The Primal Yoke
Tom Lea. Dottie Haskett at Rainbow
Lake, Cloudrock Mountains,
Wyoming, September 3, 1946.
Illustration for The Primal Yoke. 1960.
Watercolor and ink on illustration
board.
15.75 x 8.5"
The King Ranch was published in 1957. After the long-drawn stint of searching, prodding, checking, compiling and stating documented facts pertaining to real persons involved in actual events, it was downright delightful - it was like ringing freedom’s bell - to be a novelist again. . . . The new book was about snow, not sand; about spruce, not mesquite. I began it by inventing, utterly free from documented fact, my own range of high Wyoming mountains. I named them the Cloudrocks. . . . I made them musing on a faraway afternoon with the Sung Master’s Mountains, Kwangsi and Wyoming, infinite circle of sky, feet planted and spirit aspiring. . . . I fastened the view of the Cloudrock Mountains over my drawing table and referred to its topography daily while I wrote The Primal Yoke.
- Tom Lea, A Picture Gallery.
