Western

Maybe it's the fact that The Jump-Off Creek takes place in 1895 and times are hard, hard, hard; maybe it's just the way Gloss wanted her characters, but everyone in The Jump-Off Creek is stiff, dour, reserved, uncomfortable. It got harder and harder for me to read. There is no real joy in this book. On the one side you have Harley Osgood and his companions. They are poisoning cows to attract wolves. Wolf pelts are going for a pretty penny and it's nothing personal. They are just trying to make a living because as I said, times are hard. On the other side, Tim and his partner, Blue, are trying to keep their livestock safe from the poisonings, but even pet dogs are not safe from the strychnine. [Note: heartbreak alert.] In the middle is Lydia Sanderson, a lone (and lonely) widow who has come back to claim her homestead. The Jump-Off Creek borders her property and while the surrounding land needs a great deal of work, she is determined to make her way. ( )

Beautifully written, low-key, with the truthfulness of life itself.

Molly Gloss excels at stories of life on the edge: one of my very favorite novels is "The Dazzle of Day," her beautifully written, low-key and truthful story of a group of Quakers who flee political and ecological chaos on Earth in a generation starship headed for a distant star. "The Jump-Off Creek" reverses the polarity of Gloss' imaginative time-machine, and recreates world of the 1890s Oregon frontier, and the life of Lydia Sanderson, a young widow who has sold up all the baggage of her unhappy marriage and bought a smallholding in Oregon, with little more ambition than, for the first time in her life being her own boss, and keeping body and soul together.

Encounters with her neighbours -- fellow smallholders, scraping a living from the land during a depression that is adding to the general struggle to survive, their wives, who raise and bury children, and long for brief opportunities for female companionship, and "wolfers," embittered young cowboys who scrape a living from the bounty they receive for killing the wolves that prey on cattle and sheep -- build up to a narrative of her first year in her new home on the Jump-off Creek.

I can't think of any way to put it better than the late, Blessed Ursula Le Guin, who described it as " ... the West behind the swaggering and hokum." A marvellous story of the quiet courage that went into the settling of America. ( )

Mollie Gloss grew up in Oregon and often bases her novels on the experiences of her women ancestors, all women of the West.

Widowed, and not particularly sorry for it, Lydia Sanderson heads across the country in 1895 with two mules, two goats and what she hopes is enough food to see her through. She has bought a deed for property in the Blue Mountains of Oregon and plans to homestead on her own. Upon finding her property, she learns it is in poor shape in every way. The first order of business is putting up a fence for her animals and repairing her one room house so that they all can survive the winter. Among the many tasks she had before her was cutting timber, shaving it to shingles and getting them up on the roof to dry it in.

Although warry of the men living around her, she learns to trust Tim and Blue, long time friends who are her nearest neighbors. Former cowboys, they have their own ranch and are willing to share their experience and strong backs when she will let them. Thanks to Tim she makes the acquaintance of a young woman who lives a mile away and only then realizes how much she has missed the company of another woman.

Using diaries, letters and other first documents, Gloss makes the hardships of the frontier and the courageous lives of the women who settled the West seem very real. Still. it's hard to take in the struggles they overcame and how determined they had to be just to survive. ( )

The Jump-Off Creek by Molly Gloss is about homesteading in Oregon in the late 1800s. A woman who has been widowed comes to this remote area, near the Umpqua Mountains to take up her claim. She purchased the deed to an abandoned site so she starts with some land cleared and a ramshackle cabin. Her nearest neighbours are a couple of single men who are raising cattle. This was a very hard life as just in order to survive, she must work all day at tending her goats, improving her cabin, planting and caring for a garden, and clearing the land. She also had to live with the loneliness, insecurity, and the dirt.

The story is told plainly and without romanticizing any part of the life. The author used pioneer diaries, journals and the stories of her own relatives to portray an accurate picture of the hardship that was frontier life. Although there is a story about an on-going feud between a squatter and one of her neighbours, the author really concentrates on the actuality of pioneering with descriptions of branding cattle, milking goats and logging. These descriptions draw a portrait that is very effective at both giving us insight into the hardships but also a glimmer of the slow development of community.

The Jump-Off Creek is an engrossing and moving read about pioneering, a subject I love to read about but am most appreciative that I don’t have to live it. ( )