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    The Lost Frontier: Images and Narrative
    The Lost Frontier: Images and Narrative
    The Lost Frontier: Images and Narrative
    Ebook233 pages1 hour

    The Lost Frontier: Images and Narrative

    By Gerry Spence

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    About this ebook

    A visual autobiography and portfolio of one of the West’s famous trial attorneys. 

    The Lost Frontier features a generous and dazzling collection of the author’s own paintings and photographs, vividly embellishing his story of growing up in the Depression and his evolution as an attorney and advocate for the disenfranchised. Most importantly, it uniquely documents his life in and relationship with his beloved state of Wyoming. With an unabashedly iconoclastic view of how things are and how they should be, these images and words could only have been created by Gerry Spence.

    Gerry Spence is a well-known trial attorney who has tried and won many nationally known cases, including the Karen Silkwood case and the defense of Imelda Marcos. He also founded the Trial Lawyers College, which established a revolutionary method for training lawyers for the people. He is the author of sixteen books, including the best-seller How to Argue and Win Every Time, and has been a frequent commentator on television, including serving as legal consultant for NBC covering the O. J. Simpson trial. He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with his wife of forty years, Imaging.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGibbs Smith
    Release dateSep 4, 2013
    ISBN9781423632917
    The Lost Frontier: Images and Narrative
    Author

    Gerry Spence

    Gerry Spence has been a trial attorney for more than five decades and proudly represents "the little people." He has fought and won for the family of Karen Silkwood, defended Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, and represented hundreds of others in some of the most notable trials of our time. He is the founder of Trial Lawyer's College, a nonprofit school where, pro bono, he teaches attorneys for the people how to present their cases and win against powerful corporate and government interests. He is the author more than a dozen books, including The New York Times bestseller How to Argue and Win Every Time, From Freedom to Slavery, Give Me Liberty, and The Making of a Country Lawyer, and is a nationally known television commentator on the famous trials of our time. He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

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      Book preview

      The Lost Frontier - Gerry Spence

      Going?

      Getting Together

      These pages reveal an old man arguing, remembering, dreaming and surrendering to his fantasies. The product is sometimes irrelevant and often irreverent. It includes unwashed comments about life, about shame and fear, and about ideas that float in uninvited like flies in the winter. It makes no claim to a disciplined structure.

      Like life itself it is a careless stream of consciousness; that is, it displays the unorganized way in which we live. It admits to interruptions, to changes of mood, to memories that are no longer purposeful and often painful, to ideas that are both foolish and at times offensive. I do not seem to care. At this age, the next paragraph, yea, the next sentence or word may be my last. So why dillydally about it? Why not say what one wants to say when one wants to say it?

      Following are a couple hundred photographs. Most came into being in the same helter-skelter way. I remember where some of the images were taken. Some not. Ah, yes. So it is.

      I do not apologize for this. No, not at all. I have come to believe that the greatest gift we can give one another is something authentic, something not tainted by convention and fashion or the need to be accepted. If we could only tell one another the truth about ourselves we might grow to love one another. I find it difficult for a yearning soul to embrace the artificial covering behind which most hide themselves. I am not interested in artificial coverings, yours or mine. I am looking for the stark, for the raw, for the unpretentious, for the unfeigned. But to find it I must first find it in myself.

      Few will read these words. That is acceptable as well. Those who do, and who stay with me, will be those who have trudged, run and danced down some of the same ominous paths through this frightful forest we call life. And those who are patient enough or innocent enough to read these words will perhaps be offered questionable gifts. It is the gift of one human saying to another, I know what you mean. I have been there too. It is a gift that cuts through loneliness and joins us together. And a certain joy comes seeping up from that joinder.

      You have a right to ask questions of an author. Perhaps your questions might sound like this:

      "You show us remnants of the lost frontier where you were born, grew up and were educated and have spent your life. You’ve been stuck in that state like a minnow spawned in a small bowl. What did living more than eight decades in Wyoming have to do with how you became more or less famed for your wars in the nation’s courtrooms as a defender for the poor and the powerless?"

      Perhaps you’d even ask, Once we’ve absorbed these photos will this book touch us in any rewarding way? I say no. The value, if any, will not come from these pages or these photos. The value will come from you.

      Let us start with the idea of joy. Joy is a feeling that comes popping out of the self like an exploding kernel of popcorn in the popper. One requires heat to pop it. But all the heat in the universe cannot create popcorn without the kernel of corn. Joy is the product of one’s kernel submitted to the heat of the experience. Perhaps this book will provide heat.

      Joy and art are connected. Art is a gift from the artist to his audience, but it is also a gift back from the audience to the artist. Such reciprocal gifts nourish growth in both. And growth can nourish joy.

      Let me warn: I do not intend to show you that which you have seen countless times, to the point that what was once gaspingly gorgeous has become yawningly mundane. Mankind understands beauty in the same way that religion and politics are served up to the young. Here you will be given the opportunity to redefine beauty for yourself; that is to say, a chance to connect to your own lost frontier. And discovery breeds joy.

      Beyond waving all of those red flags let me further confess: My mother wanted me to become a preacher; that is to say, she wanted to give me to God. I protested. In the enlightened years of youth I thought that God was there to serve me. Yet as I consider the architecture of this book I find that I have never stopped preaching, not as a fiery young prosecutor, a father, the author of a bunch of books and a courtroom advocate for people and causes. So why should I stop preaching now? I have axes to grind. I might just as well grind them.

      Still, if you are tempted to proceed, do so at your risk. And should you find something here that enlivens or challenges, enrages or even faintly amuses, if, indeed, you discover something in these pages that sheds a candle’s dim light on your own life, such will bring joy to me. If we approach this journey together with minds uncluttered by the endless appraisals of those who pretend to know (and know little), we may discover something of the underside of Wyoming’s history, or even vague vestiges of art born in forgotten places. And we may find passing solace from realizing we are not alone in rejecting some of the jargon and clichés that make up the proclaimed value system of America. And if it should matter, these pages will tell secrets never before told on this old man. If you will be gifted by none of this, do not lament your loss. The making of this book has gifted me. It has brought me to understand that even in one’s late life one can continue to learn and grow, for which opportunity I thank you.

      Gerry Spence. Photograph by attorney Paula Elliott, Staff Member, Trial Lawyers College, 2011.

      The Early Years

      The Boy

      I was born in Laramie, Wyoming, in the year 1929, on a cold, windy day in January. I grew up in Sheridan in the deep depression years, only a decade or two after the rush of homesteaders west.

      As a child I remember some of the hardy remnant who were still attempting to homestead on far-off unclaimed lands in Wyoming.

      The automobile had not been with us for long. Our family’s first car was a Model A Ford. Air travel was for a few adventurers. We traveled by train or bus. Television hadn’t been invented. We gathered by the radio to hear President Roosevelt address the nation and to listen, blow by blow, to the fights of Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, the heavyweight champion of the world, who lost his championship to Hitler’s friend, Max Schmeling, and who regained it when he knocked out Schmeling in the first round of their second fight. Some suggest we settle the differences of the nations in the same way.

      We exercised our tribal instinct and our fear of the Lord by attending church on Sunday, except, of course, during hunting and fishing seasons. My father insisted that God would understand that enjoying His mountains hunting and fishing was a more heartfelt way to worship than sitting in a hot, stuffy church listening to some boring sermon.

      Several times during the year the church sponsored covered dish suppers. Each family brought something to share. I didn’t think the other mothers could cook as well as mine. Indeed, part of me believed their food was inedible. It might have even been poison. And like a calf that has learned to suck only from its mother’s teats, I’d eat only what my own dear mother brought.

      Our parents didn’t drive us to school or to the soccer game. In all seasons we biked back and forth more than two miles across town. No one had heard of bike helmets. Somehow we managed to remain upright on icy roads. We skated in the winter on the frozen surface of the slew, a large pond formed by past floodwaters from Goose Creek. To provide the kids a place to fish, the local businessmen filled the pond with perch trapped from nearby Lake DeSmet.

      Homesteader’s lost cabin and big sky.

      My father, Gerald Milner Spence, worked for the CB&Q Railroad in Sheridan. He

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