Essays from West of 98: Pointing North

New Year's advice from Teddy Blue

E.C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott was a young man in the proverbial glory days of the Old West cowboy. As a teenager, he drove cattle up the trail from Texas to Montana. His experiences were recounted in a 1939 memoir called “We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher. It was a rare first-person account of the cattle drive era and was an important addition to the literary canon after decades of pulp Westerns that were much closer to fantasy than fact about the cattle drives.

For some reason, I thought of Teddy Blue on the morning of January 2, while I sat on my kayak on Stamford’s College Lake. I was drinking coffee out of a thermos, reading Wendell Berry, and listening to the birds (both the natives settling in for the day and the overhead travelers passing through). I was considering the new year and all that it entailed, including my essays for the new year.

It was a beautiful day, about 60 degrees and bright, but it was also overcast and windy. A front was on the horizon and it would blow some of the Llano Estacado’s dust through Stamford later in the afternoon. The wind was just strong enough to keep my kayak drifting on the water, so I jammed the stern into some cattails to keep it still while I pondered all the things I had to ponder.

As I finished my reading of “The Wild Birds” (a tremendous short story that takes place entirely in the office of Kentucky country lawyer Wheeler Catlett in an argument with a client over estate planning, but that’s another essay), the wind started to pick up. I thought of all the topics I intend to write about in the year to come. This comes as no surprise, given the nature of my recent writing, but there will be a focus on building and strengthening the concept of community and all that it entails.

Then I thought about how best to get started on that writing project.

As I did, the wind started to blow my kayak towards the north. It was mostly in the direction of my pickup, so it was not altogether unhelpful. Curiously, I thought of Teddy Blue’s memoir and its title. Teddy Blue is well regarded for sharing the hardships of the cattle drives, the fun times that cowboys had, and the mundane work that came in between the extremes. He was not particularly trying to entertain a reader, he was merely recounting his experience. The title of his memoir is significant in that regard. It was neither melodramatic nor designed to catch the buyer’s eye. It merely told the goal: pointing the cattle north towards their destination.

As I thought of the year 2023 for West of 98, Stamford, and rural America, I pointed my kayak north. It had a poignant feeling, at least to me. Teddy Blue and his compatriots pointed the great herds of cattle north, headed for the then-unspoiled grasslands of Montana. The work was occasionally disastrous, sometimes fun, and full of hard work and mundane routine. So, too, is the work of community building. It can be fun and rewarding. It can be exhausting and discouraging. There is much hard, mundane work in between those extremes. So long as we keep the herd pointed the right direction, it brings us a step closer to the goal.

So as 2023 begins, I am setting out to continue that hard work of community building, knowing what it entails. I hope that you will do the same in your own community or otherwise share the ride with me. A new year is upon us. We’ll point it north.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to West of 98 wherever podcasts are found.