Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest
by
J. Frank Dobie

Part 3 out of 4



"Horses."

FORD, GUS L. _Texas Cattle Brands_, Dallas, 1936. A catalogue
of brands. OP.

FRENCH, WILLIAM. _Some Recollections of a Western Ranchman_,
London, 1927. A civilized Englishman remembers. OP.

GANN, WALTER. _The Trail Boss_, Boston, 1937. Faithful
fiction, with a steer that Charlie Russell should have
painted. OP.

GARD, WAYNE. _Frontier Justice_, University of Oklahoma Press,
Norman, 1949. This book could be classified under "The Bad Man
Tradition," but it has authentic chapters on fence-cutting,
the so-called "Johnson County Cattlemen's War" of Wyoming, and
other range "difficulties." Clearly written from an equable
point of view. Useful bibliography of range books.

GIBSON, J. W. (Watt). _Recollections of a Pioneer_, St.
Joseph, Missouri (about 1912). Like many another book
concerned only incidentally with range life, this contains
essential information on the subject. Here it is trailing
cattle from Missouri to California in the 1840's and 1850's.
Cattle driving from the East to California was not
economically important. The outstanding account on the subject
is _A Log of the Texas-California Cattle Trail, 1854_, by
James G. Bell, edited


{illust. caption =
Tom Lea, in _The Longhorns_ by J. Frank Dobie (1941)}


by J. Evetts Haley, published in the _Southwestern Historical
Quarterly_, 1932 (Vols. XXXV and XXXVI). Also reprinted as a
separate.

GILFILLAN, ARCHER B. _Sheep_, Boston, 1929. With humor and
grace, this sheepherder, who collected books on Samuel Pepys,
tells more about sheep dogs, sheep nature, and sheepherder
life than any other writer I know. OP.

GIPSON, FRED. _Fabulous Empire_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston,
1946. Biography of Zack Miller of the 101 Ranch and 101 Wild
West Show.

GOODWYN, FRANK. _Life on the King Ranch_, Crowell, New York,
1951. The author was reared on the King Ranch. He is
especially refreshing on the vaqueros, their techniques and
tales.

GRAY, FRANK S. _Pioneer Adventures_, 1948, and _Pioneering in
Southwest Texas_, 1949, both printed by the author, Copperas
Cove, Texas. These books are listed because the author has the
perspective of a civilized gentleman and integrates home life
on frontier ranches with range work.

GREER, JAMES K. _Bois d'Arc to Barbed Wire_, Dallas, 1936.
Outstanding horse lore. OP.

HAGEDORN, HERMANN. _Roosevelt in the Bad Lands_, Boston, 1921.
A better book than Roosevelt's own _Ranch Life and the Hunting
Trail_. OP.

HALEY, J. EVETTS. _The XIT Ranch of Texas_, Chicago, 1929. As
county and town afford the basis for historical treatment of
many areas, ranches have afforded bases for various range
country histories. Of such this is tops. A lawsuit for libel
brought by one or more individuals mentioned in the book put a
stop to the selling of copies by the publishers and made it
very "rare." _Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman_,
Boston, 1936, reissued by University of Oklahoma Press,
Norman, 1949. Goodnight, powerful individual and extraordinary
observer, summed up in himself the whole life of range and
trail. Haley's book, packed with realities of incident and
character, paints him against a mighty background. _George W.
Littlefield, Texan_, University of Oklahoma Presss
Norman, Okla., 1943, is a lesser biography of a lesser man.

HAMILTON, W. H. _Autobiography of a Cowman_, in _South Dakota
Historical Collections_, XIX (1938), 475-637. A first-rate
narrative of life on the Dakota range.

HAMNER, LAURA V. _Short Grass and Longhorns_, Norman,
Oklahoma, 1943. Sketches of Panhandle ranches and ranch
people. OP.

HARRIS, FRANK. _My Reminiscences as a Cowboy_, 1930. A blatant
farrago of lies, included in this list because of its supreme
worthlessness. However, some judges might regard the
debilitated and puerile lying in _The Autobiography of Frank
Tarbeaux_, as told to Donald H. Clarke, New York, 1930, as
equally worthless.

HART, JOHN A., and Others. _History of Pioneer Days in Texas
and Oklahoma_. No date or place of publication; no table of
contents. This slight book was enlarged into _Pioneer Days in
the Southwest from 1850 to 1879_, "Contributions by Charles
Goodnight, Emanuel Dubbs, John A. Hart and Others," Guthrie,
Oklahoma, 1909. Good on the way frontier ranch families lived.
The writers show no sense of humor and no idea of being
literary.

HASTINGS, FRANK S. _A Ranchman's Recollections_, Chicago,
1921. OP. Hastings was urbane, which means he had perspective;
"Old Gran'pa" is the most pulling cowhorse story I know.

HENRY, O. _Heart of the West_. Interpretative stories of Texas
range life, which O. Henry for a time lived. His range stories
are scattered through several volumes. "The Last of the
Troubadours" is a classic.

HENRY, STUART. _Our Great American Plains_, New York, 1930.
OP. An unworshipful, anti-Philistinic picture of Abilene,
Kansas, when it was at the end of the Chisholm Trail. While
not a primary range book, this is absolutely unique in its
analysis of cow-town society, both citizens and drovers.
Stuart Henry came to Abilene as a boy in 1868. His brother was
the first mayor of the town. After graduating from the
University of Kansas in 1881, he in time acquired "the habit
of authorship." He had written a book on London and _French
Essays and Profiles_ and _Hours with Famous Parisians_ before
he returned to Kansas for a subject. Some of his non-complimentary
characterizations of westerners aroused a mighty
roar among panegyrists of the West. They did not try to refute
his anecdote about the sign of the Bull Head Saloon. This sign
showed the whole of a great red bull. The citizens of Abilene
were used to seeing bulls driven through town and they could
go out any day and see bulls with cows on the prairie. Nature
might be good, but any art suggesting nature's virility was
indecent. There was such an uprising of Victorian taste that
what distinguishes a bull from a cow had to be painted out. A
similar artistic operation had to be performed on the bull
signifying Bull Durham tobacco--once the range favorite for
making cigarettes.

HILL, J. L. _The End of the Cattle Trail_, Long Beach,
California [May, 1924]. Rare and meaty pamphlet.

HOLDEN, W. C. _Rollie Burns_, Dallas, 1932. Biography of a
Plains cowman. OP. _The Spur Ranch_, Boston, 1934. History of
a great Texas ranch. OP.

HORN, TOM. _Life of Tom Horn . . . Written by Himself,
together with His Letters and Statements by His Friends, A
Vindication_. Published (for John C. Coble) by the Louthan
Book Company, Denver, 1904. Who wrote the book has been
somewhat in debate. John C. Coble's name is signed to the
preface attributing full authorship to Horn. Of Pennsylvania
background, wealthy and educated, he had employed Horn as a
stock detective on his Wyoming ranch. He had the means and
ability to see the book through the press. A letter from his
wife to me, from Cheyenne, June 21,1926, says that Horn wrote
the book. Charles H. Coe, who succeeded Horn as stock
detective in Wyoming, says in _Juggling a Rope_ (Pendleton,
Oregon, 1927, P. 108), that Horn wrote it. I have a copy,
bought from Fred Rosenstock of the Bargain Book Store in
Denver, who got it from Hattie Horner Louthan, of Denver also.
For years she taught English in the University of Denver,
College of Commerce, and is the author of more than one
textbook. The Louthan Book Company of Denver was owned by her
family. This copy of _Tom Horn_ contains her bookplate. On top
of the first page of the preface is written in pencil: "I
wrote this--`Ghost wrote.' H. H. L." Then, penciled at the top
of the first page of "Closing Word," is "I wrote this."

Glendolene Myrtle Kimmell was a schoolteacher in the country
where Tom Horn operated. As her picture shows, she was lush
and beautiful. Pages 287-309 print "Miss Kimmell's Statement."
She did her best to keep Tom Horn from hanging. She frankly
admired him and, it seems to me, loved him. Jay Monaghan, _The
Legend of Tom Horn, Last of the Bad Men_, Indianapolis and New
York, 1946, says (p. 267), without discussion or proof, that
after Horn was hanged and buried Miss Kimmell was "writing a
long manuscript about a Sir Galahad horseman who was `crushed
between the grinding stones of two civilizations,' but she
never found a publisher who thought her book would sell. It
was entitled _The True Life of Tom Horn_."

The main debate has been over Horn himself. The books about
him are not highly important, but they contribute to a
spectacular and highly controversial phase of range history,
the so-called Johnson County War of Wyoming. Mercer's
_Banditti of the Plains_, Mokler's _History of Natrona County,
Wyoming_, Canton's _Frontier Trails_, and David's _Malcolm
Campbell, Sheriff_ (all listed in this chapter) are primary
sources on the subject.

HOUGH, EMERSON. _The Story of the Cowboy_, New York, 1897.
Exposition not nearly so good as Philip Ashton Rollins' _The
Cowboy. North of 36_, New York, 1923. Historical novel of the
Chisholm Trail. The best character in it is Old Alamo, lead
steer. A young woman owner of the herd trails with it. The
success of the romance caused Emerson Hough to advise his
friend Andy Adams to put a woman in a novel about trail
driving--so Andy Adams told me. Adams replied that a woman
with a trail herd would be as useless as a fifth wheel on a
wagon and that he would not violate reality by
having her. For a devastation of Hough's use of history in
_North of 36_ see the Appendix in Stuart Henry's _Conquering
Our Great American Plains_. Yet the novel does have the right
temper.

HOYT, HENRY F. _A Frontier Doctor_, Boston, 1929. Texas
Panhandle and New Mexico during Billy the Kid days.
Reminiscences.

HUNT, FRAZIER. _Cat Mossman: Last of the Great Cowmen_,
illustrated by Ross Santee, Hastings House, New York, 1951.
Few full-length biographies of big operators among cowmen have
been written. This reveals not only Cap Mossman's operations
on enormous ranges, but the man.

HUNTER, J. MARVIN (compiler). _The Trail Drivers of Texas_,
two volumes, Bandera, Texas, 1920, 1923. Reprinted in one
volume, 1925. All OP. George W. Saunders, founder of the Old
Time Trail Drivers Association and for many years president,
prevailed on hundreds of old-time range and trail men to write
autobiographic sketches. He used to refer to Volume II as the
"second edition"; just the same, he was not ignorant, and he
had a passion for the history of his people. The chronicles,
though chaotic in arrangement, comprise basic source material.
An index to the one-volume edition of _The Trail Drivers of
Texas_ is printed as an appendix to _The Chisholm Trail and
Other Routes_, by T. U. Taylor, San Antonio, 1936--a
hodgepodge.

JAMES, WILL. _Cowboys North and South_, New York, 1924. _The
Drifting Cowboy_, 1925. _Smoky_--a cowhorse story--1930.
Several other books, mostly repetitious. Will James knew his
frijoles, but burned them up before he died, in 1942. He
illustrated all his books. The best one is his first, written
before he became sophisticated with life--without becoming in
the right way more sophisticated in the arts of drawing and
writing. _Lone Cowboy: My Life Story_ (1930) is without a date
or a geographical location less generalized than the space
between Canada and Mexico.

JAMES, W. S. _Cowboy Life in Texas_, Chicago, 1893. A genuine
cowboy who became a genuine preacher and wrote a
book of validity. This is the best of several books of
reminiscences by cowboy preachers, some of whom are as lacking
in the real thing as certain cowboy artists. Next to _Cowboy
Life in Texas_, in its genre, might come _From the Plains to
the Pulpit_, by J. W. Anderson, Houston, 1907. The second
edition (reset) has six added chapters. The third, and final,
edition, Goose Creek, Texas, 1922, again reset, has another
added chapter. J. B. Cranfill was a trail driver from a rough
range before he became a Baptist preacher and publisher. His
bulky _Chronicle, A Story of Life in Texas_, 1916, is
downright and concrete.

KELEHER, WILLIAM A. _Maxwell Land Grant: A New Mexico Item_,
Santa Fe, 1942. The Maxwell grant of 1,714,764 acres on the
Cimarron River was at one time perhaps the most famous tract
of land in the West. This history brings in ranching only
incidentally; it focuses on the land business, including grabs
by Catron, Dorsey, and other affluent politicians. Perhaps
stronger on characters involved during long litigation over
the land, and containing more documentary evidence, is _The
Grant That Maxwell Bought_, by F. Stanley, The World Press,
Denver, 1952 (a folio of 256 pages in an edition of 250 copies
at $15.00). Keleher is a lawyer; Stanley is a priest. Harvey
Fergusson in his historical novel _Grant of Kingdom_, New
York, 1950, vividly supplements both. Keleher's second book,
_The Fabulous Frontier_, Rydal, Santa Fe, 1945, illuminates
connections between ranch lands and politicians; principally
it sketches the careers of A. B. Fall, John Chisum, Pat
Garrett, Oliver Lee, Jack Thorp, Gene Rhodes, and other New
Mexico notables.

KENT, WILLIAM. _Reminiscences of Outdoor Life_, San Francisco,
1929. OP. This is far from being a straight-out range book. It
is the easy talk of an urbane man associated with ranches and
ranch people who was equally at home in a Chicago office and
among fellow congressmen. He had a country-going nature and
gusto for character.

KING, FRANK M. _Wranglin' the Past_, Los Angeles, 1935. King
went all the way from Texas to California, listening and
looking. OP. His second book, _Longhorn Trail Drivers_ (1940),
is worthless. His _Pioneer Western Empire Builders_ (1946) and
_Mavericks_ (1947) are no better. Most of the contents of
these books appeared in _Western Livestock Journal_, Los
Angeles.

KUPPER, WINIFRED. _The Golden Hoof_, New York, 1945. Story of
the sheep and sheep people of the Southwest. Facts, but, above
that, truth that comes only through imagination and sympathy.
OP. _Texas Sheepman_, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1951.
The edited reminiscences of Robert Maudslay. He drove sheep
all over the West, and lived up to the ideals of an honest
Englishman in writing as well as in ranching. He had a sense
of humor.

LAMPMAN, CLINTON PARKS. _The Great Western Trail_, New York,
1939. OP. In the upper bracket of autobiographic chronicles,
by a sensitive man who never had the provincial point of view.
Lampman contemplated as well as observed He felt the pathos of
human destiny.

LANG, LINCOLN A. _Ranching with Roosevelt_, Philadelphia,
1926. Civilized. OP.

LEWIS, ALFRED HENRY. _Wolfville_ (1897) and other Wolfville
books. All OP. Sketches and rambling stories faithful to
cattle backgrounds; flavor and humanity through fictionized
anecdote. "The Old Cattleman," who tells all the Wolfville
stories, is a substantial and flavorsome creation.

LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. _Arizona Characters_, Los Angeles, 1928.
Skilfully written biographies. OP.

MCCARTY, JOHN L. _Maverick Town_, University of Oklahoma
Press, 1946. Tascosa, Texas, on the Canadian River, with
emphasis on the guns.

MCCAULEY, JAMES EMMIT. _A Stove-up Cowboy's Story_, with
Introduction by John A. Lomas and Illustrations by Tom Lea,
Austin, 1943. OP. "My parents be poor like Job's turkey,"
McCauley wrote. He was a common cowhand with uncommon
saltiness of speech. He wrote as he talked. "God pity the
wight for whom this vivid, honest story has no interest," John
Lomax pronounced. It is one of several brief books
of reminiscences brought out in small editions in the "Range
Life Series," under the editorship of J. Frank Dobie, by the
Texas Folklore Society. The two others worth having are _A
Tenderfoot Kid on Gyp Water_, by Carl Peters Benedict (1943)
and _Ed Nichols Rode a Horse_, as told to Ruby Nichols
Cutbirth (1943).

MCCOY, JOSEPH G. _Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the
West and Southwest_, Kansas City, 1874. In 1867, McCoy
established at Abilene, Kansas, terminus of the Chisholm
Trail, the first market upon which Texas drovers could depend.
He went broke and thereupon put his sense, information, and
vinegar into the first of all range histories. It is a
landmark. Of the several reprinted editions, the one preferred
is that edited by Ralph P. Bieber, with an information-packed
introduction and many illuminating notes, Glendale,
California, 1940. This is Volume VIII in the "Southwest
Historical Series," edited by Bieber, and the index to it is
included in the general index to the whole series. Available
is an edition published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus,
Ohio. About the best of original sources on McCoy is _Twenty
Years of Kansas City's Live Stock and Traders_, by Cuthbert
Powell, Kansas City, 1893--one of the rarities.

MACKAY, MALCOLM S. _Cow Range and Hunting Trail_, New York,
1925. Among the best of civilized range books. Fresh
observations and something besides ordinary narrative. OP.
Illustrations by Russell.

MANDAT-GRANCEY, BARON E. DE. See Conn, William.

MERCER, A. S. _Banditti of the Plains, or The Cattlemen's
Invasion of Wyoming in 1892_, Cheyenne, 1894; reprinted at
Chicago in 1923 under title of _Powder River Invasion, War on
the Rustlers in 1892_, "Rewritten by John Mercer Boots."
Reprinted 1935, with Foreword by James Mitchell Clarke, by the
Grabhorn Press, San Francisco. All editions OP. Bloody
troubles between cowmen and nesters in Wyoming, the "Johnson
County War." For more literature on the subject, consult the
entry under Tom Horn in this chapter.

MILLER, LEWIS B. _Saddles and Lariats_, Boston, 1912. A
fictional chronicle, based almost entirely on facts, of a
trail herd that tried to get to California in the fifties. The
author was a Texan. OP.

MOKLER, ALFRED JAMES. _History of Natrona County, Wyoming,
1888-1922_, Chicago, 1923. Contains some good material on the
"Johnson County War." This book is listed as an illustration
of many county histories of western states containing concrete
information on ranching. Other examples of such county
histories are S. D. Butcher's _Pioneer History of Custer
County_ (Nebraska), Broken Bow, Nebraska, 1901; _History of
Jack County_ (Texas), Jacksboro, Texas (about 1935);
_Historical Sketch of Parker County and Weatherford, Texas_,
St. Louis, 1877.

MORA, JO. _Trail Dust and Saddle Leather_, Scribner's, New
York, 1946. No better exposition anywhere, and here tellingly
illustrated, of reatas, spurs, bits, saddles, and other gear.
_Californios_, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1949. Profusely
illustrated. Largely on vaquero techniques. Jo Mora knew the
California vaquero, but did not know the range history of
other regions and, therefore, judged as unique what was
widespread.

NIMMO, JOSEPH, JR. _The Range and Ranch Cattle Traffic in the
Western States and Territories_, Executive Document No. 267,
House of Representatives, 48th Congress, 2nd Session,
Washington, D. C., 1885. Printed also in one or more other
government documents. A statistical record concerning grazing
lands, trail driving, railroad shipping of cattle, markets,
foreign investments in ranches, etc. This document is the
outstanding example of factual material to be found in various
government publications, Volume III of the _Tenth Census of
the United States_ (1880) being another. _The Western Range:
Letter from the Secretary of Agriculture_, etc (a "letter" 620
pages long), United States Government Printing Office,
Washington, 1936, lists many government publications both
state and national.

NORDYKE, LEWIS. _Cattle Empire_, Morrow, New York, 1949.
History, largely political, of the XIT Ranch. Not so careful
in documentation as Haley's _XIT Ranch of Texas_, and not so
detailed on ranch operations, but thoroughly illuminative on
the not-heroic side of big businessmen in big land deals. The
two histories complement each other.

O'NEIL, JAMES B. _They Die But Once_, New York, 1935. The
biographical narrative of a Tejano who vigorously swings a
very big loop; fine illustration of the fact that a man can
lie authentically. OP.

OSGOOD, E. S. _The Day of the Cattleman_, Minneapolis, 1929.
Excellent history and excellent bibliography. Northwest. OP.

PEAKE, ORA BROOKS. _The Colorado Range Cattle Industry_,
Clark, Glendale, California, 1937. Dry on facts, but sound in
scholarship. Bibliography.

PELZER, LOUIS. _The Cattlemen's Frontier_, Clark, Glendale,
California, 1936. Economic treatment, faithful but static.
Bibliography.

PENDER, ROSE. A _Lady's Experiences in the Wild West in 1883_,
London (1883?); second printing with a new preface, 1888. Rose
Pender and two fellow-Englishmen went through Wyoming ranch
country, stopping on ranches, and she, a very intelligent,
spirited woman, saw realities that few other chroniclers
suggest. This is a valuable bit of social history.

PERKINS, CHARLES E. _The Pinto Horse_, Santa Barbara,
California, 1927. _The Phantom Bull_, Boston, 1932. Fictional
narratives of veracity; literature. OP.

PILGRIM, THOMAS (under pseudonym of Arthur Morecamp). _Live
Boys; or Charley and Nasho in Texas_, Boston, 1878. The
chronicle, little fictionized, of a trail drive to Kansas. So
far as I know, this is the first narrative printed on cattle
trailing or cowboy life that is to be accounted authentic. The
book is dated from Kerrville, Texas.

PONTING, TOM CANDY. _The Life of Tom Candy Ponting_, Decatur,
Illinois [1907], reprinted, with Notes and Introduction by
Herbert O. Brayer, by Branding Iron Press,
Evanston, Illinois, 1952. An account of buying cattle in Texas
in 1853, driving them to Illinois, and later shipping some to
New York. Accounts of trail driving before about 1870 have
been few and obscurely printed. The stark diary kept by George
C. Duffield of a drive from San Saba County, Texas, to
southern Iowa in 1866 is as realistic--often agonizing--as
anything extant on this much romanticized subject. It is
published in _Annals of Iowa_, Des Moines, IV (April, 1924),
243-62.

POTTER, JACK. Born in 1864, son of the noted fighting parson,"
Andrew Jackson Potter, Jack became a far-known trail boss and
ranch manager. His first published piece, "Coming Down the
Trail," appeared in _The Trail Drivers of Texas_, compiled by
J. Marvin Hunter, and is about the livest thing in that
monumental collection. Jack Potter wrote for various Western
magazines and newspapers. He was more interested in cow nature
than in gun fights; he had humor and imagination as well as
mastery of facts and a tangy language, though small command
over form. His privately printed booklets are: _Lead Steer_
(with Introduction by J. Frank Dobie), Clayton, N. M., 1939;
_Cattle Trails of the Old West_ (with map), Clayton, N.M.,
1935; _Cattle Trails of the Old West_ (virtually a new
booklet), Clayton, N. M., 1939. All OP.

_Prose and Poetry of the Live Stock Industry of the United
States_, Denver, 1905. Biographies of big cowmen and history
based on genuine research. The richest in matter of all the
hundred-dollar-and-up rare books in its field.

RAINE, WILLIAM MCLEOD, and BARNES, WILL C. _Cattle_, Garden
City, N. Y., 1930. A succinct and vivid focusing of much
scattered history. OP.

RAK, MARY KIDDER. _A Cowman s Wife_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston,
1934. Unglossed, impersonal realism about life on a small
modern Arizona ranch. _Mountain Cattle_, 1936, and OP, is an
extension of the first book.

REMINGTON, FREDERIC. _Pony Tracks_, New York, 1895 (now
published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus,
Ohio); _Crooked Trails_, New York, 1898. Sketches and
pictures.

RHODES, EUGENE MANLOVE. _West Is West, Once in the Saddle,
Good Men and True, Stepsons of Light_, and other novels.
"Gene" Rhodes had the "right tune." He achieved a style that
can be called literary. _The Hired Man on Horseback_, by May
D. Rhodes, is a biography of the writer. Perhaps "Paso Por
Aqui" will endure as his masterpiece. Rhodes had an intense
loyalty to his land and people; he was as gay, gallant, and
witty as he was earnest. More than most Western writers,
Rhodes was conscious of art. He had the common touch and also
he was a writer for writing men. The elements of simplicity
and the right kind of sophistication, always with generosity
and with an unflagging zeal for the rights of human beings,
were mixed in him. The reach of any ample-natured man exceeds
his grasp. Rhodes was ample-natured, but he cannot be classed
as great because his grasp was too often disproportionately
short of the long reach. His fiction becomes increasingly
dated.

_The Best Novels and, Stories of Eugene Manlove Rhodes_,
edited by Frank V. Dearing, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1949,
contains an introduction, with plenty of anecdotes and too
much enthusiasm, by J. Frank Dobie.

RICHARDS, CLARICE E. A _Tenderfoot Bride_, Garden City, N. Y.,
1920. The experiences of a ranchman's wife in Colorado. The
telling has charm, warmth, and flexibility. In the way that
art is always truer than a literal report, _A Tenderfoot
Bride_ brings out truths of life that the literalistic _A
Cowman's Wife_ by Mary Kidder Rak misses.

RICHTER, CONRAD. _The Sea of Grass_, Knopf, New York, 1937. A
poetic portrait in fiction, with psychological values, of a
big cowman and his wife.

RICKETTS, W. P. _50 Years in the Saddle_, Sheridan, Wyoming,
1942. OP. A natural book with much interesting information. It
contains the best account of trailing cattle from Oregon to
Wyoming that I have seen.

RIDINGS, SAM P. _The Chisholm Trail_, 1926. Sam P. Ridings, a
lawyer, published this book himself from Medford, Oklahoma. He
had gone over the land, lived with range men, studied history.
A noble book, rich in anecdote and character. The subtitle
reads: "A History of the World's Greatest Cattle Trail,
together with a Description of the Persons, a Narrative of the
Events, and Reminiscences associated with the Same." OP.

ROBINSON, FRANK C. _A Ram in a Thicket_, Abelard Press, New
York, 1950. Robinson is the author of many Westerns, none of
which I have read. This is an autobiography, here noted
because it reveals a maturity of mind and an awareness of
political economy and social evolution hardly suggested by
other writers of Western fiction.

ROLLINS, ALICE WELLINGTON. _The Story of a Ranch_, New York,
1885. Philip Ashton Rollins (no relation that I know of to
Alice Wellington Rollins) went into Charlie Everitt's
bookstore in New York one day and said, "I want every book
with the word _cowboy_ printed in it." _The Story of a Ranch_
is listed here to illustrate how titles often have nothing to
do with subject. It is without either story or ranch; it is
about some dilettanteish people who go out to a Kansas sheep
farm, talk Chopin, and wash their fingers in finger bowls.

ROLLINS, PHILIP ASHTON. _The Cowboy_, Scribner's, New York,
1924. Revised, 1936. A scientific exposition; full. Rollins
wrote two Western novels, not important. A wealthy man with
ranch experience, he collected one of the finest libraries of
Western books ever assembled by any individual and presented
it to Princeton University.

ROLLINSON, JOHN K. _Pony Trails in Wyoming_, Caldwell, Idaho,
1941. Not inspired and not indispensable, but honest
autobiography. OP. _Wyoming Cattle Trails_, Caxton, Caldwell,
Idaho, 1948. A more significant book than the autobiography.
Good on trailing cattle from Oregon.

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. _Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail_, New
York, 1888. Roosevelt understood the West. He
became the peg upon which several range books were hung,
Hagedorn's _Roosevelt in the Bad Lands_ and Lang's _Ranching
with Roosevelt_ in particular. A good summing up, with
bibliography, is _Roosevelt and the Stockman's Association_,
by Ray H. Mattison, pamphlet issued by the State Historical
Society of North Dakota, Bismarck, 1950.

RUSH, OSCAR. _The Open Range_, Salt Lake City, 1930. Reprinted
1936 by Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho. A sensitive range man's
response to natural things. The subtitle, _Bunk House
Philosophy_, characterizes the book.

RUSSELL, CHARLES M. _Trails Plowed Under_, 1927, with
introduction by Will Rogers. Russell was the greatest painter
that ever painted a range man, a range cow, a range horse or a
Plains Indian. He savvied the cow, the grass, the blizzard,
the drought, the wolf, the young puncher in love with his own
shadow, the old waddie remembering rides and thirsts of far
away and long ago. He was a wonderful storyteller, and most of
his pictures tell stories. He never generalized, painting "a
man," "a horse," "a buffalo" in the abstract. His subjects are
warm with life, whether awake or asleep, at a particular
instant, under particular conditions. _Trails Plowed Under_,
prodigally illustrated, is a collection of yarns and anecdotes
saturated with humor and humanity. It incorporates the
materials in two Rawhide Rawlins pamphlets. _Good Medicine_,
published posthumously, is a collection of Russell's letters,
illustrations saying more than written words.

Russell's illustrations have enriched numerous range books, B.
M. Bower's novels, Malcolm S. Mackay's _Cow Range and Hunting
Trail_, and Patrick T. Tucker's _Riding the High Country_
being outstanding among them. Tucker's book, autobiography,
has a bully chapter on Charlie Russell. _Charles M. Russell,
the Cowboy Artist: A Bibliography_, by Karl Yost, Pasadena,
California, 1948, is better composed than its companion
biography, _Charles M. Russell the Cowboy Artist_, by Ramon F.
Adams and Homer E. Britzman. (Both OP.) One of the most
concrete pieces of writing on Russell is a chapter in _In the
Land of Chinook_, by Al. J.
Noyes, Helena, Montana, 1917. "Memories of Charlie Russell,"
in _Memories of Old Montana_, by Con Price, Hollywood, 1945,
is also good. All right as far as it goes, about a rock's
throw away, is "The Conservatism of Charles M. Russell," by J.
Frank Dobie, in a portfolio reproduction of _Seven Drawings by
Charles M. Russell, with an Additional Drawing by Tom Lea_,
printed by Carl Hertzog, El Paso [1950].

SANTEE, ROSS. _Cowboy_, 1928. OP. The plotless narrative,
reading like autobiography, of a kid who ran away from a farm
in East Texas to be a cowboy in Arizona. His cowpuncher
teachers are the kind "who know what a cow is thinking of
before she knows herself." Passages in _Cowboy_ combine
reality and elemental melody in a way that almost no other
range writer excepting Charles M. Russell has achieved. Santee
is a pen-and-ink artist also. Among his other books, _Men and
Horses_ is about the best.

SHAW, JAMES C. _North from Texas: Incidents in the Early Life
of a Range Man in Texas, Dakota and Wyoming, 1852-1883_,
edited by Herbert O. Brayer. Branding Iron Press, Evanston,
Illinois, 1952. Edition limited to 750 copies. I first met
this honest autobiography by long quotations from it in
Virginia Cole Trenholm's _Footprints on the Frontier_
(Douglas, Wyoming, 1945), wherein I learned that Shaw's
narrative had been privately printed in Cheyenne in 1931, in
pamphlet form, for gifts to a few friends and members of the
author's family. I tried to buy a copy but could find none for
sale at any price. This reprint is in a format suitable to the
economical prose, replete with telling incidents and homely
details. It will soon be only a little less scarce than the
original.

SHEEDY, DENNIS. _The Autobiography of Dennis Sheedy_.
Privately printed in Denver, 1922 or 1923. Sixty pages bound
in leather and as scarce as psalm-singing in "fancy houses."
The item is not very important in the realm of range
literature but it exemplifies the successful businessman that
the judicious cowman of open range days frequently became.

SHEFFY, L. F. _The Life and Times of Timothy Dwight Hobart,
1855-1935_, Panhandle-Plains Historical Society, Canyon,
Texas, 1950. Hobart was manager for the large J A Ranch,
established by Charles Goodnight. He had a sense of history.
This mature biography treats of important developments
pertaining to ranching in the Texas Panhandle.

SIRINGO, CHARLES A. A _Texas Cowboy, or Fifteen Years on the
Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Cow Pony_, 1885. The first in time
of all cowboy autobiographies and first, also, in plain
rollickiness. Siringo later told the same story with additions
under the titles of _A Lone Star Cowboy, A Cowboy Detective_,
etc., all out of print. Finally, there appeared his _Riata and
Spurs_, Boston, 1927, a summation and extension of previous
autobiographies. Because of a threatened lawsuit, half of it
had to be cut and additional material provided for a "Revised
Edition." No other cowboy ever talked about himself so much in
print; few had more to talk about. I have said my full say on
him in an introduction, which includes a bibliography, to _A
Texas Cowboy_, published with Tom Lea illustrations by Sloane,
New York, 1950. OP.

SMITH, ERWIN E., and HALEY, J. EVETTS. _Life on the Texas
Range_, photographs by Smith and text by Haley, University of
Texas Press, Austin, 1952. Erwin Smith yearned and studied to
be a sculptor. Early in this century he went with camera to
photograph the life of land, cattle, horses, and men on the
big ranches of West Texas. In him feeling and perspective of
artist were fused with technical mastership. "I don't mean,"
wrote Tom Lea, "that he made just the best photographs I ever
saw on the subject. I mean the best pictures. That includes
paintings, drawings, prints." On 9 by 12 pages of 100-pound
antique finish paper, the photographs are superbly reproduced.
Evetts Haley's introduction interprets as well as chronicles
the life of a strange and tragic man. The book is easily the
finest range book in the realm of the pictorial ever
published.

SMITH, WALLACE. _Garden of the Sun_, Los Angeles, 1939. OP.
Despite the banal title, this is a scholarly work with first-
rate chapters on California horses and ranching in the San
Joaquin Valley.

SNYDER, A. B., as told to Nellie Snyder Yost. _Pinnacle Jake_,
Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1951. The setting is Nebraska,
Wyoming, and Montana from the 1880's on. Had Pinnacle Jake
kept a diary, his accounts of range characters, especially
camp cooks and range horses, with emphasis on night horses and
outlaws, could not have been fresher or more precise in
detail. Reading this book will not give a new interpretation
of open range work with big outfits, but the aliveness of it
in both narrative and sketch makes it among the best of old-
time cowboy reminiscences.

SONNICHSEN, C. L. _Cowboys and Cattle Kings: Life on the Range
Today_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1950. An
interviewer's findings without the historical criticism
exemplified by Bernard DeVoto on the subject of federal-owned
ranges (in essays in _Harper's Magazine_ during the late
1940'S).

STANLEY, CLARK, "better known as the Rattlesnake King." _The
Life and Adventures of the American Cow-Boy_, published by the
author at Providence, Rhode Island, 1897. This pamphlet of
forty-one pages, plus about twenty pages of Snake Oil Liniment
advertisements, is one of the curiosities of cowboy
literature. It includes a collection of cowboy songs, the
earliest I know of in time of printing, antedating by eleven
years Jack Thorp's booklet of cowboy songs printed at
Estancia, New Mexico, in 1908. Clark Stanley no doubt used the
contents of his pamphlet in medicine show harangues, thus
adding to the cowboy myth. As time went on, he added scraps of
anecdotes and western history, along with testimonials, to the
pamphlet, the latest edition I have seen being about 1906,
printed in Worcester, Massachusetts.

STEEDMAN, CHARLES J. _Bucking the Sagebrush_, New York, 1904.
OP. Charming; much of nature. Illustrated by Russell.


{illust. caption =
Charles M. Russell, in _The Virginian_ by Owen Wister}



STEVENS, MONTAGUE. _Meet Mr. Grizzly_, University of New
Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1943. Stevens, a Cambridge
Englishman, ranched, hunted, and made deductions. See
characterization under "Bears and Bear Hunters."

STREETER, FLOYD B. _Prairie Trails and Cow Towns_, Boston,
1936. OP. This brings together considerable information on
Kansas cow towns. Primary books on the subject, besides those
by Stuart Henry, McCoy, Vestal, and Wright herewith listed,
are _The Oklahoma Scout_, by Theodore Baughman, Chicago, 1886;
_Midnight and Noonday_, by G. D. Freeman, Caldwell, Kansas,
1892; biographies of Wild Bill Hickok, town marshal; Stuart N.
Lake's biography of Wyatt Earp, another noted marshal; _Hard
Knocks_, by Harry Young, Chicago, 1915, not too prudish to
notice dance hall girls but too Victorian to say much. Many
Texas trail drivers had trouble as well as fun in the cow
towns. _Life and Adventures of Ben Thompson_, by W. M. Walton,
1884, reprinted at Bandera, Texas, 1926, gives samples.
Thompson was more gambler than cowboy; various other men who
rode from cow camps into town and found themselves in their
element were gamblers and gunmen first and cowboys only in
passing.

STUART, GRANVILLE. _Forty Years on the Frontier_, two volumes,
Cleveland, 1925. Nothing better on the cowboy has
ever been written than the chapter entitled "Cattle Business"
in Volume II. A prime work throughout. OP.

THORP, JACK (N. Howard) has a secure place in range literature
because of his contribution in cowboy songs. (See entry under
"Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads.") In 1926 he had printed at
Santa Fe a paper-backed book of 123 pages entitled _Tales of
the Chuck Wagon_, but "didn't sell more than two or three
million copies." Some of the tales are in his posthumously
published reminiscences, _Pardner of the Wind_ (as told to
Neil McCullough Clark, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1945) . This
book is richest on range horses, and will be found listed in
the section on "Horses."

TOWNE, CHARLES WAYLAND, and WENTWORTH, EDWARD NORRIS.
_Shepherd's Empire_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman,
1945. Not firsthand in the manner of Gilfillan's _Sheep_, nor
charming and light in the manner of Kupper's _The Golden
Hoof_, but an essayical history, based on research. The
deference paid to Mary Austin's _The Flock_ marks the author
as civilized. Towne wrote the book; Wentworth supplied the
information. Wentworth's own book, _America's Sheep Trails_,
Iowa State College Press, Ames, 1948, is ponderous, amorphous,
and in part, only a eulogistic "mugbook."

TOWNSHEND, R. B. _A Tenderfoot in Colorado_, London, 1923;
_The Tenderfoot in New Mexico_, 1924. Delightful as well as
faithful. Literature by an Englishman who translated Tacitus
under the spires of Oxford after he retired from the range.

TREADWELL, EDWARD F. _The Cattle King_, New York, 1931;
reissued by Christopher, Boston. A strong biography of a very
strong man--Henry Miller of California.

TRENHOLM, VIRGINIA COLE. _Footprints on the Frontier_,
Douglas, Wyoming, 1945. OP. The best range material in this
book is a reprint of parts of James C. Shaw's _Pioneering in
Texas and Wyoming_, privately printed at Cheyenne in 1931.

TRUETT, VELMA STEVENS. _On the Hoof in Nevada_,
Gehrett-Truett-Hall, Los Angeles, 1950. A 613-page album of
cattle brands--priced at $10.00. The introduction is one of
the sparse items on Nevada ranching.

TUCKER, PATRICK T. _Riding the High Country_, Caldwell, Idaho,
1933. A brave book with much of Charlie Russell in it. OP.

VESTAL, STANLEY (pen name for Walter S. Campbell). _Queen of
Cow Towns, Dodge City_, Harper, New York, 1952. "Bibulous
Babylon," "Killing of Dora Hand," and "Marshals for Breakfast"
are chapter titles suggesting the tenor of the book.

_Vocabulario y Refranero Criollo_, text and illustrations by
Tito Saudibet, Guillermo Kraft Ltda., Buenos Aires, 1945.
North American ranges have called forth nothing to compare
with this fully illustrated, thorough, magnificent history-
dictionary of the gaucho world. It stands out in contrast to
American slapdash, puerile-minded pretenses at dictionary
treatises on cowboy life.

"He who knows only the history of his own country does not
know it." The cowboy is not a singular type. He was no better
rider than the Cossack of Asia. His counterpart in South
America, developed also from Spanish cattle, Spanish horses,
and Spanish techniques, is the gaucho. Literature on the
gaucho is extensive, some of it of a high order. Primary is
_Martin Fierro_, the epic by Jose Hernandez (published
1872-79). A translation by Walter Owen was published in the
United States in 1936. No combination of knowledge, sympathy,
imagination, and craftsmanship has produced stories and
sketches about the cowboy equal to those on the gaucho by W.
H. Hudson, especially in _Tales of the Pampas_ and _Far Away
and Long Ago_, and by R. B. Cunninghame Graham, whose writings
are dispersed and difficult to come by.

WEBB, WALTER PRESCOTT. _The Great Plains_, Ginn, Boston, 1931.
While this landmark in historical interpretation of the West
is by no means limited to the subject of grazing, it contains
a long and penetrating chapter entitled "The Cattle
Kingdom." The book is an analysis of land, climate, barbed
wire, dry farming, wells and windmills, native animal life,
etc. No other work on the plains country goes so meatily into
causes and effects.

WELLMAN, PAUL I. _The Trampling Herd_, Doubleday, Garden City,
N. Y., 1939; reissued, 1951. An attempt to sum up the story of
the cattle range in America.

WHITE, STEWART EDWARD. _Arizona Nights_, 1902. "Rawhide," one
of the stories in this excellent collection, utilizes folk
motifs about rawhide with much skill.

WILLIAMS, J. R. _Cowboys Out Our Way_, with an Introduction by
J. Frank Dobie, Scribner's, New York, 1951. An album
reproducing about two hundred of the realistic, humorous, and
human J. R. Williams syndicated cartoons. This book was
preceded by _Out Our Way_, New York, 1943, and includes
numerous cartoons therein printed. There was an earlier and
less extensive collection. Modest Jim Williams has been
progressively dissatisfied with all his cartoon books--and
with cartoons not in books. I like them and in my Introduction
say why.

WISTER, OWEN. _The Virginian_, 1902. Wister was an outsider
looking in. His hero, "The Virginian," is a cowboy without
cows--like the cowboys of Eugene Manlove Rhodes; but this hero
does not even smell of cows, whereas Rhodes's men do.
Nevertheless, the novel authentically realizes the code of the
range, and it makes such absorbing reading that in fifty years
(1902-52) it sold over 1,600,000 copies, not counting foreign
translations and paper reprints.

Wister was an urbane Harvard man, of clubs and travels. In
1952 the University of Wyoming celebrated the fiftieth
anniversary of the publication of _The Virginian_. To mark the
event, Frances K. W. Stokes wrote _My Father Owen Wister_, a
biographical pamphlet including "ten letters written to his
mother during his trip to Wyoming in 1885"--a trip that
prepared him to write the novel. The pamphlet is published at
Laramie, Wyoming, name of publisher not printed on it.

WRIGHT, PETER. _A Three-Foot Stool_, New York and
London, 1909. Like several other Englishmen who went west,
Wright had the perspective that enabled him to comprehend some
aspects of ranch life more fully than many range men who knew
nothing but their own environment and times. He compares the
cowboy to the cowherd described by Queen Elizabeth's Spenser.
Into exposition of ranching on the Gila, he interweaves talk
on Arabian afreets, Stevenson's philosophy of adventure, and
German imperialism.

WRIGHT, ROBERT M. _Dodge City, Cowboy Capital_, Wichita,
Kansas, 1913; reprinted. Good on the most cowboyish of all the
cow towns.


PAMPHLETS


Pamphlets are an important source of knowledge in all fields.
No first-class library is without them. Most of them become
difficult to obtain, and some bring higher prices than whole
sets of books. Of numerous pamphlets pertaining to the range,
only a few are listed here. _History of the Chisum War, or
Life of Ike Fridge_, by Ike Fridge, Electra, Texas (undated),
is as compact as jerked beef and as laconic as conversation in
alkali dust. James F. Hinkle, in his _Early Days of a Cowboy
on the Pecos_, Roswell, New Mexico, 1937, says: "One
noticeable characteristic of the cowpunchers was that they did
not talk much." Some people don't have to talk to say plenty.
Hinkle was one of them. At a reunion of trail drivers in San
Antonio in October, 1928, Fred S. Millard showed me his
laboriously written reminiscences. He wanted them printed. I
introduced him to J. Marvin Hunter of Bandera, Texas,
publisher of _Frontier Times_. I told Hunter not to ruin the
English by trying to correct it, as he had processed many of
the earth-born reminiscences in _The Trail Drivers of Texas_.
He printed Millard's _A Cowpuncher of the Pecos_ in pamphlet
form shortly thereafter. It begins: "This is a piece I wrote
for the Trail Drivers." They would understand some things on
which he was not explicit.

About 1940, as he told me, Bob Beverly of Lovington, New
Mexico, made a contract with the proprietor of the town's
weekly newspaper to print his reminiscences. By the time the
contractor had set eighty-seven pages of type he saw that he
would lose money if he set any more. He gave Bob Beverly back
more manuscript than he had used and stapled a pamphlet
entitled _Hobo of the Rangeland_. The philosophy in it is more
interesting to me than the incidents. "The cowboy of the old
West worked in a land that seemed to be grieving over
something--a kind of sadness, loneliness in a deathly quiet.
One not acquainted with the plains could not understand what
effect it had on the mind. It produced a heartache and a sense
of exile."

Crudely printed, but printed as the author talked, is _The End
of the Long Horn Trail_, by A. P. (Ott) Black, Selfridge,
North Dakota (August, 1939) . As I know from a letter from his
_compadre_, Black was blind and sixty-nine years old when he
dictated his memoirs to a college graduate who had sense
enough to retain the flavor. Black's history is badly botched,
but reading him is like listening. "It took two coons and an
alligator to spend the summer on that cotton plantation. . . .
Cowpunchers were superstitious about owls. One who rode into
my camp one night had killed a man somewhere and was on the
dodge. He was lying down by the side of the campfire when an
owl flew over into some hackberry trees close by and started
hooting. He got up from there right now, got his horse in,
saddled up and rode off into the night."

John Alley is--or was--a teacher. His _Memories of Roundup
Days_, University of Oklahoma Press, 1934 (just twenty small
pages), is an appraisal of range men, a criticism of life
seldom found in old-timers who look back. On the other hand,
some pamphlets prized by collectors had as well not have been
written. Here is the full title of an example: _An Aged
Wanderer, A Life Sketch of J. M. Parker, A Cowboy of the
Western Plains in the Early Days_. "Price 40 cents.
Headquarters, Elkhorn Wagon Yard, San Angelo, Texas." It was
printed about 1923. When Parker wrote it he was
senile, and there is no evidence that he was ever possessed of
intelligence. The itching to get into print does not guarantee
that the itcher has anything worth printing.

Some of the best reminiscences have been pried out of range
men. In 1914 the Wyoming Stock Growers Association resolved a
Historical Commission into existence. A committee was
appointed and, naturally, one man did the work. In 1923 a
fifty-five-page pamphlet entitled _Letters from Old Friends
and Members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association_ was
printed at Cheyenne. It is made up of unusually informing and
pungent recollections by intelligent cowmen.



_22_

Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads

{illust. Lyrics =
Kind friends, if you will listen, A story I will tell A-
bout a final bust-up, That happened down in Dell.}


COWBOY SONGS and ballads are generally ranked alongside Negro
spirituals as being the most important of America's
contributions to folk song. As compared with the old English
and Scottish ballads, the cowboy and all other ballads of the
American frontiers generally sound cheap and shoddy. Since
John A. Lomax brought out his collection in 1910, cowboy songs
have found their way into scores of songbooks, have been
recorded on hundreds of records, and have been popularized,
often--and naturally--without any semblance to cowboy style,
by thousands of radio singers. Two general anthologies are
recommended especially for the cowboy songs they contain:
_American Ballads and Folk Songs_, by John A. and Alan Lomax,
Macmillan, New York, 1934; _The American Songbag_, by Carl
Sandburg, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1927.


LARRIN, MARGARET. _Singing Cowboy_ (with music), New York,
1931. OP.

LOMAX, JOHN A., and LOMAX, ALAN. _Cowboy Songs and Other
Frontier Ballads_, Macmillan, New York, 1938. This is a much
added-to and revised form of Lomax's 1910 collec-
tion, under the same title. It is the most complete of all
anthologies. More than any other man, John A. Lomax is
responsible for having made cowboy songs a part of the common
heritage of America. His autobiographic _Adventures of a
Ballad Hunter_ (Macmillan, 1947) is in quality far above the
jingles that most cowboy songs are.

Missouri, as no other state, gave to the West and Southwest.
Much of Missouri is still more southwestern in character than
much of Oklahoma. For a full collection, with full treatment,
of the ballads and songs, including bad-man and cowboy songs,
sung in the Southwest there is nothing better than _Ozark
Folksongs_, collected and edited by Vance Randolph, State
Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, 1946-50. An
unsurpassed work in four handsome volumes.

OWENS, WILLIAM A. _Texas Folk Songs_, Southern Methodist
University Press, Dallas, 1950. A miscellany of British
ballads, American ballads, "songs of doleful love," etc.
collected in Texas mostly from country people of Anglo-
American stock. Musical scores for all the songs.

The Texas Folklore Society has published many cowboy songs.
Its publications _Texas and Southwestern Lore_ (1927) and
_Follow de Drinkin' Gou'd_ (1928) contain scores, with music
and anecdotal interpretations. Other volumes contain other
kinds of songs, including Mexican.

THORP, JACK (N. Howard). _Songs of the Cowboys_, Boston, 1921.
OP. Good, though limited, anthology, without music and with
illuminating comments. A pamphlet collection that Thorp
privately printed at Estancia, New Mexico, in 1908, was one of
the first to be published. Thorp had the perspective of both
range and civilization. He was a kind of troubadour himself.
The opening chapter, "Banjo in the Cow Camps," of his
posthumous reminiscences, _Pardner of the Wind, is_ delicious.



_23_

Horses: Mustangs and Cow Ponies

THE WEST WAS DISCOVERED, battled over, and won by men on
horseback. Spanish conquistadores saddled their horses in Vera
Cruz and rode until they had mapped the continents from the
Horn to Montana and from the Floridas to the harbors of the
Californias. The padres with them rode on horseback, too, and
made every mission a horse ranch. The national dance of
Mexico, the Jarabe, is an interpretation of the clicking of
hoofs and the pawing and prancing of spirited horses that the
Aztecs noted when the Spaniards came. Likewise, the chief
contribution made by white men of America to the folk songs of
the world--the cowboy songs--are rhythmed to the walk of
horses.

Astride horses introduced by the conquistadores to the
Americas, the Plains Indians became almost a separate race
from the foot-moving tribes of the East and the stationary
Pueblos of the Rockies. The men that later conquered and
corralled these wild-riding Plains Indians were plainsmen on
horses and cavalrymen. The earliest American explorers and
trappers of both Plains and Rocky Mountains went out in the
saddle. The first industrial link between the East and the
West was a mounted pack train beating out the Santa Fe Trail.
On west beyond the end of this trail, in Spanish California,
even the drivers of oxen rode horseback. The first
transcontinental express was the Pony Express.

Outlaws and bad men were called "long riders." The Texas
Ranger who followed them was, according to his own proverb,
"no better than his horse." Booted sheriffs from Brownsville
on the Rio Grande to the Hole in the Wall in
the Big Horn Mountains lived in the saddle. Climactic of all
the riders rode the cowboy, who lived with horse and herd.

In the Old West the phrase "left afoot" meant nothing short of
being left flat on your back. "A man on foot is no man at
all," the saying went. If an enemy could not take a man's
life, the next best thing was to take his horse. Where cow
thieves went scot free, horse thieves were hanged, and to say
that a man was "as common as a horse thief" was to express the
nadir of commonness. The pillow of the frontiersmen who slept
with a six-shooter under it was a saddle, and hitched to the
horn was the loose end of a stake rope. Just as "Colonel Colt"
made all men equal in a fight, the horse made all men equal in
swiftness and mobility.

The proudest names of civilized languages when literally
translated mean "horseman": eques, caballero, chevalier,
cavalier. Until just yesterday the Man on Horseback had been
for centuries the symbol of power and pride. The advent of the
horse, from Spanish sources, so changed the ways and
psychology of the Plains Indians that they entered into what
historians call the Age of Horse Culture. Almost until the
automobile came, the whole West and Southwest were dominated
by a Horse Culture.

Material on range horses is scattered through the books listed
under "Range Life," "Stagecoaches, Freighting," "Pony
Express."

No thorough comprehension of the Spanish horse of the Americas
is possible without consideration of this horse's antecedents,
and that involves a good deal of the horse history of the
world.

BROWN, WILLIAM ROBINSON. _The Horse of the Desert_ (no
publisher or place on title page), 1936; reprinted by
Macmillan, New York. A noble, beautiful, and informing book.

CABRERA, ANGEL. _Caballos de America_, Buenos Aires, 1945. The
authority on Argentine horses.

CARTER, WILLIAM H. _The Horses of the World_, National
Geographic Society, Washington, D. C., 1923. A concentrated
survey.

_Cattleman_. Published at Fort Worth, this monthly magazine of
the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association began in
1939 to issue, for September, a horse number. It has published
a vast amount of material both scientific and popular on range
horses. Another monthly magazine worth knowing about is the
_Western Horseman_, Colorado Springs, Colorado.

DENHARDT, ROBERT MOORMAN. _The Horse of the Americas_,
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1947. This historical
treatment of the Spanish horse could be better ordered; some
sections of the book are little more than miscellanies.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Mustangs_, illustrated by Charles Banks
Wilson, Little, Brown, Boston, 1952. Before this handsome book
arrives at the wild horses of North America, a third of it has
been spent on the Arabian progenitors of the Spanish horse,
the acquisition of the Spanish horse by western Indians, and
the nature of Indian horses. There are many narratives of
mustangs and mustangers and of Spanish-blooded horses under
the saddle. The author has tried to compass the natural
history of the animal and to blend vividness with learning.
The book incorporates his _Tales of the Mustang_, a slight
volume published in an edition of only three hundred copies in
1936. It also incorporates a large part of _Mustangs and Cow
Horses_, edited by Dobie, Boatright, and Ransom, and issued by
the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1940--a volume that went
out of print not long after it was published.

DODGE, THEODORE A. _Riders of Many Lands_, New York, 1893.
Illustrations by Remington. Wide and informed views.

GRAHAM, R. B. CUNNINGHAME. _The Horses of the Conquest_,
London, 1930. Graham was both historian and horseman, as much
at home on the pampas as in his ancient Scottish home. This
excellent book on the Spanish horses intro-



{illust. caption =
Charles Banks Wilson, in _The Mustangs_
by J. Frank Dobie (1952)}


duced to the Western Hemisphere is in a pasture to itself.
Reprinted in 1949 by the University of Oklahoma Press, with
introduction and notes by Robert Moorman Denhardt.

GREER, JAMES K. _Bois d'Arc to Barbed Wire_, Dallas, 1936. OP.

HASTINGS, FRANK. _A Ranchman's Recollections_, Chicago, 1921.
"Old Gran'pa" is close to the best American horse story I have
ever read. OP.

HAYES, M. HORACE. _Points of the Horse_, London, 1904. This
and subsequent editions are superior in treatment and
illustrations to earlier editions. Hayes was a far traveler
and scholar as well as horseman. One of the less than a dozen
best books on the horse.

JAMES, WILL. _Smoky_, Scribner's, New York, 1930. Perhaps the
best of several books that Will James--always with
illustrations--has woven around horse heroes.

LEIGH, WILLIAM R. _The Western Pony_, New York, 1933. One of
the most beautifully printed books on the West; beautiful
illustrations; illuminating text. OP.

MULLER, DAN. _Horses_, Reilly and Lee, Chicago, 1936.
Interesting illustrations.

PATTULLO, GEORGE. _The Untamed_, New York, 1911. A collection
of short stories, among which "Corazon" and "Neutria" are
excellent on horses. OP.

PERKINS, CHARLES ELLIOTT. _The Pinto Horse_, Santa Barbara,
California, 1927. A fine narrative, illustrated by Edward
Borein. OP.

RIDGEWAY, W. _The Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred
Horse_, Cambridge, England, 1905. A standard work, though many
of its conclusions are disputed, especially by Lady Wentworth
in her _Thoroughbred Racing Stock and Its Ancestors_, London,
1938.

SANTEE, ROSS. _Men and Horses_, New York, 1926. Three chapters
of this book, "A Fool About a Horse," "The Horse Wrangler,"
and "The Rough String," are especially recommended. _Cowboy_,
New York, 1928, reveals in a fine way the rapport between the
cowboy and his horse. _Sleepy Black,_
New York, 1933, is a story of a horse designed for younger
readers; being good on the subject, it is good for any reader.
All OP.

SIMPSON, GEORGE GAYLOR. _Horses: The Story of the Horse Family
in the Modern World and through Sixty Million Years of
History_, Oxford University Press, New York, 1951. In the
realm of paleontology this work supplants all predecessors.
Bibliography.

STEELE, RUFUS. _Mustangs of the Mesas_, Hollywood, California,
1941. OP. Modern mustanging in Nevada; excellently written
narratives of outstanding mustangs.

STONG, PHIL. _Horses and Americans_, New York, 1939. A survey
and a miscellany combined. OP.


{illust. caption =
Charles M. Russell, in _The Untamed_
by George Pattullo (1911)}



THORP, JACK (N. Howard) as told to Neil McCullough Clark.
_Pardner of the Wind_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1945. Two
chapters in this book make the "Spanish thunderbolts," as Jack
Thorp called the mustangs and Spanish cow horses, graze, run,
pitch, and go gentle ways as free as the wind. "Five Hundred
Mile Horse Race" is a great story. No other range man
excepting Ross Santee has put down so much everyday horse lore
in such a fresh way.

TWEEDIE, MAJOR GENERAL W. _The Arabian Horse: His Country and
People_, Edinburgh and London, 1894. One of the few horse
books to be classified as literature. Wise in the blend of
horse, land, and people.

WENTWORTH, LADY. _The Authentic Arabian Horse and His
Descendants_, London, 1945. Rich in knowledge and both
magnificent and munificent in illustrations. Almost
immediately after publication, this noble volume entered the
rare book class.

WYMAN, WALKER D. _The Wild Horse of the West_, Caxton,
Caldwell, Idaho, 1945. A scholarly sifting of virtually all
available material on mustangs. Readable. Only thorough
bibliography on subject so far published.



_24_

The Bad Man Tradition

PLENTY of six-shooter play is to be found in most of the books
about old-time cowboys; yet hardly one of the professional bad
men was a representative cowboy. Bad men of the West and
cowboys alike wore six-shooters and spurs; they drank each
other's coffee; they had a fanatical passion for liberty--for
themselves. But the representative cowboy was a reliable hand,
hanging through drought, blizzard, and high water to his herd,
whereas the bona fide bad man lived on the dodge. Between the
killer and the cowboy standing up for his rights or merely
shooting out the lights for fun, there was as much difference
as between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. Of course, the
elements were mixed in the worst of the bad men, as they are
in the best of all good men. No matter what deductions
analysis may lead to, the fact remains that the western bad
men of open range days have become a part of the American
tradition. They represent six-shooter culture at its zenith--
the wild and woolly side of the West--a stage between receding
bowie knife individualism of the backwoods and blackguard,
machine-gun gangsterism of the city.

The songs about Sam Bass, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid
reflect popular attitude toward the hard-riding outlaws. Sam
Bass, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, the Daltons, Cole Younger,
Joaquin Murrieta, John Wesley Hardin, Al Jennings, Belle
Starr, and other "long riders" with their guns in their hands
have had their biographies written over and over. They were
not nearly as immoral as certain newspaper columnists lying
under the cloak of piety. As time goes on, they, like antique


{illust. caption =
Tom Lea: Pancho Villa, in _Southwest Review_ (1951)}


Robin Hood and the late Pancho Villa, recede from all
realistic judgment. If the picture show finds in them models
for generosity, gallantry, and fidelity to a code of liberty,
and if the public finds them picturesque, then philosophers
may well be thankful that they lived, rode, and shot.

"The long-tailed heroes of the revolver," to pick a phrase
from Mark Twain's unreverential treatment of them in _Roughing
It_, often did society a service in shooting each other--aside
from providing entertainment to future generations. As "The
Old Cattleman" of Alfred Henry Lewis' _Wolfville_ stories
says, "A heap of people need a heap of killing." Nor can the
bad men be logically segregated from the long-haired killers
on the side of the law like Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp.
W. H. Hudson once advanced the theory that bloodshed and
morality go together. If American civilization proceeds, the
rage for collecting books on bad men will probably subside
until a copy of Miguel Antonio Otero's _The Real Billy the
Kid_ will bring no higher price than a first edition of A.
Edward Newton's _The Amenities of Book-Collecting_.

See "Fighting Texians," "Texas Rangers," "Range Life," "Cowboy
Songs and Other Ballads."


AIKMAN, DUNCAN. _Calamity Jane and the Lady Wildcats_, 1927.
OP. Patronizing in the H. L. Mencken style.

BILLY THE KID. We ve got to take him seriously, not so much
for what he was--

There are twenty-one men I have put bullets through,
And Sheriff Pat Garrett must make twenty-two--

as for his provocations. Popular imagination, represented by
writers of all degrees, goes on playing on him with cumulative
effect. As a figure in literature the Kid has come to lead the
whole field of western bad men. The _Saturday Review_, for
October 11, 1952, features a philosophical essay entitled
"Billy the Kid: Faust in America--The Making of a Legend." The
growth of this legend is minutely traced through a period
of seventy-one years (1881-1952) by J. C. Dykes in _Billy the
Kid: The Bibliography of a Legend_, University of New Mexico
Press, Albuquerque, 1952 (186 pages). It lists 437 titles,
including magazine pieces, mimeographed plays, motion
pictures, verses, pamphlets, fiction. In a blend of casualness
and scholarship, it gives the substance and character of each
item. Indeed, this bibliography reads like a continued story,
with constant references to both antecedent and subsequent
action. Pat Garrett, John Chisum, and other related characters
weave all through it. A first-class bibliography that is also
readable is almost a new genre.

Pat F. Garrett, sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, killed
the Kid about midnight, July 14, 1881. The next spring his
_Authentic Life of Billy the Kid_ was published at Santa Fe,
at least partly written, according to good evidence, by a
newspaperman named Ash Upton. This biography is one of the
rarities in Western Americana. In 1927 it was republished by
Macmillan, New York, under title of _Pat F. Garrett's
Authentic Life of Billy the Kid_, edited by Maurice G. Fulton.
This is now OP but remains basic. The most widely circulated
biography has been _The Saga of Billy the Kid_ by Walter Noble
Burns, New York, 1926. It contains a deal of fictional
conversation and it has no doubt contributed to the Robin-
Hoodizing of the lethal character baptized as William H.
Bonney, who was born in New York in 1859 and now lives with
undiminished vigor as Billy the Kid. Walter Noble Burns was
not so successful with _The Robin Hood of El Dorado: The Saga
of Joaquin Murrieta_ (1932), or, despite hogsheads of blood,
with _Tombstone_ (1927).

CANTON, FRANK M. _Frontier Trails_, Boston, 1930.

COE, GEORGE W. _Frontier Fighter_, Boston, 1934; reprinted by
University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. The autobiography
of one of Billy the Kid's men as recorded by Nan Hillary
Harrison.

COOLIDGE, DANE. _Fighting Men of the West_, New York, 1932.
Biographical sketches. OP.

CUNNINGHAM, EUGENE. _Triggernometry_, 1934; reprinted by
Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho. Excellent survey of codes and
characters. Written by a man of intelligence and knowledge.
Bibliography.

FORREST, E. R. _Arizona's Dark and Bloody Ground_, Caxton,
Caldwell, Idaho, 1936.

GARD, WAYNE. _Sam Bass_, Boston, 1936. Most of the whole
truth. OP.

HALEY, J. EVETTS. _Jeff Milton--A Good Man with a Gun_,
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. Jeff Milton the
whole man as well as the queller of bad men.

HENDRICKS, GEORGE. _The Bad Man of the West_, Naylor, San
Antonio, 1941. Analyses and classifications go far toward
making this treatment of old subjects original. Excellent
bibliographical guide.

HOUGH, EMERSON. _The Story of the Outlaw_, 1907. OP. An
omnibus carelessly put together with many holes in it.

LAKE, STUART. _Wyatt Earp_, Boston, 1931. Best written of all
gunmen biographies. Earp happened to be on the side of the
law.

LANKFORD, N. P. _Vigilante Days and Ways_, 1890, 1912. OP.
Full treatment of lawlessness in the Northwest.

LOVE, ROBERTUS. _The Rise and Fall of Jesse James_, New York,
1926. Excellently written. OP.

RAINE, WILLIAM MCLEOD. _Famous s and Western Outlaws_,
Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1929. A rogues' gallery. _Guns
of the Frontier_, Boston, 1940. Another miscellany. OP.

RASCOE, BURTON. _Belle Starr_, New York, 1941. OP.

RIPLEY, THOMAS. _They Died with Their Boots On_, 1935. Mostly
about John Wesley Hardin. OP.

SABIN, EDWIN L. _Wild Men of the Wild West_, New York, 1929.
Biographic survey of killers from the Mississippi to the
Pacific. OP.

WILD BILL HICKOK. The subject of various biographies, among
them those by Frank J. Wilstach (1926) and William
E. Connelley (1933). The _Nebraska History Magazine_ (Volume
X) for April-June 1927 is devoted to Wild Bill and contains a
"descriptive bibliography" on him by Addison E. Sheldon.

WOODHULL, FROST. Folk-Lore Shooting, in _Southwestern Lore_,
Publication IX of the Texas Folklore Society, 1931. Rich.
Humor.



_25_

Mining and Oil

DURING the twentieth century oil has brought so much money to
the Southwest that the proceeds from cattle have come to look
like tips. This statement is not based on statistics, though
statistics no doubt exist--even on the cost of catching sun
perch. Geological, legal, and economic writings on oil are
mountainous in quantity, but the human drama of oil yet
remains, for the most part, to be written. It is odd to find
such a modern book as Erna Fergusson's _Our Southwest_ not
mentioning oil. It is odd that no book of national reputation
comes off the presses about any aspect of oil. The nearest to
national notice on oil is the daily report of transactions on
the New York Stock Exchange. Oil companies subsidize histories
of themselves, endow universities with money to train
technicians they want, control state legislatures and senates,
and dictate to Congress what they want for themselves in
income tax laws; but so far they have not been able to hire
anybody to write a book about oil that anybody but the hirers
themselves wants to read. Probably they don't read them. The
first thing an oilman does after amassing a few millions is
buy a ranch on which he can get away from oil--and on which he
can spend some of his oil money.

People live a good deal by tradition and fight a good deal by
tradition also, voting more by prejudice. When one considers
the stream of cow country books and the romance of mining
living on in legends of lost mines and, then, the desert of
oil books, one realizes that it takes something more than
money to make the mare of romance run. Geology and economics
are beyond the aim of this _Guide_, but if oil money
keeps on buying up ranch land, the history of modern ranching
will be resolved into the biographies of a comparatively few
oilmen.


BOATRIGHT, MODY C. _Gib Morgan: Minstrel of the Oil Fields_.
Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1945. Folk tales about Gib
rather than minstrelsy. OP.

BOONE, LALIA PHIPPS. _The Petroleum Dictionary_, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1952. "More than 6,000 entries:
definitions of technical terms and everyday expressions, a
comprehensive guide to the language of the oil industry."

CAUGHEY, JOHN WALTON. _Gold Is the Cornerstone_ (1948).
Adequate treatment of the discovery of California gold and of
the miners. _Rushing for Gold_ (1949). Twelve essays by twelve
writers, with emphasis on travel to California. Both books
published by University of California Press, Berkeley and Los
Angeles.

CENDRARS, BLAISE. _Sutter's Gold_, London, 1926. OP.

CLARK, JAMES A., and HALBOUTY, MICHEL T. _Spindletop_, Random
House, New York, 1952. On January 10, 1901, the Spindletop
gusher, near Beaumont, Texas, roared in the oil age. This
book, while it presumes to record what Pat Higgins was
thinking as he sat in front of a country store, seems to be
"the true story." The bare facts in it make drama.

DE QUILLE, DAN (pseudonym for William Wright) . _The Big
Bonanza_, Hartford, 1876. Reprinted, 1947. OP.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _Coronado's Children_, Dallas, 1930;
reprinted by Grosset and Dunlap, New York. Legendary tales of
lost mines and buried treasures of the Southwest. _Apache Gold
and Yaqui Silver_, Little, Brown, Boston, 1939. More of the
same thing.

EMRICH, DUNCAN, editor. _Comstock Bonanza_, Vanguard, New
York, 1950. A collection of writings, garnered mostly from
West Coast magazines and newspapers, bearing on mining in
Nevada during the boom days of Mark Twain's



{illust. caption =
Tom Lea, in _Santa Rita_ by Martin W. Schwettmann
(1943)}


_Roughing It_. James G. Gally's writing is a major discovery
in a minor field.

FORBES, GERALD. _Flush Production: The Epic of Oil in the
Gulf-Southwest_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942.

GILLIS, WILLIAM R. _Goldrush Days with Mark Twain_, New York,
1930. OP.

GLASSCOCK, LUCILLE. _A Texas Wildcatter_, Naylor, San
Antonio, 1952. The wildcatter is Mrs. Glasscock's husband. She
chronicles this player's main moves in the game and gives an
insight into his energy-driven ambition.

HOUSE, BOYCE. _Oil Boom_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1941. With
Boyce House's earlier _Were You in Ranger?_, this book gives a
contemporary picture of the gushing days of oil, money, and
humanity.

LYMAN, GEORGE T. _The Saga of the Comstock Lode_, 1934, and
_Ralston's Ring_, 1937. Both published by Scribner's, New
York.

MCKENNA, JAMES _A. Black Range Tales_, New York, 1936.
Reminiscences of prospecting life. OP.

MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. _Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career
of E. W. Marland_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951.
Mature in style and in interpretative power, John Joseph
Mathews goes into the very life of an oilman who was something
else.

RISTER, C. C. _Oil! Titan of the Southwest_, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. Facts in factual form. Plenty of
oil wealth and taxes; nothing on oil government.

SHINN, CHARLES H. _Mining Camps_, 1885, reprinted by Knopf,
New York, 1948. Perhaps the most competent analysis extant on
the behavior of the gold hunters, with emphasis on their self-
government. _The Story of the Mine as Illustrated by the Great
Comstock Lode of Nevada_, New York, 1896. OP. Shinn knew and
he knew also how to combine into form.

STUART, GRANVILLE. _Forty Years on the Frontier_, Cleveland,
1925. Superb on California and Montana hunger for precious
metals. OP.

TAIT, SAMUEL W. _Wildcatters: An Informal History of Oil-
Hunting in America_, Princeton University Press, 1946. OP.

TWAIN, MARK. _Roughing It_. The mining boom itself.



_26_

Nature; Wild Life; Naturalists

"NO MAN," says Mary Austin, "has ever really entered into the
heart of any country until he has adopted or made up myths
about its familiar objects." A man might reject the myths but
he would have to know many facts about its natural life and
have imagination as well as knowledge before entering into a
country's heart. The history of any land begins with nature,
and all histories must end with nature.

"The character of a country is the destiny of its people,"
wrote Harvey Fergusson in _Rio Grande_. Ross Calvin, also of
New Mexico, had the same idea in mind when he entitled his
book _Sky Determines_. "Culture mocks at the boundaries set up
by politics," Clark Wissler said. "It approaches geographical
boundaries with its hat in its hand." The engineering of water
across mountains, electric translation of sounds,
refrigeration of air and foods, and other technical
developments carry human beings a certain distance across some
of nature's boundaries, but no cleverness of science can
escape nature. The inhabitants of Yuma, Arizona, are destined
forever to face a desert devoid of graciousness. Technology
does not create matter; it merely uses matter in a skilful
way--uses it up.

Man advances by learning the secrets of nature and taking
advantage of his knowledge. He is deeply happy only when in
harmony with his work and environments. The backwoodsman,
early settler, pioneer plainsman, mountain man were all like
some infuriated beast of Promethean capabilities tearing at
its own vitals. Driven by an irrational energy, they seemed
intent on destroying not only the growth of the soil but the
power of the soil to reproduce. Davy Crockett, the great bear
killer, was "wrathy to kill a bear," and as respects bears and
other wild life, one may search the chronicles of his kind in
vain for anything beyond the incidents of chase and slaughter.
To quote T. B. Thorpe's blusterous bear hunter, the whole
matter may be summed up in one sentence: "A bear is started
and he is killed." For the average American of the soil,
whether wearing out a farm, shotgunning with a headlight the
last doe of a woodland, shooting the last buffalo on the
range, trapping the last howling lobo, winging the last
prairie chicken, running down in an automobile the last
antelope, making a killer's target of any hooting owl or
flying heron that comes within range, poisoning the last eagle
to fly over a sheep pasture for him the circumstances of the
killing have expressed his chief intellectual interest in
nature.

A sure sign of advancing civilization has been the rapidly
changing popular attitude toward nature during recent years.
People are becoming increasingly interested not merely in
conserving game for sportsmen to shoot, but in preserving all
wild life, in observing animals, in cultivating native flora,
in building houses that harmonize with climate and landscape.
Roger Tory Peterson's _Field Guide to the Birds_ has become
one of the popular standard works of America.

The story of the American Indian is--despite taboos and
squalor--a story of harmonizations with nature. "Wolf
Brother," in _Long Lance_, by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance,
is a poetic concretion of this harmony. As much at ease with
the wilderness as any Blackfoot Indian was George Frederick
Ruxton, educated English officer and gentleman, who rode
horseback from Vera Cruz to the Missouri River and wrote
_Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains_. In this book
he tells how a lobo followed him for days from camp to camp,
waiting each evening for his share of fresh meat and sometimes
coming close to the fire at night. Any orthodox American would
have shot the lobo at first appearance. Ruxton had the
civilized perspective on nature represented by Thoreau
and Saint Francis of Assisi. Primitive harmony was run over by
frontier wrath to kill, a wrath no less barbaric than
primitive superstitions.

But the coyote's howl is more tonic than all theories about
nature; the buck's whistle more invigorating; the bull's
bellow in the canyon more musical; the call of the bobwhite
more serene; the rattling of the rattlesnake more logical; the
scream of the panther more arousing to the imagination; the
odor from the skunk more lingering; the sweep of the buzzard
in the air more majestical; the wariness of the wild turkey
brighter; the bark of the prairie dog lighter; the guesses of
the armadillo more comical; the upward dartings and dippings
of the scissortail more lovely; the flight of the sandhill
cranes more fraught with mystery.

There is an abundance of printed information on the animal
life of America, to the west as well as to the east. Much of
it cannot be segregated; the earthworm, on which Darwin wrote
a book, knows nothing of regionalism. The best books on nature
come from and lead to the Grasshopper's Library, which is free
to all consultants. I advise the consultant to listen to the
owl's hoot for wisdom, plant nine bean rows for peace, and,
with Wordsworth, sit on an old gray stone listening for
"authentic tidings of invisible things." Studies are only to
"perfect nature." In the words of Mary Austin, "They that make
the sun noise shall not fail of the sun's full recompense."

Like knowledge in any other department of life, that on nature
never comes to a stand so long as it has vitality. A
continuing interest in natural history is nurtured by _Natural
History_, published by the American Museum of Natural History,
New York; _Nature_, published in Washington, D. C.; _The
Living Wilderness_, also from Washington; _Journal of
Mammalogy_, a quarterly, Baltimore, Maryland; _Audubon
Magazine_ (formerly _Bird Lore_), published by the National
Audubon Society, New York; _American Forests_, Washington, D.
C., and various other publications.

In addition to books of natural history interest listed below,
others are listed under "Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters,"
"Bears and Bear Hunters," "Coyotes, Lobos, and Panthers,"
"Birds and Wild Flowers," and "Interpreters." Perhaps a
majority of worthy books pertaining to the western half of
America look on the outdoors.


ADAMS, W. H. DAVENPORT (from the French of Benedict Revoil).
_The Hunter and the Trapper of North America_, London, 1875. A
strange book.

ARNOLD, OREN. _Wild Life in the Southwest_, Dallas, 1936.
Helpful chapters on various characteristic animals and plants.
OP.

BAILEY, VERNON. _Mammals of New Mexico_, United States
Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Biological Survey,
Washington, D. C., 1931. _Biological Survey of Texas_, 1905.
OP. The "North American Fauna Series," to which these two
books belong, contains or points to the basic facts covering
most of the mammals of the Southwest.

BAILLIE-GROHMAN, WILLIAM A. _Camps in the Rockies_, 1882. A
true sportsman, Baillie-Grohman was more interested in living
animals than in just killing. OP.

BEDICHEK, ROY. _Adventures with a Texas Naturalist_,
Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1947. To be personal, Roy
Bedichek has the most richly stored mind I have ever met; it
is as active as it is full. Liberal in the true sense of the
word, it frees other minds. Here, using facts as a means, it
gives meanings to the hackberry tree, limestone, mockingbird,
Inca dove, Mexican primrose, golden eagle, the Davis
Mountains, cedar cutters, and many another natural phenomenon.
_Adventures with a Texas Naturalist_ is regarded by some good
judges as the wisest book in the realm of natural history
produced in America since Thoreau wrote.

The title of Bedichek's second book, _Karankaway Country_
(Garden City, 1950), is misleading. The Karankawa Indians
start it off, but it goes to coon inquisitiveness, prairie
chicken dances, the extinction of species to which the
whooping crane is approaching, browsing goats, dignified
skunks, swifts in love flight, a camp in the brush, dust,
erosion, silt--always with thinking added to seeing. The
foremost naturalist of the Southwest, Bedichek constantly
relates nature to civilization and human values.

BROWNING, MESHACH. _Forty-Four Years of the Life of a Hunter_,
1859; reprinted, Philadelphia, 1928. Prodigal on bear and
deer.

CAHALANE, VICTOR H. _Mammals of North America_, Macmillan, New
York, 1947. The author is a scientist with an open mind on the
relationships between predators and game animals. His thick,
delightfully illustrated book is the best dragnet on American
mammals extant. It contains excellent lists of references.

CATON, JUDGE JOHN DEAN. _Antelope and Deer of America_, 1877.
Standard work. OP.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Longhorns_ (1941) and _The Mustangs_
(1952), while hardly to be catalogued as natural history
books, go farther into natural history than most books on
cattle and horses go. _On the Open Range_ (1931; reprinted by
Banks Upshaw, Dallas) contains a number of animal stories more
or less true. Ben Lilly of _The Ben Lilly Legend_ (Boston,
1950) thought that God had called him to hunt. He spent his
life, therefore, in hunting. He saw some things in nature
beyond targets.

DODGE, RICHARD I. _The Hunting Grounds of the Great West_,
London, 1877. Published in New York the same year under title
of _The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants_.
Outstanding survey of outstanding wild creatures.

DUNRAVEN, EARL OF. _The Great Divide_, London, 1876; reprinted
under title of _Hunting in the Yellowstone_, 1925. OP.

ELLIOTT, CHARLES (editor). _Fading Trails_, New York, 1942.
Humanistic review of characteristic American wild life. OP.

FLACK, CAPTAIN. _The Texas Ranger, or Real Life in the
Backwoods_, 1866; another form of _A Hunter's Experience in
the Southern States of America_, by Captain Flack, "The
Ranger," London, 1866.

GANSON, EVE. _Desert Mavericks_, Santa Barbara, California,
1928. Illustrated; delightful. OP.

GEISER, SAMUEL WOOD. _Naturalists of the Frontier_, Southern
Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1937; revised and enlarged
edition, 1948. Biographies of men who were characters as well
as scientists, generally in environments alien to their
interests.

GERSTAECKER, FREDERICK. _Wild Sports in the Far West_, 1854. A
translation from the German. Delightful reading and revealing
picture of how backwoodsmen of the Mississippi Valley "lived
off the country."

GRAHAM, GID. _Animal Outlaws_, Collinsville, Oklahoma, 1938.
OP. A remarkable collection of animal stories. Privately
printed.

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Between 1893 and 1913, Grinnell, partly
in collaboration with Theodore Roosevelt, edited five volumes
for The Boone and Crockett Club that contain an extraordinary
amount of information, written mostly by men of civilized
perspective, on bears, deer, mountain sheep, buffaloes,
cougars, elk, wolves, moose, mountains, and forests. The
series, long out of print, is a storehouse of knowledge not to
be overlooked by any student of wild life in the West. The
titles are: _American Big-Game Hunting_, 1893; _Hunting in
Many Lands_, 1895; _Trail and Camp-Fire_, 1897; _American Big
Game in Its Haunts_, 1904; _Hunting at High Altitudes_, 1913.

GRINNELL, JOSEPH; DIXON, JOSEPH S.; and LINSDALE, JEAN M.
_Fur-Bearing Mammals of California: Their Natural History,
Systematic Status, and Relation to Man_, two volumes,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1937. The king, so
far, of all state natural histories.

HALL, E. RAYMOND. _Mammals of Nevada_, University of
California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1946. So far as
my knowledge goes, this is the only respect-worthy book extant
pertaining to the state whose economy is based on fees from
divorces and gambling and whose best-known citizen is Senator
Pat McCarran.

HARTMAN, CARL G. _Possum_, University of Texas Press, Austin,
1952. This richly illustrated book comprehends


{illust. caption =
Charles M. Russell, in _The Blazed Trail of the
Old Frontier_ by Agnes C. Laut (1926)}


everything pertaining to the subject from prehistoric
marsupium to baking with sweet potatoes in a Negro cabin. It
is the outcome of a lifetime's scientific investigation not
only of possums but of libraries and popular talk. Thus, in
addition to its biographical and natural history aspects, it
is a study in the evolution of man's knowledge about one of
the world's folkiest creatures.

HORNADAY, WILLIAM T. _Camp Fires on Desert and Lava_, London,
n.d. OP. Dr. Hornaday, who died in 1937, was the first
director of the New York Zoological Park. He was a great
conservationist and an authority on the wild life of America.

HUDSON, W. H. _The Naturalist in La Plata_, New York, 1892.
Not about the Southwest or even North America, but
Hudson's chapters on "The Puma," "Some Curious Animal
Weapons," "The Mephitic Skunk," "Humming Birds," "The Strange
Instincts of Cattle," "Horse and Man," etc. come home to the
Southwest. Few writers tend to make readers so aware; no other
has written so delightfully of the lands of grass.

INGERSOLL, ERNEST. _Wild Neighbors_, New York, 1897. OP. A
superior work. Chapter II, "The Father of Game," is on the
cougar; Chapter IV, "The Hound of the Plains," is on the
coyote; there is an excellent essay on the badger. Each
chapter is provided with a list of books affording more
extended treatment of the subject.

JAEGER, EDMUND C. _Denizens of the Desert_, Boston, 1922. OP.
"Don Coyote," the roadrunner, and other characteristic
animals. _Our Desert Neighbors_, Stanford University Press,
California, 1950.

LOCKE, LUCIE H. _Naturally Yours, Texas_, Naylor, San Antonio,
1949. Charm must never be discounted; it is far rarer than
facts, and often does more to lead to truth. This slight book
is in verse and drawings, type integrated with delectable
black-and-white representations of the prairie dog, armadillo,
sanderling, mesquite, whirlwind, sand dune, mirage, and dozens
of other natural phenomena. The only other book in this list
to which it is akin is Eve Ganson's _Desert Mavericks_.

LUMHOLTZ, CARL. _Unknown Mexico_, New York, 1902. Nearly
anything about animals as well as about Indians and mountains
of Mexico may be found in this extraordinary two-volume work.
OP.

MCILHENNY, EDWARD A. _The Alligator s Life History_, Boston,
1935. OP. The alligator got farther west than is generally
known--at least within reach of Laredo and Eagle Pass on the
Rio Grande. McIlhenny's book treats--engagingly, intimately,
and with precision--of the animal in Louisiana. Hungerers for
anatomical biology are referred to _The Alligator and Its
Allies_ by A. M. Reese, New York, 1915. I have more to say
about McIlhenny in Chapter 30.

MARCY, COLONEL R. B. _Thirty Years of Army Life on the
Border_, New York, 1866. Marcy had a scientific mind and a
high sense of values. He knew how to write and what he wrote
remains informing and pleasant.

MARTIN, HORACE T. _Castorologia, or The History and Traditions
of the Canadian Beaver_, London, 1892. OP. The beaver is a
beaver, whether on Hudson's Bay or the Mexican side of the Rio
Grande. Much has been written on this animal, the propeller of
the trappers of the West, but this famous book remains the
most comprehensive on facts and the amplest in conception. The
author was humorist as well as scientist.

MENGER, RUDOLPH. _Texas Nature Observations and
Reminiscences_, San Antonio, 1913. OP. Being of an educated
German family, Dr. Menger found many things in nature more
interesting than two-headed calves.

MILLS, ENOS. _The Rocky Mountain Wonderland, Wild Life on the
Rockies, Waiting in the Wilderness_, and other books. Some
naturalists have taken exception to some observations recorded
by Mills; nevertheless, he enlarges and freshens mountain
life.

MUIR, JOHN. _The Mountains of California, Our National Parks_,
and other books. Muir, a great naturalist, had the power to
convey his wise sympathies and brooded-over knowledge.

MURPHY, JOHN MORTIMER. _Sporting Adventures in the Far West_,
London, 1879. One of the earliest roundups of game animals of
the West.

NEWSOME, WILLIAM M. _The Whitetailed Deer_, New York, 1926.
OP. Standard work.

PALLISER, JOHN. _The Solitary Hunter; or Storting Adventures
in the Prairies_, London, 1857.

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. _Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter_,
with a chapter entitled "Books on Big Game"; _Hunting
Adventures in the West; The Wilderness Hunter; Ranch Life and
the Hunting Trail; A Book Lover's Holiday in the Open; The
Deer Family_ (in collaboration).

SEARS, PAUL B. _Deserts on the March_, University of Oklahoma
Press, Norman, 1935. Dramatic picturization of the forces of
nature operating in what droughts of the 1930's caused to be
called "the Dust Bowl." "Drought and Wind and Man" might be
another title.

SETON, ERNEST THOMPSON. _Wild Animals I Have Known; Lives of
the Hunted_. Probably no other writer of America has aroused
so many people, young people especially, to an interest in our
wild animals. Natural history encyclopedias he has authored
are _Life Histories of Northern Animals_, New York, 1920, and
_Lives of Game Animals_, New York, 1929. Seton's final
testament, _Trail of an Artist Naturalist_ (Scribner's, New
York, 1941), has a deal on wild life of the Southwest.

THORPE, T. B. _The Hive of the Bee-Hunter_, New York, 1854.
OP. Juicy.

WARREN, EDWARD ROYAL. _The Mammals of Colorado_, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942. OP.



_27_

Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters

THE LITERATURE on the American bison, more popularly called
buffalo, is enormous. Nearly everything of consequence
pertaining to the Plains Indians touches the animal. The
relationship of the Indian to the buffalo has nowhere been
better stated than in Note 49 to the Benavides _Memorial_,
edited by Hodge and Lummis. "The Great Buffalo Hunt at
Standing Rock," a chapter in _My Friend the Indian_ by James
McLaughlin, sums up the hunting procedure; other outstanding
treatments of the buffalo in Indian books are to be found in
_Long Lance_ by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance; _Letters and
Notes on . . . the North American Indians_ by George Catlin;
_Forty Years a Fur Trader_ by Charles Larpenteur. Floyd B.
Streeter's chapter on "The Buffalo Range" in _Prairie Trails
and Cow Towns_ lists twenty-five sources of information.

The bibliography that supersedes all other bibliographies is
in the book that supersedes all other books on the subject--
Frank Gilbert Roe's _The North American Buffalo_. More about
it in the list that follows.

Nearly all men who got out on the plains were "wrathy to kill"
buffaloes above all else. The Indians killed in great numbers
but seldom wastefully. The Spaniards were restrained by Indian
hostility. Mountain men, emigrants crossing the plains, Santa
Fe traders, railroad builders, Indian fighters, settlers on
the edge of the plains, European sportsmen, all slaughtered
and slew. Some observed, but the average American hunter's
observations on game animals are about as illuminating as the
trophy-stuffed den of a rich oilman or the


{illust. caption = Harold D. Bugbee: Buffaloes


lockers of a packing house. Lawrence of Arabia won his name
through knowledge and understanding of Arabian life and
through power to lead and to write. Buffalo Bill won his name


 


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