On Coon Mountain

Coon Mountain lies in the Cookson Hills, where the western edge of the Ozark Plateau reaches into eastern Oklahoma. A part of the Cherokee Nation during Indian Territory days, it was home to a rural community mostly of white and Cherokee farmers by the time Glen Ross was born there in 1929--which could have been 1829, for all the difference twentieth-century industry had made. These autobiographical essays tell us what was special about the rural Americans of the Great Depression and...
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Coon Mountain lies in the Cookson Hills, where the western edge of the Ozark Plateau reaches into eastern Oklahoma. A part of the Cherokee Nation during Indian Territory days, it was home to a rural community mostly of white and Cherokee farmers by the time Glen Ross was born there in 1929--which could have been 1829, for all the difference twentieth-century industry had made. These autobiographical essays tell us what was special about the rural Americans of the Great Depression and World War II--about their resourcefulness, humor, and love of the land. How with a minimum of technology, in a subsistence economy, they achieved a life-style and a stature in the eyes of their children that we envy today. Glen Ross's lucid, appealing narratives pull us back into a time when children picked corn, peaches, strawberries--whatever was in season--and trapped animals, when a woman had to make hominy beginning with seed corn grown on the farm, and men met the challenges of horse-drawn equipment as they farmed, hunted, and fished to eke out a living with their families. We have in this book vivid pictures of doughty pioneer relatives and their bygone way of life, including the well-stocked general store kept by Ross's kindly storekeeper uncle (who spoke Cherokee as well as English), a remote mountain homestead abandoned to the encroaching wilderness, a missionary meeting in the midst of a summer thunderstorm, and an eerie midnight raccoon hunt in once-familiar woods transformed by darkness. As Ross grew up, the depression deepened. The family traveled five days in a 1936 Chevrolet to Oregon to escape the hard times, only to return a year later to their homestead. Their battery-powered radio toldthem of the war in Europe, even as it entertained the women with the early-day soaps. Eventually, war work was to draw the family out of the hills and into the second half of the twentieth century. Readers will laugh as Ross