Author: Chilton Williamson (Chilton Williamson)

I have lived now in the West 20 years, two years past the age of liability for military service (if there were a Western States of America, and if they had a draft) and one year short of my political majority and the suffrage. Although you can have spent half a century living in a...

The Northwest strikes me as a better place than the Southwest to live in—fewer people, better hunting, plenty of invigorating Arctic air and the cold dry snow—but the Southwest, probably, offers greater advantages for the Western writer. The presence of the Spanish and Mexicans, the more developed Indian populations, and the clashes between these and...

“Hear that,” Dick McIlhenny said. He removed the headset and handed it to me, while holding the Bionic Ear cupped toward the woods. “I hear it.” “What does it sound like to you?” “Footfalls, coming this way. Look at that horse.” The gelding stood at attention behind the trailer, his body rigid and his ears...

At four-thirty in the afternoon Papa’s on North Mesa Street in El Paso was preparing to open for business. Although the place looks like a student hangout and is located near the university, the clientele is largely well-to-do professional men who can easily afford the nine, twelve, and twenty-dollar cigars displayed in a wide tall...

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. Speaking from experience, rather than poetic frenzy, I say both. The spring winds blowing white at home in Wyoming blow red down here in New Mexico, a howling gale that seems to be returning to the Dustbowl the errant Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas...

In a world filled with perplexity, inscrutability, and conundrum, two major mysteries at least are not unfathomable. What do women want? The answer has had human beings stumped from the time of the origin of species, yet the answer is perfectly plain: they don’t know. The question of what environmentalists want is of more recent...

The crickets which stopped singing at Thanksgiving have come inside at last, along with the spiders and an occasional skink. The leaves dropped from the pecan trees around the beginning of December, and crews are at work in the orchards beside the Rio Grande gathering the nuts. The bermuda grass is brown in the backyard,...

Up in Oregon a woman was bathing in a river. The transistor radio she had set on the bank played as she swam. She was still swimming when a movement farther along the bank caught her eye. She turned and saw Elvis disappearing into the woods on her side of the river. At the same...

Historians have been arguing since the 1950’s whether the West ought to be understood as a frontier, a region, or the seamless westward extension of Eastern and Midwestern America. Beginning in the 1980’s the debate intensified, owing to the work of the so-called New Western Historians who like to think that they started it all....

Back in the 70’s when the publicity stunt called Hands Across America was in the planning stage Kenny Rogers announced his intention to assume a position on the western boundary of Texas in order to be able to hold hands with the state of Arizona. I was reminded of the story last summer when a...

It was time to look into getting hold of two barrera seats if we were going to attend the coming corrida at the Plaza Monumental de Toros in Juárez. From Las Cruces I telephoned Jim Rauen 190 miles away in Belen and tapped into what sounded like a conversation between drug dealers speaking in heavily...

The first thing you notice is the heat and the intensity of the light, glaring on the white-painted adobe walls of Mesilla where Indian rugs, sun-rotted and sun-faded, hang behind deeply recessed windows barred with iron. Stepping out from the coolness of San Albino on the plaza after Mass into the blinding Sunday noon had...

East, east-southeast, southeast: rugged mountains covered by lichenous forests breaking from the red desert floor, sky islands of the American Southwest. San Carlos Lake ahead of the wing, and beyond it the dark mass of the Pinaleno Mountains; southwest, the distant horn of Baboquivari snagging the summer haze. The Chiricahua Mountains crowded the Arizona line...

From 9,000 feet the triangulating mountains, snow-covered and hazy with spring, showed on three horizons bounding the broad brown desert of the Green River. Leveling at 9,475 feet we saw the steam plume from the power plant. Lake Viva Naughton, and the white scratch of clay road running toward the mountains north of town. The...

For three weeks the wind blew hard on the desert and the nights were very cold. The wind dropped, the days grew warmer, and the snow line retreated on the mountains. The winds came again and the red sand stiffened between the clumps of yellow grama grass before the gray clouds moved out, and then...

The house key on its leather thong had nearly worn through the corner of the mailing envelope in which it had arrived. The gate latch was a loose affair operated by another thong, of a piece with the first, running through a circular hole in one of the upright planks that made the wooden gate....

Neither Art Antilla nor I felt like getting drunk. We stood away from camp on the cliff edge above Devil’s Hole canyon, drinking black coffee while the Commissary Commandos huddled around the campfire with their whiskey bottles and someone pitched a bowling ball over the talus slope to the creek bottom 800 feet below for...

Sheep Mountain like a fallen tombstone lay on the horizon under a sky thickening with gray cloud ribbons and white lenticulars. It was too cold for snow yet and rain had not fallen for weeks in the mountains. The wind raised small storms of dust on the pale surface of the clay road, and whirled...

The man and the bull stood facing one another across the yellow sand midway between the center of the ring and the barrera. The bull was smaller and less ferocious than the big fighting bulls; the man was young, not out of his teens, and instead of the matador’s costume of embroidered silk he wore...

It is possibly a good thing that more writers are not sportsmen and outdoorsmen. The relationship between art and sport is a complexly curious one, since a case can be made for a sporting element in writing that is, of course, wholly cerebral (though not necessarily noncompetitive and nonviolent). In writing, as in the nonliterary...

Horses, like people, are naturally lazy and essentially perverse; habitually unready or unwilling to do what duty requires of them. But in midafternoon of this hot, still day on the desert mine came willingly when I called them, perhaps in hope of double rations or else recalling idyllic mountain parks and alpine basins covered with...

Fontenelle Creek ran fast and brown at the crossing, the waves flashing backward, flooding islands of willow that bent before the strength of the water to show the gray undersides of the slender leaves. I left the jeep at the trailhead on the near side of the ford and commenced walking, taking along only binoculars...

The cloud was no bigger than a puff of white smoke above the western horizon at a point equidistant between the Henry Mountains and the Book Cliffs, It was a nice cloud, a point of interest in an otherwise banal sky, soft blue paling around the edges. I tamped down the cookfire I had built...

It felt as strange flying west—not south, not east—from Salt Lake City as if the earth had reversed its rotation and were spinning in the opposite direction. Basin and range, range and basin: the long barrier mountains were heavy with snow, but now in early March the desert separating them lay bare, dramatizing the topographical...

There is a point along New Mexico Route 6, on the edge of the West Mesa of the Rio Grande, from which as you look east the whole of the river valley between Albuquerque and Socorro—a distance of about 120 miles—appears, backed by the Sandia, the Manzanos, and the Pinos mountains. Obscured by the bosque...

“The Sahara of the Bozart,” more than anything else Mencken wrote about the South, won him the undying hatred of the former Confederacy and its spokesmen. The essay, which first appeared in 1917 as a newspaper column and was subsequently expanded for inclusion in the next volume of the Prejudices series, was attacked at the...

The carcass lay across a slab of rock at about the level of mv knees. I estimated its undressed weight to have been around 700 pounds: substantial for a two-year-old elk. I had managed to position it so that when I drew the guts out they fell clear of the slab onto the rocks below....

As the supernatural world is eternally at work behind events in the natural world, so the world of man-in-nature continues to operate behind the synthetic, abstracted, and unreal world of man-outside-of-nature. For that reason alone, I shall always hunt elk. (Though of course, I really don’t need any reason.) On the afternoon before the start...

Last summer this expansive sagebrush basin at the lower end of the Wyoming Range made the annual encampment of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, spawn of a congestive civilization. Fifteen thousand strong, they organized according to their various pursuits: drinking, drugs, nudity, fornication, and—for all the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department knows—cannibalism and human sacrifice....

It is 145 road miles from Belen to Gallup, New Mexico, a railroad town immediately east of the Arizona border on old Highway 66 and adjacent to the Ramah and Big Navajo Indian Reservations where my grandmother Williamson taught school early in the century, returning to Ohio after a semester or two when an amorous...

A town without a saloon is like a woman without a heart. I made Blanding, Utah, before sundown, checked into the Best Western Motel, and rang up the front desk from my room. “Is the Elk Ridge Restaurant within walking distance from here?” “It’s just half a block away.” “Do they have a liquor license?”...

We had gone barely 25 yards when I had a feeling of the woods dissolving around us, and then we were hanging our toes over a bare rock ledge at which the world dropped away. From 20 miles out Black Mesa appeared to float in space like a long dark cloud bisected by a pillar...

In the American Southwest nothing looks to be of a piece but the landscape and the infinity of sky overhead. The vast frame of the earth and the geomorphic scheme that shaped it lie plainly revealed through a scrim of sparse vegetation so that a single landmark is sufficient to supply, organize, and integrate in...

Past Robles Junction where the road coming north from Sasabe meets Highway 86 we crossed onto the Papago reservation heading west toward the Indian capital of Sells, no lights ahead save the constellation of the Kitt Peak Observatory lifted high against the night sky by the bulk of the Baboquivari Mountains, and almost no traffic....