“Coming of Age in the West”: A Review of Destined to Ride Alone by R.G. Yoho

 

(Naples, FL: Speaking Volumes, 2016). ISBN: 979-8-89022-307-4

It was at the West Virginia Writers Conference in 2012 that I first met Western writer R.G. Yoho. We’ve stayed in contact ever since, as he’s steadily gathered awards for his ten classic Westerns, including this one, written for young audiences. Not only am I a lifelong fan of Westerns on the screen and page; I love and write in numerous genres, which are a special type of literature where the tropes are not only expected—they are the criteria by which the reader judges the writer’s specific contributions.

While I was reading Destined to Ride Alone, I was also reading the seventeenth book in Louis L’Amour’s Sackett saga and Comanche Moon, the second book in Larry McMurtry’s Gus and Call tetralogy. Although they are each writing for different audiences, Yoho, L’Amour, and McMurtry are all masters of the Western trope.

Destined to Ride Alone (the title itself is the trope of all Western tropes) takes as its centerpiece the journey of Jimmy Yeager, a parentless fourteen-year-old who rides the fabled Orphan Train to the American West in 1860, in the hopes that he will be adopted by a welcoming family. For reasons left unstated, Jimmy remains unchosen as the other orphans, one by one, are placed with families at stops along the route.

Providence (smiles? scowls?) on our hero in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where Jimmy’s chosen by a gruff, mannerless farmer named Bates, who’s adopted from the Orphan Train before. The fate of the previous boy is tantalizingly NOT what it seems in Bates’s matter-of-fact response to queries about what’s transpired. As you might imagine, Jimmy’s more a slave than adopted son as he adapts to the relentless and back-breaking work required of him on Bates’s farm. Bates’s wife, a melancholy but kind (and of course attractive) younger woman named Esther, comes to Jimmy’s assistance now and again—at their mutual peril.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. But the beauty of Destined to Ride Alone is that it stops well short of the terminus of its seemingly inevitable trajectory and takes a turn that is both surprising and ultimately as heart wrenching as if Jimmy’s story had never deviated at all. It is here that Yoho shines most brightly in the proud tradition of Western novelists by giving us a warts-and-all study of the vast spectrum of human nature (the extensive array of characters is often what I love best about Westerns). For most of the middle of the book, Jimmy is navigating a sea of greed, deception, lust, and abuse of power and privilege. He has no choice but to grow up quicker than any teenager should.

After Jimmy is pushed from the frying pan into the fire, he exits Iowa to seek his fortunes elsewhere, while keeping an eye on his past, which seems determined to come back and haunt him (another beloved Western trope). After Jimmy arrives in St. Joseph, Missouri—at the time of the firing on Fort Sumpter and the founding of Kansas—the action unfolds with well-known Western history as its backdrop, which was value added for me. Jimmy takes a job with the short-lived, long-mythologized Pony Express, right before it’s supplanted by the telegraph companies (there’s always progress at a cost in a proper Western). Through his eager answer to the call of adventure, he meets James Butler Hickok in Rock Creek Station in the Nebraska Territory (on the Oregon Trail), where the soon-to-be nicknamed “Wild Bill” is a stockman. Jimmy gets there just in time for a historically accurate was-it-murder-or-self-defense situation involving Hickok that mirrors one from which he himself is trying to run. 

As Jimmy forges a future with one eye on the past, more of the Western genre’s most beloved tropes unfold, including the pretty girl with the wealthy father, the drinker–gambler, the dangers of the prairie, heroism, and the ubiquitous Pinkerton Detective Agency. All these tropes and the ones I mentioned earlier are contextualized by the sure hand of a veteran writer of Westerns, with all the sights, sounds, smells, and sociocultural details long-time readers of this most American of genres rightfully expect. The violence (physical and emotional) is both detailed and real enough to carry the narrative forward while still being more than appropriate for teenagers.

If you’re looking for an inspiring and educational YA novel about responsibility, honesty, and achieving your aspirations, I highly recommend Destined to Ride Alone. Jimmy is an example of how you retain the light within your soul when called upon to stand against humanity’s darker inclinations.  And it’s not just a great first book to introduce YA audiences to Westerns—it has a place on the shelf of long-time, adult fans of the Western like me.