Hollywood the Hard Way: A Cowboy's Journey

A young cowboy accepts a bet to ride from Oklahoma to Hollywood. He has to do it in 50 days, taking only what he can carry on his horse. He crosses raging rivers, endures blistering sandstorms and survives gunfights with murderous horse thieves. No, it's not the latest Larry McMurtry novel. It's a true story that Dickinson, an Oklahoma native, first heard from a bartender in Montana. She subsequently tracked down Jerry Van Meter, the now aging cowboy who made the amazing journey back in 1946; a year later, after extensive research and interviews with Van Meter, she wrote this charming narrative. The bet was between Jimmy Wakely, a Hollywood singing cowboy, and Van Meter's grandfather, a hardened old Oklahoma rancher. Disagreeing about whether cowboys were doomed to extinction, they chose young Van Meter to settle the matter. After a series of ordeals, including a harrowing trek across the Mojave Desert, Van Meter reached California only to find a landscape transformed by a surging post-WWII economy and filled with highways, department stores and sprawling subdivisions. Van Meter realized that he may have won the bet but lost the point: Billy the Kid was never rousted from a nap by the California Highway Patrol; Wild Bill Cody never rested his horse in the end zone of the Rose Bowl. Dickinson's compelling adventure story doubles as a wistful eulogy for a vanished way of life. (Sept.)