim Hoy to provide an introduction to the Flint Hills, or maybe the state of Kansas.
Jim is a retired English professor at Emporia State. But he grew up in a ranching family near the little Flint Hills town of Cassoday and is still engaged in ranching there. He knows Chaucer AND cattle. All of that is on display in a new book of his from the University Press of Kansas called Gathering Strays: Stories from Kansas and the Southwestern Plains.
These are mostly a collection of articles from a newspaper column that Jim wrote over the years, sometimes with co-author Tom Isern. So, maybe you’ve seen some of them. But to have them all collected in one place is a real boon for readers. Because you might have missed some of these stories, or forgotten them.
For instance, he writes about Trail City, a cowtown just west of Coolidge out in far southwestern Kansas. I’ve driven through Coolidge lots of times over the years, but I didn’t even know Trail City existed until now. Similarly, his reflections on the little cowtown of Elgin, down in Chautaqua County, brought back my memories of visiting the place in the mid-1960s. Back then there were stories about cowboys who would sit on the Oklahoma side of the border and shoot out windows in buildings on the Kansas side, all with impunity because the Elgin sheriff couldn’t cross the state line. Elgin called itself as a town too tough to die. Today it pretty much has.
Jim writes about a farmer near Chanute who had a monkey, which reminded me of another monkey story. I was helping measure water levels in southwestern Kansas, not far from Johnson City, when one of the guys on our crew encountered a landowner with a monkey riding shotgun in his pickup. That monkey was named Jasmine. I gave a talk in Johnson a few years later and people there reported, sadly, that Jasmine had passed away. Maybe farm monkeys are more common than I thought.
Jim’s article about Home on the Range, the Kansas state song, is enlightening and evocative. He calls Home on the Range “the most melodious, most poetic, most well-known state song” in the country. He is obviously, unabashedly in love with this place and its culture, writing with the careful, practiced eye of somebody who has covered a lot of territory and has stories to tell. Just like a cowboy, maybe.
If you’ve spent much time in Kansas, this book will increase your appreciation for the state’s people and their history. And if you’re new to Kansas, like my friend who went to the Symphony, you’ll get a first class introduction to this place we call home. There’s no place like it.
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Commentator Rex Buchanan is a writer, author and director emeritus at the Kansas Geological Survey. He lives in Lawrence.