Non-fiction writer, Ralph Moody, wrote autobiographical books about his life with horses and cattle, through the good days and the bad times, in Northwest Kansas and Southwest Nebraska.
Moody’s stories start on a Colorado ranch in a book called “Little Britches: Father and I were Ranchers.” His tales continue in Cedar Bluffs, Oberlin and McCook in “The Dry Divide” and “Horse of a Different Color.”
After “Little Britches,” Moody’s life continued without his father, who died in 1910, and is told in books called “Man of the Family,” “The Fields of Home,” The Home Ranch, “Mary Emma & Company” and “Shaking the Nickel Bush.”
When one reads the “Little Britches” series, it’s easy to wonder why Ralph didn’t stay a rancher. We know he prospered at ranching and that he loved. It. The reason is that he wanted to marry Edna, his Medford sweetheart, and she refused to marry a farmer. He went to Kansas City to see if he could learn to support a family in town, and discovered he could. They married, and in the late 1940’s they moved to northern California. He told an interviewer for the “New York Times Book Review”, August 6, 1967, “My goal in writing is to leave a record of the rural way of life in this country during the early part of the twentieth century, and to point up the values of that era which I feel that we, as a people, are letting slip away from us”. (This information was gleaned from “Something About The Author”, Vol. 1, p. 162)
A book reviewer from Kansas City, wrote this review of “Little Britches” in 2000, “I read this book after my 9-year-old son finished it for school. The lessons and values that Ralph Moody learned growing up are so good and true — even if sometimes they were learned the hard way. Mr. Moody’s book teaches wonderful values like responsibility, respect, honesty, hard work and commitment, and support of the family.”
Stop by the library and check out these books about midwest living in the early 1900’s.
