The Friday 56,#6

It’s time for  Friday 56!  It’s a book meme hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice. Be sure to visit her blog if you would like to participate!

From Freda’s Voice The Rules:
*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader
(If you have to improvise, that’s ok.)
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don’t spoil it)
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post in the Linky on Friday 56. Add the post url, not your blog url.
*It’s that simple!

Here’s my contribution:

Butch Cassidy was especially forgiven, even admired, by many of the country people in this three-state area because it was well known that his gun had never killed anyone. Butch had been born Robert Leroy Parker to good Mormon parents in a solid, God-fearing community. Despite the fact that the Mormons wisely provided recreation for their young people and sponsor dances in their communities, the atmosphere in a religiously oriented Mormon town was oppressively workaday for a farm youngster who dreamed of the glamorous life of a cowboy.

This is from  The Bassett Women by Grace McClure. It’s one of those books found for sale in National Park gift shops. I buy them thinking that I will read it while driving across the desert on the way to my next stop, but i never do. In fact, I picked this up at Dinosaur National Monument earlier this summer (If you have kids who are obsessed by dinosaurs you should definitely visit. Fossils are sticking out of the ground if you know what to look for while hiking.) It also is near one of the hideouts of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid if you like to follow infamous outlaws of the Old West. And I do. I grew up near Butch’s childhood home and spend a lot of time in his hometown of Circleville, Utah. Since I’ve spent time at the location of the beginning of his story, I like to visit other locations that are part of his legend.  And Butch and Sundance had many hideouts across the West, and one of them is the Bassett Ranch near Dinosaur National Park. This book is the story of the women who ran that ranch, and their story is fascinating in it’s own right. The Bassett Sisters rustled cattle, took outlaws as lovers, and got rid of pesky husbands through divorce.  But little is known about them. So, to combat this gap in my knowledge about women of the Old West, I plan on reading this soon.

Would you read this book? Do you buy books similar to this at gift shops near national parks but never get around to reading them? If you do read them, do you enjoy the book? Please let me know in the comments below. Happy reading!