Last Cattle Drive (PB)

by Robert Day

Book Overview

First published in 1977, Robert Day's The Last Cattle Drive--an instant bestseller and Book-of-the-Month Club selection--is now a modern-day Western classic. This raucous, rollicking novel of a cattle... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0700603441
• ISBN13: 9780700603442
• Release Date: September 1987
• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Great Characters

Anyone who has lived around cattle, horses, and the people who work them knows these characters under a different name. Same is true of the dialog. The author has done a great job bringing these things to life.

A Personal Favorite

I originally purchased this book because it was required reading for a college course. Much to my suprise, it became one of my favorite books. The story revolves around a cattle drive taking place during the 1970's. Though exagerated, the characters ring true - particularly if you've ever spent any time in midwestern farm county. I've loaned this book to so many people the cover has fallen off, and I've always received positive feedback from those who have borrowed the book. It's a great read!

delightful literature

At last, a fiction set in Kansas that gets the state out of the old "Wizard of Oz" trap! I grew up in the Hays area and moved to Lawrence several years ago, so it was sheer delight to see places I've always been familiar with, e.g. Betty's Cafe in Gorham, Dirty Dan's, Brookville Hotel, gain notice in popular fiction. This book captures so well the contrast between eastern and western Kansas -- the snobs versus the hicks, the suburbs of Johnson County against the flat horizon of Gorham, the rushed noise of mechanized diesel, such a part of the industrialized world, against the solitude and stillness of the High Plains. The people around the Hays area whom Day describes are based on real folks, and in some cases ARE real folks, though I think he exaggerates their crudity and profanity excessively. I recall working for ranchers and farmers who remind me a lot of Spangler Tukle. And the main character's clash with a film crew is based on the trouble that the crew of "Paper Moon" had with locals when they shot that movie in northwest Kansas in the early 1970s. As the cattle drive commences and works its way toward Kansas City, the reader is swept along the plains landscape adjoining I-70, beautiful little spots that most tourists miss as they set their cruise controls, race through the state, and see only enough to confirm their prejudice of Kansas as a flat, character-less place. The ending seems to synthesize the two worlds of country and city, with cowboys driving their herd into the KC stockyards over expressways and interchanges, and city people lining the route to welcome them as heroes. To my knowledge, no such cattle drive ever took place, and I suspect the residents of KC, Missouri would react more with horror than with the fanfare presented here to see tons of hoofed beef clopping down their streets. But this book, after all, is fiction. Thanks, Prof. Day, for what hopefully will become an enduring classic on twentieth-century Kansas and Kansas people.

Laugh out loud funny

I am a native of Kansas and am familiar with the part of Kansas where this story takes place. The book had me laughing all the way and the characters ring true. A real gem.

Hilarious classic!

This book is true classic. It is a hilarious account of cattle drive across modern day Kansas. The book is written from the perspective of an city boy who has just graduated from college and takes a job teaching at a small town in western Kansas. He takes a job with a local rancher for extra pay and ends up driving cattle across Kansas. Its more than about cattle but a lot about the characters found on the Great Plains. The route will be a familiar one to Kansans but the drive will be one never to forget for anyone else reading the book.