In 1980 I had the good fortune to find my way to Bozeman and by an unimaginable stroke of luck I even met Ben Stein the editor of what had become my favorite book. Tough Trip Through Paradise is very much also the work of Ben Stein. Ben had gone through the original found writings to form the book. Andrew Garcia and Ben Stein are now gone. But the remains of the story are still here with us. The site of Fort Ellis just east of Bozeman has been excavated and located. The building where Walter Cooper outfitted Garcia is still here on Main Street.The Musselshell still flows.If you take a trip to the Big Hole Battlefield monument you'll see the markings of the battle. A photo of In-Who-Lise hangs in the museum but there's no connection made with the book.
Somehow Andrew Garcia and Ben Stein were able to conserve the essence of the 1870's and take us to that time. Not by telling us how it was but by making us feel it. This was their genius. It just seeps into you. Sit, read and just let yourself experience those times. The west as it was, the indians, and others who played their part will be changed forever in your mind because you will have been there.
And after the first paragraph of the introduction I was hooked: "In 1948 I found the manuscript from which this book was written. It was stored in dynamite boxes, packed solid in the heavy waxed paper that powder comes in - several thousand pages of legal-sized paper, both hand writtena and typed. Also in the collection were newspaper clippings showing Andrew Garcia at meetings of the Society of Montana Pioneers through the 1930's........"
Magnificently edited. A wonderful adventure story, wonderfully written and very readable, about one man's unusual life, which, in retrospect, in many ways was very priveliged... a way of living which could never be duplicated..