Way back in the last millennium, I owned a bookstore in downtown Cheyenne, and it was the sweetest of gigs!
Surrounded by all those books as soon as I opened the door in the morning, I was happy as a cow in clover.
I named the place Joe Pages since I had the first hipster coffeehouse in the store, too.
And I paid special attention to having a well-stocked regional and Wyoming book section.
Customers, especially tourists and newcomers, would drop in and ask me to suggest a good book or two that would help acquaint them with all that is Wyoming.
My eyes would brighten, my mustache would twitch and I’d say, “Man, I have just the books for you!”
John McPhee’s “Rising From the Plains” was always the first book I’d present to someone curious about Wyoming.
“Rising From the Plains” basically recounts a road trip around the Cowboy State that the author took with Dave Love, the godfather of Wyoming geology.
In its pages, you watch Wyoming form as a young Earth contorts, twists and folds under primordial tectonic pressures into the landscape of basin and range that we see today.
McPhee’s masterpiece is the best book to have in your saddlebag for a jaunt around our state.
And Love knew more about what your eyes see, what is under your feet and how it got there than any man who ever lived.
Then I direct a customer’s attention to Jim Galvin’s “The Meadow” for the sheer beauty of its prose. Galvin’s descriptions of the mountainous landscape along the Wyoming/Colorado border south of Tie Siding speak to the heart, not the head.
It would qualify as real estate porn in a glossy sales brochure if it came from the pen of a lesser writer.
But “The Meadow” doesn’t compel the reader to want to buy the land described.
Rather it makes you want to dismount your horse, sit on a rocky hillside and watch the shadows of wind-driven clouds move like maps of small countries across the flank of the buckskin colored prairie.
Asa Mercer was a journalist embedded with the Invaders of the Johnson County War, and published his account of that fiasco as “Banditti of the Plains.”
It’s my next recommendation for a reader curious to know more about the Cowboy State.
Set in Wyoming’s open range days a couple of years after statehood, “Banditti of the Plains” was a burr under the saddle of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, the instigators of the Invasion, and they tried like hell to suppress its publication.
The book describes the political and economic tensions in newborn Wyoming between classes and government that still prevail today.
Understanding the roots of those tensions will help the reader understand the political climate in Wyoming now.
Finally, no Wyoming bookshelf is complete without a copy of T.A. Larson’s “History of Wyoming.”
Annotated and comprehensive, Larson’s book is the Rosetta Stone for knowledge about our nearly-square state.
Generations of U.W. history students fed on this mother’s milk of Wyoming’s past, and are better Wyomingites for so doing.
Larson parses the forces that shaped Wyoming up to and slightly past the midpoint of the 20th Century. It is indispensable reading for anyone with Steamboat on their license plate.
If I could convince a customer to walk out of Joe Pages with those four books in hand, I’d feel like I’d done my job for the day.
I would know that my new friend left my store better equipped to understand and love the state that surrounded them.
I’ll probably get as much hate mail for this column as I do for some of my political screeds, but I stand by every word I wrote.
Irate readers will likely hit me upside the head with their favorite Wyoming book, and claim, “You forgot to mention this one, you idiot!”
I’ll get frowny-face emojis in the comment section from readers who say, “You commie, how can you ignore…” and then give me the title of their most cherished book about Wyoming.
Good!
If you have your own canon of Wyoming literature and it feeds your soul, then more power to you.
The important thing is that we read deeply about Wyoming and try to understand her.
Here endeth the lesson.
Rod Miller can be reached at RodsMillerWyo@yahoo.com
