The Hi Lo Country, 60th Anniversary Edition

By Max Evans and Johnny D. Boggs

At its heart, The Hi Lo Country is the story of the friendship between two men, their mutual love of a woman, and their allegiance to the harsh, dry, achingly beautiful New Mexico high-desert grassland. The story is told by Pete, a young ranch hand, whose best friend is Big Boy Matson. Together they drink, gamble, fight, work, and rodeo. They both fall hard for a married woman—the attractive, bored, and dangerous Mona.

When it was first published in 1961, the novel was both a celebration and an elegy. It captured something jagged and authentic in the West, and it caught the attention of Hollywood—notably Sam Peckinpah, who spent twenty years trying to make a movie of this multilayered and plainspoken novel. It would take another twenty years for Martin Scorsese and Stephen Frears to finally do it. Now in a special 60th anniversary edition, The Hi Lo Country continues to tell a quintessential story of the people and the land found in the American West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780826362544

Max Evans

Max Evans, novelist, artist, scriptwriter, former cowboy, miner, and dealer in antiquities, resides in Albuquerque. He received the Owen Wister Award for lifelong contributions to the field of western literature from the Western Writers of America.

Book preview

I WATCHED THEM LOWER Big Boy Matson into his grave. It was a large coffin, and yet I half expected it to burst apart from the weight and size of the man. Not only his physical bigness but from the whole of his being.

I stood above the crowd of big-hatted men and dark-dressed women. I stood alone. Not very long ago I had been one of them, but I had left and gone to another part of the land. The people were fast becoming strangers to me as I to them; but the land, the great swelling earth under my feet, was mine, and I belonged to it even as the man it now reclaimed.

As the preacher said his last words and the coffin sank out of sight, I looked down from the wind-stroked hill to the town, Hi Lo, New Mexico. It didn’t seem to be affected by the death of its strongest son. Maybe like the rest of us the event had been anticipated for so long it had lost its impact.

Even I, his best friend, felt no sadness. No tears. There was only a vacancy, as if the bicep of my arm had been torn away.

He had died very young, but nothing seemed to have been wasted. This was strange, for he had had so much to give. The violence of his death had been no surprise, but the way it had happened was. It was as if a village had been vacated because of an impending flood, and had been destroyed by an erupting volcano instead.

I walked to my pickup truck, got in, and looked back at the scene for the last time. I said, Goodbye, you old son of a bitch; I hope they have broncs in hell.

The town of Hi Lo squatted, hugging the earth as if at any moment the constant wind would blow it into the dust of the arroyos. But as doubtful as it appeared about its geographical position, it seemed even more uneasy about its social standing. Its frame and adobe houses were scattered untrustingly over a relatively large area. Long ago, in the early 1900’s, the homesteaders had settled the land and merchants had come from far places to build the town. Rock and mud houses had sprung above the natural contours of the mighty grass-covered hills like trees in an orchard.

The inhabitants of these homes filled the town with trade, and the councilmen planned for a city. Building jammed against building, while in the country, across several million acres of grassland, neighbor joined neighbor on every 160 acres.

The plows dug into the grass, and horses lunged against their traces, drawing the furrowed lines behind them. Trees were planted, wells dug, children sired, and the torn land was sown with beans, corn, cane, and wheat.

Some prospered for a time. The crops were harvested and sold. New rooms were added to the new homes. New plows were bought, and bigger and stronger horses to pull them. The men with the best crops bought land from those with the poorest. Little by little, unnoticeable at first, the number of farms shrank as the size of a few others increased.

But then the land rebelled against this violation—although in her own subtle way she assisted the strong in overtaking the weak by deceit: gradually at first, then with mounting force, the furrows blew level in the drying wind. The deserted homes fell, one rock, one adobe at a time. The men who survived let the plows rust away, and stem by stem, acre by countless acre, the grass returned. It was a land meant for livestock. Cattle country. And so in the end it was.

The great ranches took hold. Thousands upon thousands of cattle ranged its hills, its mountains, its brush-covered canyons. The people were scattered thinly across the land, and the town, most of its trade gone, shriveled to only five hundred inhabitants.

It was a lonely land, and its people came to the dying town of Hi Lo to visit, to talk cow talk and horse talk, to get drunk, to gamble, to whore around. Hi Lo was the hub of the limitless grasslands and wild gorges. But the land had left its curse upon it too. For over three hundred days a year the wind drilled at it and sucked at it as a reminder of the desecration of the plow. The men of the ranches remembered and understood, and suffered the wind with amazing forbearance.

Hi Lo has its business section, though small, like all its counterparts. Every shop of the town fronts on the highway that runs parallel to the railroad. In the summertime business is brought by tourists who stop for gas, food, or liquor between the widely scattered oases of New Mexico.

In the fall the ranchers drive their cattle into the stockyards and load them on the trains for Denver or numberless feed lots in Texas, Illinois, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The profits determine the well-being of the ranchers, the cowboys, and the citizens of Hi Lo throughout the sharp, bitter winter.

The everlasting wind naturally creates great thirst. Hi Lo has two establishments for the relief of this torture. The Wild Cat Saloon is on the south side of the highway, and directly across the street stands the Double Duty Saloon. The two places eye each other like two young herd bulls. The former is managed by a short overstuffed man called Nick Barnes. He serves his drinks slowly, methodically, invariably saying: Drink up, you bastards, and order another round. You didn’t come to stay, you came to play. The latter is managed, so to speak, by Lollypop Adams. No one knows the reason for this name. Lollypop is tall and skinny, like a reared-up greyhound, and all bones except for his stomach, which has a slight swelling. This slight paunch comes from joining the boys too often in their festivities. Everybody comes here to drink and play cards, tell lies, and get out of the goddam wind. A man really has to be in bad shape to be thrown out of one of these places. Business is not always good, and fist fights from pure boredom and wind-tense nerves are as common as gnats after a pig’s rump.

Down the street a way is the general mercantile, Hi Lo’s supermarket. Everything a man needs to fight this country can be found here if he has the money or the credit. Nearly everyone has credit at least for a year—from one shipping time to the next. Mitch Peabody, a beady-eyed little man, owns the store. But it’s his wife, twice as heavy, who runs it and sees to the profits. Rose is her name, and her bountiful breasts are her fortune. One rancher said that in the past twenty years he had bought over a thousand pounds of female breast from the Peabody mercantile. Rose, when weighing nails, beans, sugar, or anything else that’s sold by the pound, always manages to have one breast on the scales. This is partly unavoidable because of their size. But when Abrahm Frink once said, Two dozen bolts and a pound of teat, his credit was cut off forthwith.

There are three gas stations, one with a fair-to-less-than-average mechanic, and a small hotel with a restaurant, The Collins Hotel by name. And there is a moneylender, Steve Shaw, who is not exactly a fixture of the town because he owns a ranch and spends as much time in the country as he does at his office in Hi Lo.

There are others, of course, but it is not these I am mainly concerned with. They are so close together they no longer have individual personalities, but have intermingled and welded into one lone identity—just simply Hi Lo, New Mexico. It is the people scattered out across the land that make Hi Lo whatever it is. They are strong and weak in varying degrees. They all contribute something to the town, something of themselves and each in his own manner. Hi Lo may not see some of these people for months. But she waits, knowing they will come. I think the one she looked forward to seeing most, and dreaded most, was Big Boy Matson. But this is not just the story of Big Boy or myself or the woman Mona, with her terrible gifts of love and guilt and grief. No, this is not enough to give you a complete picture of the Hi Lo country. I have to include many others—cowboys, cattle barons, farmers, inventors, artists, sheep-herders, thieves, drunkards, killers. All these are the spokes projecting from the hub, which is the town.

An eagle flying straight out above Hi Lo as high as his wings could carry him would see red and white cattle, heads down, grazing in every direction. To the south, on the edge of the desert, were innumerable sheep, with the herders alert for the wild marauding creatures lurking around the edges of the flock Here the grass struggles to move out into the eroded desert, and the cactus and sagebrush thrust themselves back in pincered stabs at the grassland. It is a static battle, and has been so for thousands of years.

To the east and the west, for thirty or more miles, the grammar and buffalo grass carpet the land except in those places where flint-hard malpais mesas ripple across the earth like huge, flattened snakes. The same grasses blanket the rolling hills for fifty miles to the north. Here the hills mesh with mountains, and the cedar and piñon change to pine and spruce. All the smaller animals of the open range live here—the coyote, the bobcat, the fox; here, too, are the bear, the deer, and the mountain lion.

Although Hi Lo has tried hard to act civilized, it can never quite escape the wildness of these wild creatures. Often during Sunday-evening prayers at one of the churches the monotonous, mumbling tones of the congregation will be shattered by the yapping, unsynchronized howling of a pack of coyotes hunting right to the edge of town. And then on the opposite side of town another pack will answer, and yet another some distance beyond. On and on.

So is it with the people of this land. They listen, and hear the call of the beast.

THE FIRST TIME I SAW BIG BOY was at a country dance. I was giving it. It was a short while after the dust bowl of the early thirties had reduced almost everyone to the same low level. We were all broke and half starved. But now the grass was beginning to return, and a man could latch onto a dollar here and there. I’d hired a couple of Spanish musicians; one sawed on a fiddle and the other pounded a guitar. Everybody was dancing, stomping, yelling, drinking homemade whisky and raising general hell.

Almost everyone had come in a wagon or on horseback. There were just a few old cars and a couple of pickups outside.

Big Boy came up to me, introduced himself, and said, If you ever need any help around here, just yell.

I didn’t talk to him again that night; but he lit in and had as fine a time as anyone. It did strike me as odd that a total stranger should make such an offer. Later I learned how much he meant just what he said.

I had heard about the Matsons when I first came here, years back, but I’d never met any of them before. Big Boy had two younger brothers, his mother and an old grandmother on the Matson Outfit. When Big Boy was just a kid his father had died from a bullet in his lung. The bullet had been put there twenty years before by a rancher in a dispute over the exact location of a fence line. Just the same, it was the bullet that finally killed him. I heard that Big Boy’s grandfather had died the same way down in Texas for whipping a man with a loaded quirt. Instead of lasting twenty years, though, he’d died before his heavy frame hit the ground.

Big Boy had grown up fast, taking over a man’s job at fourteen and learning to do it right. Being head of a family at that age was quite a calling, and I think that even then black things hovered around him like an invisible spray—felt but never quite seen.

Time passed and things gradually got better. The price of cattle moved up; the rains came in grass-growing torrents; and a man could begin to plan once more. I hadn’t seen much of Big Boy for several months. We were all too busy trying to make a living. My next meeting with him was because of a horse.

I had bought a four-year-old sorrel from the C-Bars. He had been broken by their foreman and had a good rein and stop on him. He traveled smooth, with a running walk, and was already developing good cow sense. It was about a month before I got to bring him home with me. I saddled him up and started for home. I noticed some healed-over spur marks on his shoulder that weren’t there before and I wondered about them. In a couple of days I stopped wondering.

I rode the sorrel (and that’s what I called him, Old Sorrel) out after some springing heifers about two miles from the house. I took him to a shallow, muddy spring to let him water. I put one leg up over the swells of the saddle and lit a smoke. I was about half asleep. Old Sorrel finished drinking, raised his head, and when he pulled his foot up out of the mud the suction made a popping noise. That’s all the excuse he needed. Down between his front legs went his head, and a thousand pounds of horse flesh jumped right straight up in the air. I was caught completely off guard, and on the third jump I went down on my left shoulder into the mud.

By the time I got up and scraped the mud out of my eyes, Old Sorrel had bucked to the top of the hill and was now in a dead run for the ranch house. I was afoot with a two-mile walk ahead of me. I may say that I was unhappy with that horse.

Every time I rode him something drastic happened. The mere shadow of a fence post would start him bucking, and the son of a bitch always threw me. He bucked crooked, twisting, gut-wrenching jumps that I just couldn’t handle. He was more of a horse than I was a cowboy, and that’s all there was to it. I tried every trick I knew. It didn’t do any good.

Now I understood about the spur marks. The foreman was mad because his boss had sold Old Sorrel, so, before I came after him, he deliberately spoiled the horse by spurring him viciously in the shoulders and making him buck. It was a shame, too, because he had the makings of a fine animal.

I told Lollypop Adams, the bartender at the Double Duty Saloon in Hi Lo, about this and I guess he told Big Boy. Anyway, Big Boy and his brother Sykes, who was just a year or two younger than him, rode up one day. People called Sykes Little Boy. He was as tall as Big Boy but much lighter.

Pete, he said, I hear you got a spoiled horse on your hands.

Yeah, that’s right. He’s out there in the corral now.

Let’s go look at him, he said. We all went out to the corral, and Big Boy walked around Old Sorrel twice.

In a few minutes he asked, How much you want for him?

My money back, I said.

How much is that?

Seventy-five dollars.

I’ll take him, he said, and counted out the money.

I was sure glad to make that sale. Big Boy proceeded to unsaddle the black he was riding.

You going to ride mine home? I asked.

That’s what I bought him for, he said.

Little Boy hadn’t said anything but howdy since they got there. But he got down, tightened up his cinch, and made ready to haze Old Sorrel if need be.

Big Boy caught the horse and tied him to the snubbing post in the center of the corral. Then he saddled him up, climbed aboard, and started off. I waited for the action to begin, but nothing happened. That horse just plain knew better. Between him and Big Boy it was no contest.

He said quietly, Let’s go, Little Boy.

His brother, leading the black, opened the gate and they rode off together. I stood watching them go, feeling kind of funny. The picture of him saddling that outlaw horse with such ease and total confidence was stamped on my mind.

Though Big Boy was only about five foot eleven, he gave the impression of being taller, and he looked thirty pounds heavier than the two hundred he actually weighed. An impression of terrific reserve power just barely held in check at all times, was given by the way he talked and moved. I thought of him as being dark, but this wasn’t so: his hair was light brown, and he had a strange kind of skin, almost white but with just the faintest touch of olive, that never tans or burns but always stays the same, indoors or out. He had a