From Cowboy Trails To Soldier Tales

ISBN: 978-1533005212

Normally, when thebooklight reviews a work there is a specific genre into which the work neatly fits. Dann Slator’s From Cowboy Trails To Soldier Trails is definitely a biography. By that term, what is meant is a work about a person’s life written by the person who is the subject. From that broad attribution, though, one does not get a unique appreciation for what the contents of this book are like.

It might be easier to tell you what this work is not. It is not well written by the laws and rules of conventional grammar. It is not always a work that leads the reader to the next event in a logical way either. It would be easy to dismiss the narrative structure by pedantic notions of what a biography is supposed to usually be, but to do that overlooks what the work actually is and does. Maybe a better categorization might be an oral history by an eyewitness discussing life from their unique perspective and voice. One, after all, does not have to have much book learning in order to have life learning.

What Mr. Slator’s work accomplishes powerfully well is to tell the story of an individual in the early 20th century who is not wanted by his family and so becomes an orphan. Once the status of an orphan is applied, it turns out that many other people also do not want Dann Slator around either and often times tell him so. This eventually makes Mr. Slator wish he was no longer on the planet and the narrative thread that can be found throughout subsequently often features ways Mr. Slator is trying to devise ways to die without actually having committed suicide. As a child, he does not have this qualm, and so tries to hang himself with a noose and is only saved at the last possible moment before he would have been unable to be revived.

Mr. Slator is a young man in Colorado during the 30’s and eventually becomes a cowboy because of his love of horses. Generally speaking, it is clear to the reader that Mr. Slator loves animals in preference to most human beings, but it is not difficult to understand why this is so once one gets a flavor for the kinds of human beings he is encountering. In almost all instances, the things he loves face tragic or terrible ends and frequently he himself is having to fight for existence or is getting injured while trying to stay alive. It is clear that the reason Mr. Slator stays alive has more to do with his guardian angels than any fervent wish of his own to stay that way. Eventually, after enduring the Dust Bowl and the government’s slaughter of cattle and horses on the farm he is working, he goes off to World War II hoping the Japanese will kill him and that he will never have to return home to the United States. His only regret, at this point, is leaving his horse behind.

After many near misses in the army with some incredible stories of his time within the theater of the war and the Philippines in specific as well as in other adjoining areas to communist China, Mr. Slator returns home and finds a lady with which to settle down. Unfortunately, he has trouble with alcohol. Through a chance encounter with Mr. Chick, however, of Chick tract fame, who happened to be at a local church he felt he should go to, he finally finds salvation and begins the process of turning his life around. A big portion of this time is spent on making his own tracts for the prison ministry he feels called to serve along with raising his two adopted daughters.

Eventually, we find Mr. Slator in later life, after his wife has passed on, still advancing the prison ministry although one can certainly feel loneliness for his absent wife within the pages of the writing. This is all after a life filled with what can only be described as the Forrest Gump quality of doing things innocently that just so happen to oftentimes touch or contribute to major differences in the world, which sometimes, in turn, lead to encounters with famous people. Often, some small event Mr. Slator does in the course of his life echoes up and out. To describe these events would be to spoil the surprise of the read, and that would not be something any reviewer would wish to deprive a reader of. Suffice it to say, Dann Slator might be, in many ways, the most famous person you never heard of.

By the time Mr. Slator is in the senior years of his life, he starts to become bothered by the idea that when he dies all these stories he is carrying around will die with him. He does, indeed, find salvation. He helps lead many other people to it. He finds a calling in a world that does not want him. He finds those in the world who are not wanted and tries, as best as he can, to witness about the Messiah to them so that they might also find purpose and change their ways.

Whereas one can read many studied works on the 20th century with all the veneer and re-written, revisionist history, there are details in this work one cannot find elsewhere. No, the work is not in an academic form. Sometimes an idea or two will repeat in the work as if the writer forgot he had said it all ready. On the other hand, we might be better off as a civilization if we could hear from people whose voices do not always carry—in their own words—forms and grammar be damned. If you want to learn what it was like to be a cowboy or in World War II, this is a great work to read. If you want to understand something of grass roots Christianity, this is also an excellent read. If you want to feel important and show off to your friends how cultured you are, though, this book ain’t for you. Move on down the trail, buckaroo.