It was bookseller Sam Weller who told me Pearl Baker has died in a Price nursing home. Baker was the author of "The Wild Bunch at Robbers Roost" and "Robbers Roost Recollections." She was 85.
I saw the news as a sad comment on the way people turn authors into celebrities one day and ignore them the next. But I also saw the news as a chance to give a worthy writer some notice.When Paul Newman and Robert Redford made the movie "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," people couldn't get enough of Pearl Baker. She'd grown up on the actual Robbers Roost ranch, and her recollections of stories she'd heard about Butch and the boys - told in her straight-forward, dry, Western brogue - always charmed reporters and researchers. (A curator of a wax museum even came by her home to chat and have lunch.)
As the interest in Butch Cassidy waned, however, so did Baker's notoriety. But she felt the vocation of a true writer and kept plugging. In 1972 she mentioned several books she was completing, including "Over Canyonlands With Jim Hurst" and a book on wildlife, "It's for the Birds." But the Robbers Roost stories were what people wanted to hear.
"You could say that we Robbers Roosters have made our mark in the world," she wrote in an afterword to her popular "Robbers Roost Recollections," "and we think it is because we had a different heritage. We had learned to hit things another lick, and we had wider vision than other people."
Pearl Baker was the product of a time and place. She embodied the hard-scrabbled West of the rancher, and she wrote about her life in the beautiful, bold, bald, honest cadences of Western American speech. Writers will still come down the pike who write in a voice akin to Pearl Baker's, but they'll be writing from the head, not the heart. Her voice rose out of her insides and her heritage.
When she passed away in Price, part of an era passed with her.
Being a stockwoman from pioneer stock, she had a way of convincing a reader she was telling the truth - no small feat in an era of hype. She was a woman witnessing her life and times, trying to get things right.
This, for instance, from her "Recollections:"
In telling of these people who meant most to us, I might step on some toes; if so, remember that some of the stories I hear of my childhood make me see red. Only lately I was much offended by one that included our cursing each other. There was not a word of truth in it, it was a total misrepresentation and very unfair, but since we did use profanity constantly and casually, the poor man thought he was telling the truth. He just didn't know the rules, one of the strictest of which, and the most likely to bring down the punishing wrath of our elders, was to use even one swear word to or about another person - it simply wasn't tolerated.
Pearl Baker will be missed.