Novel: Last Go Round

Overview
Last Go Round is a brash, affectionate tall tale about the birth of modern rodeo and the mixed, unruly crowd that made it possible. Set chiefly at the 1911 Pendleton Round-Up in eastern Oregon, it turns a real controversy in the saddle-bronc championship into a folkloric showdown among three riders whose skills, styles, and identities collide and entwine: George Fletcher, a flamboyant Black cowboy; Jackson Sundown, a seasoned Nez Perce horseman; and John Spain, a formidable white champion. The story treats the arena as a crucible where American myths are hammered out in dust and sunlight, then sold back to the public with a grin.

Setting and Characters
Pendleton is a boomtown with a split personality, equal parts railroad grit and carnival flare, its motto “Let ’er Buck” promising that the West will be both celebrated and tested. Around the chutes cluster barkers, boosters, judges in stiff hats, and drifters who know broncs better than they know beds. The stock are characters, too, mean, athletic, practically supernatural. Fletcher rides like a jazz solo, long and loose, winning the crowd with style and broke-dam charisma. Sundown, compact and quiet, carries the gravitas of survival and tribal memory, seeming to talk to a horse rather than conquer it. Spain represents hard-nosed discipline and the establishment’s idea of clean winning form. An old-timer narrator, who once drifted through this world with a coil of rope on his saddle, frames their contests with a mixture of eyewitness detail and barroom exaggeration.

Plot
The novel builds across a week of events the way a bronc builds to a buck, gathering stories as it goes. Practice pens become theaters for bravura and one‑upmanship; side wagers multiply; the town fills with music, dust, and rumor. Fletcher and Sundown trade rides that feel like challenges to gravity itself, while Spain, riding tight and textbook‑true, stacks up scores. Accidents, near-disasters, and comic interludes only fatten the legend: a horse that seems to levitate, a saddle that explodes, a rider saved by luck and nerve in equal measure. As the final go‑round approaches, the whole town turns judge and promoter.

The climax lands on the championship bronc rides, each run narrated like a battlefield dispatch and a carnival barker’s pitch at once. Fletcher’s ride sends the grandstand to its feet; Sundown’s is pure balance and old wisdom; Spain answers with cold precision. When the official decision breaks against the swell of the crowd, Spain declared winner over Fletcher, the arena boils with boos and thrown hats. A local lawman steps in not with a badge but with a hat to pass, and the grandstand crowns Fletcher the people’s champion by showering him with cash. The “official” outcome stands on paper; the legend goes the other way.

Style and Themes
Kesey fuses documentary grit with frontier brag, threading archival photographs and mock ephemera through a voice that winks even as it swears it tells the truth. The book treats the West as a stage and a forge, where performance becomes proof and stories become currency. It probes race and belonging without sermonizing, showing a crowd that can be both prejudiced and fair-minded in the same breath, and it lets Indigenous endurance and Black artistry sit at the center of the ring. Authenticity and showmanship wrestle and finally shake hands. The title’s promise, one last go round, points to a moment when raw horse culture begins to submit to rules, judges, and sponsorships, and to a broader passing of the open-range West into the age of automobiles and headlines.

Aftermath
By the time the dust settles, the novel has given its riders something more durable than buckles: a legend that outlives a judge’s card. The narrator’s weathered voice admits that none of it happened exactly as told, except for the parts that matter, and that the crowd’s verdict, carried in hats, coins, and hollers, can be truer than the ledger. The Round-Up rolls on as an annual ritual, but the book preserves the instant when it was still half-wild, when a town, three riders, and a pen full of outlaw horses made the West up again, louder, brighter, and more complicated than before.