Chapter Books

Brighty of the Grand Canyon

We read Marguerite Henry’s Brighty of the Grand Canyon as a family read-aloud. I read it long ago, probably when I was 11 or 12, but remembered virtually nothing. How can this be? It’s full of excitement and the usual emotional highs and lows of animal stories. This one includes a prospector, a lion hunter, a president, and a murderer along with the noble and unassuming Brighty the burro. It also incorporates Ms. Henry’s now familiar theme of love for wild places, taking place in the Grand Canyon before it was made a national park. What’s wrong with me that my mind permits such good stuff to evaporate, while certain episodes of The Little Rascals are firmly established there till my dying day?

In any case, this book was a success for both mother and 7-year-old daughter. The only thing I disliked was what I always dislike about animal stories: bad people who enter the scene and abuse the animals. Fortunately in all the Marguerite Henry novels I’ve read, the animals triumph in the end. But sometimes they have hard going at the hands of people far more brutish than they are. The villain in this story is truly diabolical, a vicious criminal who’s counterbalanced by the brave, straight-shooting (both literally and figuratively) Uncle Jim Owens. His character is carefully and lovingly drawn, respectful of the real Jim Owens after whom he’s modelled.

I should add too that this worked well as a read-aloud. The narrative is interesting and dramatic, and the dialogue/dialect are fun to bring to life.

Brighty was a real burro, named “Bright Angel” after Bright Angel Creek, and some information is gathered about him here. There’s also a movie about him, in which Marguerite Henry’s own burro Jiggs plays Brighty. Though I did know a Breyer’s horse figurine exists (no longer in production), I didn’t realize it replicates a statue of Brighty that sits at the north rim of the Grand Canyon. All of this testifies to Brighty’s popularity and indicates that my enjoyment of this story treads an already well-established path.