* Nailed it, to a Capital T !

* "Both outsiders and sometimes Texans themselves, often seem to expect if not prefer the stereotypes instead of the actual complexity and diversity of Texans." Don Graham
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From the Washington Post
New in Paperback
Sunday, January 8, 2006; BW12

The myth of rugged Western masculinity so vital to television truck ads -- and American presidents -- has taken a few hits lately. Turns out cowboys can be gay ("Brokeback Mountain"), prospectors can be criminals ("Deadwood"), and most settlers didn't know what the heck they were doing (historical record). But myths die hard, as three new paperbacks demonstrate.

On January 1, 1870, 10-year-old Adolph Korn was kidnapped by Apaches while he was tending sheep with his twin brother along the Llano River in the Texas Hill Country. The stepson of a former German confectioner who was barely scraping by as a shepherd, Korn was restored to his family three years later. But afterward, writes Scott Zesch in The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier (St. Martin's, $14.95), "he refused to sleep indoors. For a while, he even lived in a cave like a wild man. He ate raw meat. Now and then he took his rifle and disappeared into the hills for several days, never explaining his absences when he returned." Zesch, a descendant of Korn, sets out to unearth the story of this boy who left his heart with the Apaches who captured him. Along the way, he discovers that Korn's story is far from unique: Many children were stolen from white settlers in the area, often adopted into Indian families and even trained to be warriors for the tribe. Interweaving Korn's story with those of other white Indians, as they came to be called, Zesch tells a compelling tale of desperate life on the frontier. "If western movies have underplayed the harsh living conditions . . . they've also exaggerated the bravery and self-reliance of the farmers who lived there," writes Zesch. "When Indians came around their homesteads, the settlers . . . seldom stood and fought to defend their homes if they had a chance to hide or escape."

The mountain men lionized in Win Blevins's Give Your Heart to the Hawks: A Tribute to the Mountain Men (Forge, $14.95) would probably have sympathized with poor Alfred Korn. Originally published more than 30 years ago, Give Your Heart mourns the loss of those who "outside the authority of any sheriff, beyond the help of the U.S. cavalry or anyone else back in the States, all the way off the map . . . rode, walked, floated, and crawled virtually every inch of the West. They learned the plains down to the last buffalo wallow, the mountains down to the last side canyon, the deserts to the last hidden spring." Blevins, a novelist, has taken their stories -- all fully documented, he says -- and dramatized them. The reader can get a sense of what it felt like to be John Colter -- who had traveled with Lewis and Clark -- as he ran naked from Blackfoot warriors, eventually walking 250 miles in 11 days without food to safety. Pretty bad, but Hugh Glass topped him by crawling 300 miles after a grizzly mauled him and his companions abandoned him for dead. Blevins's mountain men are nearly supernatural not only in their survival skills but also in their ability to "look at a trail and tell which tribe made it, how many of them there were, what mission they were on, whether they were going to it or returning from it . . . and where they were now." Only the settling of the West could bring these men down.

No matter how settled and civilized Texas gets, though, it will always resist the dimming of its myths. "Both outsiders and sometimes Texans themselves," writes Don Graham in the introduction to Lone Star Literature: A Texas Anthology (Norton, $19.95), "often seem to expect if not prefer the stereotypes instead of the actual complexity and diversity of Texans." Graham, a literature professor at the University of Texas at Austin, aims to remedy the situation with a sweeping collection of work from 20th-century Texas writers. It's an impressive group. Larry McMurtry, whose well-received Crazy Horse: A Life (Penguin, $13) has just been released in paperback, makes an appearance with an excerpt from his novel The Last Picture Show . Mary Karr, Katherine Ann Porter, Dagoberto Gilb, Rick Bass and Donald Barthelme also contribute. The book is roughly organized by geography. In the western section, O. Henry spins a tale about the legislature trying to buy some homegrown art, while the southern section includes a snippet from Robert A. Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power about the hard lot of a Texas farm wife. There's also a collection of pieces on the Kennedy assassination -- Joe Bob Briggs's "How I Solved the Kennedy Assassination" is particularly noteworthy -- and another about Latinos along the Mexican border, which features Sandra Cisneros's chattily tragic " La Fabulosa : A Texas Operetta." All in all, the anthology is as broad and deep as the great state itself.

-- Rachel Hartigan Shea
source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/05/AR2006010501695_pf.html