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Riding the Red Beast West is part history of place, part oral history, and part lyric memoir that recounts a family’s generational experiences and a boy’s adolescence on the Kansas prairie in what might be seen as the waning years of the American frontier. With tongue in cheek the author throws his rope and saddle in the back of a wagon and invites the reader along on a journey across the Great Plains of the Dust Bowl years of the 1930’s, the war years of the 1940’s, and the restless 1950’s to experience great adventures, absurd comedy, and shocking dramas played out on a vast prairie stage. With the Plains as the great metaphor, Rickard beckons you in, and just when you fall into the idyllic sense of bliss of his prairie paradise you are hit in the face by a drunk cowboy swinging a log chain over his head in a parking lot. Red Beast West skillfully balances conflict and reflection. Rickard contrasts the dreamlike impressions of the Great Plains with shocking events and gut-wrenching scenes. The drowning of a crippled boy at Horseshoe Lake, the hunt for a monster snake, a bull rider pronounced dead three different times in his life, the murder of a U.S. Marshal, and a disastrous summer storm are but a few that build narrative tension and ensnare readers in a spellbinding grip. Like sorting through a foot locker filled with old boots, Rickard pulls characters from his past who thrill, dismay, and sometimes shock, people who created dreams and schemes in a wild time and savage place, many who became legends and others who live only in this book. People such as his Uncle Buck, 103 year old cowboy, who dances in and out of the past as if he were rounding up strays. Pearl Banks, the son of a slave, local dogcatcher and shoeshine man who touched the lives of everyone he met. Clyde Cessna, who built and flew the first airplane in his part of the country and created an empire. Cannon Ball Green, who drove the stage through blizzards at the risk of losing finge
