{"id":691,"date":"2026-10-20T20:24:02","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T20:24:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/?p=691"},"modified":"2026-10-20T20:24:02","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T20:24:02","slug":"a-new-kind-of-western-benchland-by-horatio-r-potter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/?p=691","title":{"rendered":"A NEW KIND OF WESTERN: BENCHLAND, BY HORATIO R. POTTER"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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WHO HAS THE RIGHT TO SUCH HEARTBREAKING BEAUTY IN MONTANA?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Native Americans who migrated across the Siberean Peninsula into the western hemisphere approximately 16,500 years ago?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or the European Americans who, about a minute ago in relative time, took the land for themselves by force of arms, chicanery, the spread of disease, and elimination of the buffalo? Genocide all dressed up as manifest destiny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or the out of state corporations who, since about a second ago, have been buying the land at distressed prices from ranchers, and the the copper mines from individual families, many of whom were the descendants of the original prospectors?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Horatio R. Potter’s Benchland<\/em> is carried by four characters: the rancher Buck McCafferty, a seventy-five year old widower, still grieving for his wife, and his daughter Beth, also devestated by the absence of her mother, and Abe Carver, a copper miner who having survived a catastrophe in a Nevada mine, returns to his adopted home in Montana, and his grirlfriend, Lucile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The back-breaking, seven-days-a- week work of wresting a living out of a small cattle ranch is wearing Buck’s seventy-five- year old body down, but he’s dammed if he’ll sell the ranch that has been in his family for generations to a super wealthy gentleman rancher, essentially a part-time hobyist, who will add Buck’s land to the massive acreage he’s already acumulated from ranchers who have given up. But that’s what Beth wants him to do. Husbandless, her life is passing by. She yearns to escape back east and start a whole new life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abe Carver also wants to work the land. Not the surface of it, but the bedrock underneath. He wants to be there, a hands on guy, using his body and brains to extract the copper that the world needs now more than ever. But he has to wait and wait because the enviros,who are are also from someplace else, force review after review after review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Write about what you know about” is an instruction the gifted Horatio Potter has obeyed. He owns and operates a ranch about 40 miles from Bozeman, Montana and he also owns a house on a pleasant tree-lined street in Bozeman, a town experiencing a rapid change that strikes me as mirroring the change that in the novel upends Buck’s and Abe’s lives. About a decade ago, before I stopped being an educator and turned to full-time writing, I had the pleasure and honor to consult with Headwaters Academy, a wonderful little independent middle school in Bozeman, where Horatio Potter was the chairman of the board. On my first trip there from Oakland where I live, I arrived at Bozeman’s tiny airport after dark. Driving into Bozeman in a rented car, I didn’t see much of the surroundings, just the huge black star studded Montana sky above me. Nor did I get any sense of Bozeman when I checked into the hotel. But in the morning, stepping out of the hotel onto Bozeman’s Main Street, I was suddenly on a movie set! If Butch Cassiday and the Sundance kid had strolled by, guns aready, I wouldn’t have been surprised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until I noticed, looming high above, not far from Main Steet, four huge construction cranes. Nothing about the streets surrounding Main Street reminds of the old west. First there are the tree-lined streets, then further out, office buildings, new hotels, new houses and condos. Bozeman is one of the fastest growing small cities in the USA, expanding from a little over 37,000 in 2010 to a little over 53,000 in 2020. It is not ranchers or miners or loggers who are moving in; its that privileged, monied, college educated section of the populace who the internet and Zoom now alows to live wherever they choose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you are a fly fisherman, eager to fish the iconic headwater rivers, a backpacker or a skier whose neighbors are Montana’s mountains, or parents who want to bring up their children in a setting that is both rural and sophisticated, near an excellent state university, or a writer who wants to look out the window for inspiration, or a landscape painter,wouldn’t you be eager to transplant yourself to Bozeman from, say, Shaker Heights, or Brooklyn, maybe even Greenwich?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of most of my trips to consult with the Headwaters Academy, I took an extra day to explore the area. I’d leave the old west of Main Street, move through the relativley old tree-lined residential section, past the office buildings and the shiny new condos, into open land, once ranched or farmed, where now isolated buildings stand as if dropped randomly out of the sky, and still further into open country, I’d stop and spend time, my imagination churning, at the foot of a gigantic cliff toward which, not so very long ago, Native Americans drove buffalo herds, killing many all at once as efficiently as any modern slaughterhouse. Then I’d head a few more miles to where the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin Rivers meet to form the Missouri River. Just to be there, in that place, beloved of fishermen and historians, just to stand watching the pelucid current, was enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I’d return to Bozeman and eat dinner at one of the several restaurants on or near Main Street that were so trendy they made the eateries in the Gourmet Ghetto of the East Bay where I live seem old fashioned. If I ordered a cheeseburger with french fries I was just as likely to get a lecture about choresterol as I was to be stared as if I were from Mars. No, I didn’t want one of the those fancy, much too colorful drinks that look like a fruit cocktail in a wine glass. I wanted scotch on the rocks – preferebaly without the rocks. I was definitely an outsider.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not so long ago, there was Zane Grey spinning tales about the west, like Riders of the Purple age<\/em>. Then a gajillion shoot-em -ups in one-street little towns, while on the radio the masked Lone ranger shouted, Hi-Yo Silver, Away!, his injun, buddy Tonto riding dutifully behind him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then the wondrous film High Noo<\/em>n, in which Gary Cooper, America’s iconic male, is saved from certain death when his bride of several hours, played by Grace Kelly before she actually married a King, breaks her pacifist oath to save her husband. All in black and white!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then the Bill Goldman’s glorious Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid<\/em>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And both on the page and the screen: Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove!<\/em> Oh my!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, the romance over. Time to get real. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so: Benchland<\/em>, by Horatio R. Potter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read it twice, like I did. It’s even better the second time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WHO HAS THE RIGHT TO SUCH HEARTBREAKING BEAUTY IN MONTANA? The Native Americans who migrated across the Siberean Peninsula into the western hemisphere approximately 16,500 years ago? Or the European Americans who, about a minute ago in relative time, took the land for themselves by force of arms, chicanery, the spread of disease, and elimination […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"newstephenddev","author_link":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/?author=1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=691"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":693,"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions\/693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephendavenportauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}