Overview

Celebrated folklorist and author Jim Hoy has spent most of his life living in the heart of the famed Flint Hills of Kansas and documenting and celebrating his fellow Kansans and plains folk. Like rounding up stray cattle in a rolling pasture, Hoy has gathered over a hundred stray stories, tales without a single theme or unified narrative, and rounded them up here for the very first time. Branding these stories in sections like Cattle Towns, Outlaws, and Cowboy Music, Hoy’s vignettes teach, excite, charm, and instill a deep pride in anyone fortunate enough to have lived on the Great Plains. In Gathering Strays, Hoy gives us a collection of stories about Kansas, the Great Plains, and Western life that reflect his life-long love of the land, experience, and history of the region. Hoy introduces us to folks like Elmer McCurdy, a failed train robber whose arsenic-embalmed body went on tour and made money for the undertaker, and Ame Cole, who scolded Russian Grand Duke Alexis on his table manners. Writing as an easygoing storyteller, Hoy covers familiar areas like rodeos and cattle drives, takes us from Dodge City to Beer City and everywhere in between, explains why Kansas has the best state song in the nation, and expands our picture of cowboys with stories of Australian drovers, Black cowboys, and Mexican vaqueros.Throughout, his easy-to-read yet authoritative style describes the people, places, and events that make the region so distinctive and celebrated. Gathering Strays will be hailed by anyone interested in the heroes and villains, towns and ranges, and myths and legends of the West.

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9780700634101

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Reviews

Growing up on ranches in the Flint Hills of Kansas, Jim Hoy has spent his life riding and writing. He leads us on a fun, information-rich tour of the people, places, and events of the Old West. We meet memorable cowboys, outlaws, and other frontier folk and explore cow towns, ranches, rodeos, and more. Saddle up and enjoy the ride! --Richard W. Slatta is professor emeritus of history at North Carolina State University and author of The Cowboy Encyclopedia, Cowboys of the Americas Jim Hoy is a fine storyteller with deep roots in the Flint Hills of Kansas and the Great Plains. This connection with the old days and old ways of the West gives him a perspective to interpret the history of the Great Plains. Anything he's written is well worth reading, including this fine book. --Jim Garry is a storyteller and the author of This Ol' Drought Ain't Broke Us Yet and The First Liar Never Has a Chance Gathering Strays is Jim Hoy's amble through a lifetime of stories that didn't fit in any of his other books. Already known for his history of cattle guards and the definitive chronicle of cowboy life in the Flint Hills, Hoy is a careful scholar and natural storyteller who turns his considerable attention to those true tales most Kansans have likely never heard before. Here you'll meet horse thief Hurricane Bill Martin, the terror of Wichita; hapless outlaw Elmer McCurdy, killed in a gunfight in 1911 and whose mummified body went on tour as a carnival attraction for the next six decades; performer Buddy Heaton and his trained buffalo Old Grunter; eccentric rancher and practical joker Henry Mudge, who used chicken blood to fake murders; and sixteen-year-old Minnie Walkup, who in 1885 got away with poisoning her middle-aged husband for the money. This is the kind of book you read not just for the stories, but also to spend some time in the gentle company of Hoy, a native Kansan who makes you feel at home in the Sunflower State, no matter where you're from. --Max McCoy, author of Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River

Author Information

Jim Hoy is professor emeritus of English, Emporia State University, and director emeritus of the Center for Great Plains Studies. Among his many books are My Flint Hills: Observations and Reminiscences from America’s Last Tallgrass Prairie, Flint Hills Cowboys: Tales from the Tallgrass Prairie, also from Kansas, and, with Tom Isern, Plains Folk: A Commonplace of the Great Plains.

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