Jo Fussell is a hell of a storyteller – this account of a life as a cowboy and railwayman in Texas and the rest of the American south is rich in period detail and gives a great insight in to the changes that took place in America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Joseph Fussell was born in a country where memories of the Civil War were still vivid, and lived through the Great Depression as well as the Spanish-American War and two world wars. As grandson and editor Bob Fussell says, the greatest dilemma facing him when reviewing the memoirs was deciding whether his grandfather was a murderer or an embellisher. He chose to believe the former.

Fussell’s life was characterised by itchy feet and an unwillingness to stay in one place for very long. Leaving school in his early teens, he worked as cattleman, ‘cow puncher’, stable hand and many other jobs besides. Moving around the south hitching rides on the railroads, he worked numerous jobs, some of which took him in to the lawless borderlands between Texas and Mexico. While there, the death of a friend at the hands of nine Mexican ranchers led him on to a quest for vengeance which he planned and executed with ruthless precision – he describes the events, though spares us gory details. Later, Fussell finds himself commissioned as a Texas Ranger and clearly implies that he took the law in to his own hands on a number of other occasions.

Fussell had found jobs on the railroad throughout his life, and for the second half of the book, he’s a railwayman rather than a cowboy – now married with children, and in poor health, he continues to move around a lot. This goes on for a while, but it’s when he settles in Winslow, Arizona, as yardmaster for a switching yard that things get really interesting. If you’re not interested in the complexities of running a railway, this might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but when Fussell retires from active service to a desk-bound job, his involvement in the local community and politics comes to the fore – by this time he is effectively a town elder, and as the Great Depression bites he does his part to help people less fortunate than himself.

Fussell is an engaging and interesting narrator – he is often very articulate, despite his professed lack of education, though sometimes the cowpoke vernacular comes through (Hitler is a “kraut-eating, beer-drinking, goose-stepping squarehead paperhanger”). The sense of how much he crammed in to his life permeates every page of this book, and reinforces the impression we get of how much America was changing and maturing during Fussell’s lifetime. He may not have been a cowboy for his whole life, though he probably thought of himself as one, but he was an unbridled spirit. I may not agree with him on everything, but I can respect him nonetheless. A very enjoyable book, that his grandson has done well to bring to the attention of the wider world.

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