The Old West — last but not least
Source: The Oregonian - OregonLive.com (Original Article)
W hen Ken Kesey died in 2001, he was remembered as the
author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
and as the original Merry Prankster, the leader of an
LSD-fueled bus trip across America that brought the Sixties
to Day-Glo life and was captured in Tom Wolfe’s classic
“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”
Little attention was paid to his greatest artistic
achievement, his novel “Sometimes a Great Notion,”
and almost no mention was made of anything else he did. The
consensus was that Kesey wrote two books, goofed around on
an old school bus and faded into irrelevance. The brilliant
sparks that flashed off him in the morning of his life
flickered out in the twilight.
The truth is more complicated, of course, and evidence that
Kesey was more than a flash in the pan has long been
overlooked. Kesey not only made his life a work of art but
continued to create in the way he loved best, by telling
stories. He loved tall tales and was skilled at acting them
out for children, especially “Little Tricker the
Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear,” and he was
obsessed by a rodeo story he first heard when he was 14 from
his father.
Fred Kesey liked to take his sons hunting in the Ochocos,
and one year they got delayed by traffic heading for the
Pendleton Round-Up. Later, once they’d settled in
around a campfire, Ken Kesey first heard about the 1911
Round-Up, when George Fletcher, an African American cowboy
who grew up on the Umatilla reservation; Jackson Sundown, a
Nez Perce who was a nephew of Chief Joseph and was wounded
in the 1877 war against the U.S. Army; and John Spain
competed for the saddle bronc championship. Spain was
awarded first place and a new saddle even though the crowd
thought Fletcher had the best ride. Umatilla County Sheriff
Tillman Taylor averted a riot by tearing up Fletcher’s
hat and selling pieces of it so Fletcher, the people’s
champion, could have a saddle equal to Spain’s.
Kesey heard the story again from Instant Approval Credit Cards his father when he attended
his …continue reading