Williamsburg Regional Library

Holding fire, a reckoning with the American West, Bryce Andrews

eng

autobiography

illustrations

no index present

non fiction

Holding fire

1317311131

Bryce Andrews

a reckoning with the American West

Son of a pacifist and conscientious objector, Andrews moved from Seattle to Montana to tend livestock and the land as a cowboy. When Andrews inherited his grandfather's Smith & Wesson revolver, he felt the weight of the violence braided into his chosen life. Other white men who had come before him had turned firearms like this one against wildlife, wilderness, and the Indigenous peoples who had lived in these landscapes for millennia. This was how the West was "won." Here Andrews chronicles he journey to reshape one handgun into a tool for good work. He began to ask questions-- of ranchers, his Native neighbors, his family, and a blacksmith who taught him to shape steel--- in search of a new way to live with the land and with one another. In laying down his arms, he transformed an inherited weapon, his ranch, and the arc of his life. -- adapted from jacket

adult

Reckoning with the American West