Chapter v

, "The Stage-Coach Mail," in _Fort Concho and the Texas Frontier_, illustrated by Harold Bugbee, San Angelo Standard-Times, San Angelo, Texas, 1952. Strong on frontier crossed by stage line.

HUNGERFORD, EDWARD. _Wells Fargo: Advancing the Frontier_, Random House, New York, 1949. Written without regard for the human beings that the all-swallowing corporation crushed. Facts on highwaymen.

INMAN, HENRY. _The Old Santa Fe Trail_, New York, 1897. OP. _The Great Salt Lake Trail_, 1898. OP. Many first-hand incidents and characters.

MAJORS, ALEXANDER. _Seventy Years on the Frontier_, Chicago, 1893. Reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Majors was the lead steer of all freighters.

ORMSBY, W. L. _The Butterfield Overland Mail_, edited by Lyle H. Wright and Josephine M. Bynum, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 1942. Ormsby rode the stage from St. Louis to San Francisco in 1858 and contributed to the New York _Herald_ the lively articles now made into this book.

ROOT, FRANK A., and CONNELLEY, W. E. _The Overland Stage to California_, Topeka, Kansas, 1901. Reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. A full storehouse. Basic.

SANTLEBEN, AUGUST. _A Texas Pioneer_, edited by I. D. Affleck, New York, 1910. OP. Best treatise available on freighting on Chihuahua Trail.

TWAIN, MARK. _Roughing It_, 1871. Mark Twain went west by stage.

WINTHER, O. O. _Express and Stagecoach Days in California_, Stanford University Press, 1926. Compact, with bibliography. OP.

19. Pony Express

"PRESENTLY the driver exclaims, `Here he comes!'

"Every neck is stretched and every eye strained. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky. In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling sweeping towards us nearer and nearer--growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined--nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear--another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck [of the stagecoach], a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go swinging away like a belated fragment of a storm."--Mark Twain, _Roughing It_.

A word cannot be defined in its own terms; nor can a region, or a feature of that region. Analogy and perspective are necessary for comprehension. The sense of horseback motion has never been better realized than by Kipling in "The Ballad of East and West." See "Horses."

BRADLEY, GLENN D._ The Story of the Pony Express_, Chicago, 1913. Nothing extra. OP.

BREWERTON, G. D. _Overland with Kit Carson_, New York, 1930. Bibliography on West in general.

CHAPMAN, ARTHUR. _The Pony Express_, Putnam's, New York, 1932. Good reading and bibliography.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. Chapter on "Rides and Riders," in _On the Open Range_, published in 1931; reprinted by Banks Up shaw, Dallas. Chapter on "Under the Saddle" in _The Mustangs_.

HAPEN, LEROY. _The Overland Mail_, Cleveland, 1926. Factual, bibliography. OP.

ROOT, FRANK A., and CONNELLEY, W. E. _The Overland Stage to California_, Topeka, Kansas, 1901. Reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Basic work.

VISSCHER, FRANK J. _A Thrilling and Truthful History of the Pony Express_, Chicago, 1908. OP. Not excessively "thrilling."

20. Surge of Life in the West

THE WANDERINGS of Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, De Soto, and La Salle had long been chronicled, although the chronicles had not been popularized in English, when in 1804 Captain Meriwether Lewis and Captain William Clark set out to explore not only the Louisiana Territory, which had just been purchased for the United States by President Thomas Jefferson, but on west to the Pacific. Their _Journals_, published in 1814, initiated a series of chronicles comparable in scope, vitality, and manhood adventure to the great collection known as _Hakluyt's Voyages_.

Between 1904 and 1907 Reuben Gold Thwaites, one of the outstanding editors of the English-speaking world, brought out in thirty-two volumes his epic _Early Western Travels_. This work includes the Lewis and Clark _Journals_, every student of the West, whether Northwest or Southwest, goes to the collection sooner or later. It is a commentary on the values of life held by big rich boasters of patriotism in the West that virtually all the chronicles in the collection remain out of print.

An important addendum to the Thwaites collection of _Early Western Travels_ is "The Southwest Historical Series," edited by Ralph P. Bieber--twelve volumes, published 1931-43, by Clark, Glendale, California.

The stampede to California that began in 1849 climaxed all migration orgies of the world in its lust for gold; but the lust for gold was merely one manifestation of a mighty population's lust for life. Railroads raced each other to cross the continent. Ten million Longhorns were going up the trails; from Texas while the last of a hundred million buffaloes, killed in herds--the greatest slaughter in history--were being skinned. Dodge City was the Cowboy Capital of the world, and Chicago was becoming "hog butcher of the world." Miller and Lux were expanding their ranges so that, as others boasted, their herds could trail from Oregon to Baja California and bed down every night on Miller and Lux's own grass.

Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832-1918) was massing in San Francisco at his own expense the greatest assemblage of historical documents any one individual ever assembled. While his interviewers and note-takers sorted down tons of manuscript, he was employing a corps of historians to write what, at first designed as a history of the Pacific states, grew in twenty-eight volumes to embrace also Alaska, British Columbia, Texas, Mexico, and Central America, aside from five volumes on the Native Races and six volumes of essays. Meantime he was printing these volumes in sets of thousands and selling them through an army of agents that covered America.

Collis P. Huntington (1821-1900) was building the Southern Pacific Railroad into a network, interlocked with other systems and steamship lines, not only enveloping California land but also the whole economic and political life of that and other states, with headquarters in the U.S. Congress. Then his nephew, Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927), taking over his wealth and power, was building gardens at San Marino, California, collecting art, books, and manuscripts to make, without benefit of any institution of learning and in defiance of all the slow processes of tradition found at Oxford and Harvard, a Huntington Library and a Huntington Art Gallery that, set down amid the most costly botanical profusion imaginable, now rival the world's finest.

The dreams were of empire. Old men and young toiled as "terribly" as mighty Raleigh. The "spacious times" of Queen Elizabeth seemed, indeed, to be translated to another sphere, though here the elements that went into the mixture were less diverse. Boom methods of Gargantuan scale were applied to cultural factors as well as to the physical. Few men stopped to reflect that while objects of art may be bought by the wholesale, the development of genuine culture is too intimately personal and too chemically blended with the spiritual to be bartered for. The Huntingtons paid a quarter of a million dollars for Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy." It is very beautiful. Meanwhile the mustang grapevine waits for some artist to paint the strong and lovely grace of its drapery and thereby to enrich for land-dwellers every valley where it hangs over elm or oak.

Most of the books in this section could be placed in other sections. Many have been. They represent the vigor, vitality, energy, and daring characteristic of our frontiers. To quote Harvey Fergusson's phrase, the adventures of mettle have always had "a tension that would not let them rest."

BARKER, EUGENE C. _The Life of Stephen F. Austin_, Dallas, 1925. Republished by Texas State Historical Association, Austin. Iron-wrought biography of the leader in making Texas Anglo-American.

BELL, HORACE. _Reminiscences of a Ranger, or Early Times in California_, Los Angeles, 1881; reprinted, but OP. In this book and in _On the Old West Coast_, Bell caught the lift and spiritedness of life-hungry men.

BIDWELL, JOHN (1819-1900). _Echoes of the Past_, Chico, California (about 1900). Bidwell got to California several years before gold was discovered. He became foremost citizen and entertained scientists, writers, scholars, and artists at his ranch home. His brief accounts of the trip across the plains and of pioneer society in California are graphic, charming, telling. The book goes in and out of print but is not likely to die.

BILLINGTON, RAY ALLEN. _Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier_, Macmillan, New York, 1949. This Alpha to Omega treatise concludes with a seventy-five-page, double-column, fine-print bibliography which not only lists but comments upon most books and articles of any consequence that have been published on frontier history.

BOURKE, JOHN G. _On the Border with Crook_, New York, 1891. Now published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Bourke had an eager, disciplined mind, at once scientific and humanistic; he had imagination and loyalty to truth and justice; he had a strong body and joyed in frontier exploring. He was a captain in the army but had nothing of the littleness of the army mind exhibited by Generals Nelson Miles and O. O. Howard in their egocentric reminiscences. I rank his book as the meatiest and richest of all books dealing with campaigns against Indians. In its amplitude it includes the whole frontier. General George Crook was a wise, generous, and noble man, but his _Autobiography_ (edited by Martin F. Schmitt; University of Oklahoma Press) lacks that power in writing necessary to turn the best subject on earth into a good book and capable also, as Darwin demonstrated, of turning earthworms into a classic.

BURNHAM, FREDERICK RUSSELL. _Scouting on Two Continents_, New York, 1926; reprinted, Los Angeles, 1942. A brave book of enthralling interest. The technique of scouting in the Apache Country is illuminated by that of South Africa in the Boer War. Hunting for life, Major Burnham carried it with him. OP.

DEVOTO, BERNARD. _The Year of Decision 1846_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1943. Critical interpretation as well as depiction. The Mexican War, New Mexico, California, Mountain Men, etc. DeVoto's _Across the Wide Missouri_ is wider in spirit, less bound to political complexities. See under "Mountain Men."

EMORY, LIEUTENANT COLONEL WILLIAM H. _Notes of a Military Reconnaissance from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri, to San Diego, in California, including Part of the Arkansas, Del Norte, and Gila Rivers_, Washington, 1848. Emory's own vivid report is only one item in _Executive Document No. 41_, 30th Congress, 1st Session, with which it is bound. Lieutenant J. W. Albert's _Journal_ and additional _Report on New Mexico_, St. George Cooke's Odyssey of his march from Santa Fe to San Diego, another _Journal_ by Captain A. R. Johnson, the Torrey-Englemann report on botany, illustrated with engravings, all go to make this one of the meatiest of a number of meaty government publications. The Emory part of it has been reprinted by the University of New Mexico Press, under title of _Lieutenant Emory Reports_, Introduction and Notes by Ross Calvin, Albuquerque, 1951.

Emory's great two-volume _Report on United States and Mexican Boundary Survey_, Washington 1857 and 1859, is, aside from descriptions of borderlands and their inhabitants, a veritable encyclopedia, wonderfully illustrated, on western flora and fauna. United States Commissioner on this Boundary Survey (following the Mexican War) was John Russell Bartlett. While exploring from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific and far down into Mexico, he wrote _Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora and Chihuahua_. published in two volumes, New York, 1854. For me very little rewritten history has the freshness and fascination of these strong, firsthand personal narratives, though I recognize many of them as being the stuff of literature rather than literature itself.

FOWLER, JACOB. _The Journal of Jacob Fowler, 1821-1822_, edited by Elliott Coues, New York, 1898. Hardly another chronicle of the West is so Defoe-like in homemade realism, whether on Indians and Indian horses or Negro Paul's experience with the Mexican "Lady" at San Fernando de Taos. Should be reprinted.

GAMBRELL, HERBERT. _Anson Jones: The Last President of Texas_, Garden City, New York, 1948; now distributed by Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, Texas. Anson Jones was more surged over than surgent. Infused with a larger comprehension than that behind many a world figure, this biography of a provincial figure is perhaps the most artfully written that Texas has produced. It goes into the soul of the man.

HOBBS, JAMES. _Wild Life in the Far West_, Hartford, 1872. Hobbs saw just about all the elephants and heard just about all the owls to be seen and heard in the Far West including western Mexico. Should be reprinted.

HULBERT, ARCHER BUTLER. _Forty-Niners: The Chronicle of the California Trail_, Little, Brown, Boston, 1931. Hulbert read exhaustively in the exhausting literature by and about the gold hunters rushing to California. Then he wove into a synthetic diary the most interesting and illuminating records on happenings, characters, ambitions, talk, singing, the whole life of the emigrants.

IRVING, WASHINGTON. Irving made his ride into what is now Oklahoma in 1832. He had recently returned from a seventeen-year stay in Europe and was a mature literary man--as mature as a conforming romanticist could become Prairie life refreshed him. A _Tour on the Prairies_, published in 1835, remains refreshing. It is illuminated by _Washington Irving on the Prairie; or, A Narrative of the Southwest in the Year 1832_, by Henry Leavitt Ellsworth (who accompanied Irving), edited by Stanley T. Williams and Barbara D. Simison, New York, 1937; by _The Western Journals of Washington Irving_, excellently edited by John Francis McDermott, Norman, Oklahoma, 1944; and by Charles J. Latrobe's _The Rambler in North America, 1832-1833_, New York, 1835.

JAMES, MARQUIS. _The Raven_, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1929. Graphic life of Sam Houston.

KURZ, RUDOLPH FRIEDERICH. _Journal of Rudolph Friederich Kurz: ... His Experiences among Fur Traders and American Indians on the Mississippi and Upper Missouri Rivers, during the Years of 1846-1852_, U.S. Bureau of Ethnology Bulletin 115, Washington, 1937. The public has not had a chance at this book, which was printed rather than published. Kurz both saw and recorded with remarkable vitality. He was an artist and the volume contains many reproductions of his paintings and drawings. One of the most readable and illuminating of western journals.

LEWIS, OSCAR. _The Big Four_, New York, 1938. Railroad magnates.

LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. _Arizona Characters_, Los Angeles, California, 1928. Fresh sketches of representative men. The book deserves to be better known than it is. OP.

LYMAN, GEORGE D. _John Marsh Pioneer_, New York, 1930. Prime biography and prime romance. Laid mostly in California. This book almost heads the list of all biographies of western men. OP.

PARKMAN, FRANCIS. _The Oregon Trail_, 1849. Parkman knew how to write but some other penetrators of the West put down about as much. School assignments have made his book a recognized classic.

PATTIE, JAMES O. _Personal Narrative_, Cincinnati, 1831; reprinted, but OP. Positively gripping chronicle of life in New Mexico and the Californias during Mexican days.

PIKE, ZEBULON M. _The Southwestern Expedition of Zebulon M. Pike_, Philadelphia, 1810. The 1895 edition edited by Elliott Coues is the most useful to students. No edition is in print. Pike's explorations of the Southwest (1806-7) began while the great Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-6) was ending. His journal is nothing like so informative as theirs but is just as readable. _The Lost Pathfinder_ is a biography of Pike by W. Eugene Hollon, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949.

TWAIN, MARK. _Roughing It_, 1872. Mark Twain was a man who wrote and not merely a writer in man-form. He was frontier American in all his fibers. He was drunk with western life at a time when both he and it were standing on tiptoe watching the sun rise over the misty mountain tops, and he wrote of what he had seen and lived before he became too sober. _Roughing It_ comes nearer catching the energy, the youthfulness, the blooming optimism, the recklessness, the lust for the illimitable in western life than any other book. It deals largely with mining life, but the surging vitality of this life as reflected by Mark Twain has been the chief common denominator of all American frontiers and was as characteristic of Texas "cattle kings" when grass was free as of Virginia City "nabobs" in bonanza.

21. Range Life: Cowboys, Cattle, Sheep

THE COWBOY ORIGINATED in Texas. The Texas cowboy, along with the Texas cowman, was an evolvement from and a blend of the riding, shooting, frontier-formed southerner, the Mexican-Indian horseback worker with livestock (the vaquero), and the Spanish open-range rancher. The blend was not in blood, but in occupational techniques. I have traced this genesis with more detail in _The Longhorns_. Compared with evolution in species, evolution in human affairs is meteor-swift. The driving of millions of cattle and horses from Texas to stock the whole plains area of North America while, following the Civil War, it was being denuded of buffaloes and secured from Indian domination, enabled the Texas cowboy to set his impress upon the whole ranching industry. The cowboy became the best-known occupational type that America has given the world. He exists still and will long exist, though much changed from the original. His fame derives from the past.

Romance, both genuine and spurious, has obscured the realities of range and trail. The realities themselves have, however, been such that few riders really belonging to the range wished to lead any other existence. Only by force of circumstances have they changed "the grass beneath and the sky above" for a more settled, more confining, and more materially remunerative way of life. Some of the old-time cowboys were little more adaptable to change than the Plains Indians; few were less reluctant to plow or work in houses. Heaven in their dreams was a range better watered than the one they knew, with grass never stricken by drought, plenty of fat cattle, the best horses and comrades of their experience, more of women than they talked about in public, and nothing at all of golden streets, golden harps, angel wings, and thrones; it was a mere extension, somewhat improved, of the present. Bankers, manufacturers, merchants, and mechanics seldom so idealize their own occupations; they work fifty weeks a year to go free the other two.

For every hired man on horseback there have been hundreds of plowmen in America, and tens of millions of acres of rangelands have been plowed under, but who can cite a single autobiography of a laborer in the fields of cotton, of corn, of wheat? Or do coal miners, steelmongers, workers in oil refineries, factory hands of any kind of factory, the employees of chain stores and department stores ever write autobiographies? Many scores of autobiographies have been written by range men, perhaps half of them by cowboys who never became owners at all. A high percentage of the autobiographies are in pamphlet form; many that were written have not been published. The trail drivers of open range days, nearly all dead now, felt the urge to record experiences more strongly than their successors. They realized that they had been a part of an epic life.

The fact that the hired man on horseback has been as good a man as the owner and, on the average, has been a more spirited and eager man than the hand on foot may afford some explanation of the validity and vitality of his chroniclings, no matter how crude they be. On the other hand, the fact that the rich owner and the college-educated aspirant to be a cowboy soon learned, if they stayed on the range, that _a man's a man for a' that_ may to some extent account for a certain generous amplitude of character inherent in their most representative reminiscences. Sympathy for the life biases my judgment; that judgment, nevertheless, is that some of the strongest and raciest autobiographic writing produced by America has been by range men.

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

This is not to say that these chronicles are of a high literary order. Their writers have generally lacked the maturity of mind, the reflective wisdom, and the power of observation found in personal narratives of the highest order. No man who camped with a chuck wagon has written anything remotely comparable to Charles M. Doughty's _Arabia Deserta_, a chronicle at once personal and impersonal, restrainedly subjective and widely objective, of his life with nomadic Bedouins. Perspective is a concomitant of civilization. The chronicles of the range that show perspective have come mostly from educated New Englanders, Englishmen, and Scots. The great majority of the chronicles are limited in subject matter to physical activities. They make few concessions to "the desire of the moth for the star"; they hardly enter the complexities of life, including those of sex. In one section of the West at one time the outstanding differences among range men were between owners of sheep and owners of cattle, the ambition of both being to hog the whole country. On another area of the range at another time, the outstanding difference was between little ranchers, many of whom were stealing, and big ranchers, plenty of whom had stolen. Such differences are not exponents of the kind of individualism that burns itself into great human documents.

Seldom deeper than the chronicles does range fiction go below physical surface into reflection, broodings, hungers--the smolderings deep down in a cowman oppressed by drought and mortgage sitting in a rocking chair on a ranch gallery looking at the dust devils and hoping for a cloud; the goings-on inside a silent cowboy riding away alone from an empty pen to which he will never return; the streams of consciousness in a silent man and a silent woman bedded together in a wind-lashed frame house away out on the lone prairie. The wide range of human interests leaves ample room for downright, straightaway narratives of the careers of strong men. If the literature of the range ever matures, however, it will include keener searchings for meanings and harder struggles for human truths by writers who strive in "the craft so long to lerne." For three-quarters of a century the output of fiction on the cowboy has been tremendous, and it shows little diminution. Mass production inundating the masses of readers has made it difficult for serious fictionists writing about range people to get a hearing.

The code of the West was concentrated into the code of the range--and not all of it by any means depended upon the six-shooter. No one can comprehend this code without knowing something about the code of the Old South, whence the Texas cowboy came.

Mexican goats make the best eating in Mexico and mohair has made good money for many ranchers of the Southwest. Goats, goat herders, goatskins, and wine in goatskins figure in the literature of Spain as prominently as six-shooters in Blazing Frontier fiction--and far more pleasantly. Read George Borrow's _The Bible in Spain_, one of the most delectable of travel books. Beyond a few notices of Mexican goat herders, there is on the subject of goats next to nothing readable in American writings. Where there is no competition, supremacy is small distinction; so I should offend no taste by saying that "The Man of Goats" in my own _Tongues of the Monte_ is about the best there is so far as goats go.

Although sheep are among the most salient facts of range life, they have, as compared with cattle and horses, been a dim item in the range tradition. Yet, of less than a dozen books on sheep and sheepmen, more than half of them are better written than hundreds of books concerning cowboy life. Mary Austin's _The Flock_ is subtle and beautiful; Archer B. Gilfillan's _Sheep_ is literature in addition to having much information; Hughie Call's _Golden Fleece_ is delightful; Winifred Kupper's _The Golden Hoof_ and _Texas Sheepman_ have charm--a rare quality in most books on cows and cow people. Among furnishings in the cabin of Robert Maudslay, "the Texas Sheepman," were a set of Sir Walter Scott's works, Shakespeare, and a file of the _Illustrated London News_. "A man who read Shakespeare and the _Illustrated London News_ had little to contribute to

Come a ti yi yoopee Ti yi ya!"

O. Henry's ranch experiences in Texas were largely confined to a sheep ranch. The setting of his "Last of the Troubadours" is a sheep ranch. I nominate it as the best range story in American fiction.

"Cowboy Songs" and "Horses" are separate chapters following this. The literature cited in them is mostly range literature, although precious little in all the songs rises to the status of poetry. A considerable part of the literature listed under "Texas Rangers" and "The Bad Man Tradition" bears on range life.

ABBOTT, E. C., and SMITH, HELENA HUNTINGTON. We _Pointed Them North_, New York, 1939. Abbott, better known as Teddy Blue, used to give his address as Three Duce Ranch, Gilt Edge, Montana. Helena Huntington Smith, who actually wrote and arranged his reminiscences, instead of currying him down and putting a checkrein on him, spurred him in the flanks and told him to swaller his head. He did. This book is franker about the women a rollicky cowboy was likely to meet in town than all the other range books put together. The fact that Teddy Blue's wife was a half-breed Indian, daughter of Granville Stuart, and that Indian women do not object to the truth about sex life may account in part for his frankness. The book is mighty good reading. OP.

ADAMS, ANDY. _The Log of a Cowboy_ (1903). In 1882, at the age of twenty-three, Andy Adams came to Texas from Indiana. For about ten years he traded horses and drove them up the trail. He knew cattle people and their ranges from Brownsville to Caldwell, Kansas. After mining for another decade, he began to write. If all other books on trail driving were destroyed, a reader could still get a just and authentic conception of trail men, trail work, range cattle, cow horses, and the cow country in general from _The Log of a Cowboy_. It is a novel without a plot, a woman, character development, or sustained dramatic incidents; yet it is the classic of the occupation. It is a simple, straightaway narrative that takes a trail herd from the Rio Grande to the Canadian line, the hands talking as naturally as cows chew cuds, every page illuminated by an easy intimacy with the life. Adams wrote six other books. _The Outlet, A Texas Matchmaker, Cattle Brands_, and _Reed Anthony, Cowman_ all make good reading. _Wells Brothers_ and _The Ranch on the Beaver_ are stories for boys. I read them with pleasure long after I was grown. All but _The Log of a Cowboy_ are OP, published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

ADAMS, RAMON F. _Cowboy Lingo_, Boston, 1936. A dictionary of cowboy words, figures of speech, picturesque phraseology, slang, etc., with explanations of many factors peculiar to range life. OP. _Western Words_, University of Oklahoma Press, 1944. A companion book. _Come an' Get It_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1952. Informal exposition of chuck wagon cooks.

ALDRIDGE, REGINALD. _Ranch Notes_, London, 1884. Aldridge, an educated Englishman, got into the cattle business before, in the late eighties, it boomed itself flat. His book is not important, but it is maybe a shade better than _Ranch Life in Southern Kansas and the Indian Territory_ by Benjamin S. Miller, New York, 1896. Aldridge and Miller were partners, and each writes kindly about the other.

ALLEN, JOHN HOUGHTON. _Southwest_, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1952. A chemical compound of highly impressionistic autobiographic nonfiction and highly romantic fiction and folk tales. The setting is a ranch of Mexican tradition in the lower border country of Texas, also saloons and bawdy houses of border towns. Vaqueros and their work in the brush are intensely vivid. The author has a passion for superlatives and for "a joyous cruelty, a good cruelty, a young cruelty."

ARNOLD, OREN, and HALE, J. P. _Hot Irons_, Macmillan, New York, 1940. Technique and lore of cattle brands. OP.

AUSTIN, MARY. _The Flock_, Boston, 1906, OP. Mary Austin saw the meanings of things; she was a creator. Very quietly she sublimated life into the literature of pictures and emotions.

Australian ranching is not foreign to American ranching. The best book on the subject that I have found is _Pastures New_, by R. V. Billis and A. S. Kenyon, London, 1930.

BARNARD, EVAN G. ("Parson"). _A Rider of the Cherokee Strip_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1936. Savory with little incidents and cowboy humor. OP.

BARNES, WILL C. _Tales from the X-Bar Horse Camp_, Chicago, 1920. OP. Good simple narratives. _Apaches and Longhorns_, Los Angeles, 1941. Autobiography. OP. _Western Grazing Grounds and Forest Ranges_, Chicago, 1913. OP. Governmentally factual. Barnes was in the U.S. Forest Service and was informed.

BARROWS, JOHN R. _Ubet_, Caldwell, Idaho, 1934. Excellent on Northwest; autobiographical. OP.

BECHDOLT, FREDERICK R. _Tales of the Old Timers_, New York, 1924. Vivid, economical stories of "The Warriors of the Pecos" (Billy the Kid and the troubles on John Chisum's ranch-empire), of Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch in their Wyoming hide-outs, of the way frontier Texans fought Mexicans and Comanches over the open ranges. Research clogs the style of many historians; perhaps it is just as well that Bechdolt did not search more extensively into the arcana of footnotes. OP.

BOATRIGHT, MODY C. _Tall Tales from Texas Cow Camps_, Dallas, 1934. The tales are tall all right and true to cows that never saw a milk bucket. OP. Reprinted 1946 by Haldeman-Julius, Girard, Kansas.

BOREIN, EDWARD. _Etchings of the West_, edited by Edward S. Spaulding, Santa Barbara, California, 1950. OP. A very handsome folio; primarily a reproduction of sketches, many of which are on range subjects. Ed Borein tells more in them than hundreds of windbags have told in tens of thousands of pages. They are beautiful and authentic, even if they are what post-impressionists call "documentary." Believers in the True Faith say now that Leonardo da Vinci is documentary in his painting of the Lord's Supper. Ed Borein was a great friend of Charlie Russell's but not an imitator. _Etchings of the West_ will soon be among the rarities of Western books.

BOWER, B. M. _Chip of the Flying U_, New York, 1904. Charles Russell illustrated this and three other Bower novels. Contrary to his denial, he is supposed to have been the prototype for Chip. A long time ago I read _Chit of the Flying U_ and _The Lure of the Dim Trails_ and thought them as good as Eugene Manlove Rhodes's stories. That they have faded almost completely out of memory is a commentary on my memory; just the same, a character as well named as Chip should, if he have substance beyond his name, leave an impression even on weak memories. B. M. Bower was a woman, Bower being the name of her first husband. A Montana cowpuncher named "Fiddle Back" Sinclair was her second, and Robert Ellsworth Cowan became the third. Under the name of Bud Cowan he published a book of reminiscences entitled _Range Rider_ (Garden City, N. Y., 1930). B. M. Bower wrote a slight introduction to it; neither he nor she says anything about being married to the other. In the best of her fiction she is truer to life than he is in a good part of his nonfiction. Her chaste English is partly explained in an autobiographic note contributed to _Adventure_ magazine, December 10, 1924. Her restless father had moved the family from Minnesota to Montana. There, she wrote, he "taught me music and how to draw plans of houses (he was an architect among other things) and to read _Paradise Lost_ and Dante and H. Rider Haggard and the Bible and the Constitution--and my taste has been extremely catholic ever since."

BRANCH, E. DOUGLAS. _The Cowboy and His Interpreters_, New York, 1926. Useful bibliography on range matters, and excellent criticism of two kinds of fiction writers. OP.

BRATT, JOHN. _Trails of Yesterday_, Chicago, 1921. John Bratt, twenty-two years old, came to America from England in 1864, went west, and by 1870 was ranching on the Platte. He became a big operator, but his reminiscences, beautifully printed, are stronger on camp cooks and other hired hands than on cattle "kings." Nobody ever heard a cowman call himself or another cowman a king. "Cattle king" is journalese.

BRISBIN, GENERAL JAMES S. _The Beef Bonanza; or, How to Get Rich on the Plains_, Philadelphia, 1881. One of several books of its decade designed to appeal to eastern and European interest in ranching as an investment. Figureless and with more human interest is _Prairie Experiences in Handling Cattle and Sheep_, by Major W. Shepherd (of England), London? 1884.

BRONSON, EDGAR BEECHER. _Cowboy Life on the Western Plains_, Chicago, 1910. _The Red Blooded_, Chicago, 1910. Freewheeling nonfiction.

BROOKS, BRYANT B. _Memoirs_, Gardendale, California, 1939. The book never was published; it was merely printed to satisfy the senescent vanity of a property-worshiping, cliche-parroting reactionary who made money ranching before he became governor of Wyoming. He tells a few good anecdotes of range days. Numerous better books pertaining to the range are NOT listed here; this mediocrity represents a particular type.

BROTHERS, MARY HUDSON. A _Pecos Pioneer_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1943. Superior to numerous better-known books. See comment under "Women Pioneers."

BROWN, DEE, and SCHMITT, MARTIN F. _Trail Driving Days_, Scribner's, New York, 1952. Primarily a pictorial record, more on the side of action than of realism, except for post-trailing period. Excellent bibliography.

BURTON, HARLEY TRUE. A _History of the J A Ranch_, Austin, 1928. Facts about one of the greatest ranches of Texas and its founder, Charles Goodnight. OP.

CALL, HUGHIE. _Golden Fleece_, Boston, 1942. Hughie married a sheepman, and after mothering the range as well as children with him for a quarter of a century, concluded that Montana is still rather masculine. Especially good on domestic life and on sheepherders. OP.

CANTON, FRANK M. _Frontier Trails_, edited by E. E. Dale, Boston, 1930. OP. Good on tough hombres.

CLAY, JOHN. My _Life on the Range_, privately printed, Chicago, 1924. OP. John Clay, an educated Scot, came to Canada in 1879 and in time managed some of the largest British-owned ranches of North America. His book is the best of all sources on British-owned ranches. It is just as good on cowboys and sheepherders. Clay was a fine gentleman in addition to being a canny businessman in the realm of cattle and land. He appreciated the beautiful and had a sense of style.

CLELAND, ROBERT GLASS. _The Cattle on a Thousand Hills_, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 1941 (revised, 1951). Scholarly work on Spanish-Mexican ranching in California.

CLEAVELAND, AGNES MORLEY. _No Life for a Lady_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1941. Best book on range life from a woman's point of view ever published. The setting is New Mexico; humor and humanity prevail.

COLLINGS, ELLSWORTH. _The 101 Ranch_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1937. The 101 Ranch was far more than a ranch; it was a unique institution. The 101 Ranch Wild West Show is emphasized in this book. OP.

COLLINS, DENNIS. _The Indians' Last Fight or the Dull Knife Raid_, Press of the Appeal to Reason, Girard, Kansas, n.d. Nearly half of this very scarce book deals autobiographically with frontier range life. Realistic, strong, written from the perspective of a man who "wanted something to read" in camp.

COLLINS, HUBERT E. _Warpath and Cattle Trail_, New York, 1928. The pageant of trail life as it passed by a stage stand in Oklahoma; autobiographical. Beautifully printed and illustrated. Far better than numerous other out-of-print books that bring much higher prices in the second-hand market.

CONN, WILLIAM (translator). _Cow-Boys and Colonels: Narrative of a Journey across the Prairie and over the Black Hills of Dakota_, London, 1887; New York (1888?). More of a curiosity than an illuminator, the book is a sparsely annotated translation of _Dans les Montagnes Rocheuses_, by Le Baron E. de Mandat-Grancey, Paris, October, 1884. (The only copy I have examined is of 1889 printing.) It is a gossipy account of an excursion made in 1883-84; cowboys and ranching are viewed pretty much as a sophisticated Parisian views a zoo. The author must have felt more at home with the fantastic Marquis de Mores of Medora, North Dakota. The book appeared at a time when European capital was being invested in western ranches. It was followed by _La Breche aux Buffles: Un Ranch Francais dans le Dakota_, Paris, 1889. Not translated so far as I know.

COOK, JAMES H. _Fifty Years on the Old Frontier_, 1923. Cook came to Texas soon after the close of the Civil War and became a brush popper on the Frio River. Nothing better on cow work in the brush country and trail driving in the seventies has appeared. OP. A good deal of the same material was put into Cook's _Longhorn Cowboy_ (Putnam's, 1942), to which the pushing Mr. Howard R. Driggs attached his name.

COOLIDGE, DANE. _Texas Cowboys_, 1937. Thin, but genuine. _Arizona Cowboys_, 1938. _Old California Cowboys_, 1939. All well illustrated by photographs and all OP.

Cox, JAMES. _The Cattle Industry of Texas and Adjacent Territory_, St. Louis, 1895. Contains many important biographies and much good history. In 1928 I traded a pair of store-bought boots to my uncle Neville Dobie for his copy of this book. A man would have to throw in a young Santa Gertrudis bull now to get a copy.

CRAIG, JOHN R. _Ranching with lords and Commons_, Toronto, 1903. During the great boom of the early 1880'S in the range business, Craig promoted a cattle company in London and then managed a ranch in western Canada. His book is good on mismanaged range business and it is good on people, especially lords, and the land. He attributes to De Quincey a Latin quotation that properly, I think, belongs to Thackeray. He quotes Hamlin Garland: "The trail is poetry; a wagon road is prose; the railroad, arithmetic." He was probably not so good at ranching as at writing. His book supplements _From Home to Home_, by Alex. Staveley Hill, New York, 1885. Hill was a major investor in the Oxley Ranch, and was, I judge, the pompous cheat and scoundrel that Craig said he was.

CRAWFORD, LEWIS F. _Rekindling Camp Fires: The Exploits of Ben Arnold (Connor)_, Bismarck, North Dakota, 1926. OP. The skill of Lewis F. Crawford of the North Dakota Historical Society made this a richer autobiography than if Arnold had been unaided. He was squaw man, scout, trapper, soldier, deserter, prospector, and actor in other occupations as well as cowboy. He had a fierce sense of justice that extended to Indians. His outlook was wider than that of the average ranch hand. _Badlands and Broncho Trails_, Bismarck, 1922, is a slight book of simple narratives that catches the tune of the Badlands life. OP. _Ranching Days in Dakota_, Wirth Brothers, Baltimore, 1950, is good on horse-raising and the terrible winter of 1886-87.

CULLEY, JOHN. _Cattle, Horses, and Men_, Los Angeles, 1940. Much about the noted Bell Ranch of New Mexico. Especially good on horses. Culley was educated at Oxford. When I visited him in California, he had on his table a presentation copy of a book by Walter Pater. His book has the luminosity that comes from cultivated intelligence. OP.

DACY, GEORGE F. _Four Centuries of Florida Ranching_, St. Louis, 1940. OP. In _Crooked Trails_, Frederic Remington has a chapter (illustrated) on "Cracker Cowboys of Florida," and _Lake Okeechobee_, by A. J. Hanna and Kathryn Abbey, Indianapolis, 1948, treats of modern ranching in Florida, but the range people of that state have been too lethargic-minded to write about themselves and no Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings has settled in their midst to interpret them.

DALE, E. E. _The Range Cattle Industry_, Norman, Oklahoma, 1930. Economic aspects. Bibliography. _Cow Country,_ Norman, Oklahoma, 1942. Bully tales and easy history. Both books are OP.

DANA, RICHARD HENRY. _Two Years Before the Mast_, 1841. This transcript of reality has been reprinted many times. It is the classic of the hide and tallow trade of California.

DAVID, ROBERT D. _Malcolm Campbell, Sheriff_, Casper, Wyoming, 1932. Much of the "Johnson County War" between cowmen and thieving nesters. OP.

DAYTON, EDSON C. _Dakota Days_. Privately printed by the author at Clifton Springs, New York, 1937--three hundred copies only. Dayton was more sheepman than cowman. He had a spiritual content. His very use of the word _intellectual_ on the second page of his book; his estimate of Milton and Gladstone, adjacent to talk about a frontier saloon; his consciousness of his own inner growth--something no extravert cowboy ever noticed, usually because he did not have it; his quotation to express harmony with nature:

I have some kinship to the bee, I am boon brother with the tree; The breathing earth is part of me--

all indicate a refinement that any gambler could safely bet originated in the East and not in Texas or the South.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _A Vaquero of the Brush Country_, 1929. Much on border troubles over cattle, the "skinning war," running wild cattle in the brush, mustanging, trail driving; John Young's narrative, told in the first person, against range backgrounds. _The Longhorns_, illustrated by Tom Lea, 1941. History of the Longhorn breed, psychology of stampedes; days of maverickers and mavericks; stories of individual lead steers and outlaws of the range; stories about rawhide and many other related subjects. The book attempts to reveal the blend made by man, beast, and range. Both books published by Little, Brown, Boston. _The Mustangs_, 1952. See under "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 by J. Evetts Haley, published in the _Southwestern Historical Quarterly_, 1932 (Vols. XXXV and XXXVI). Also reprinted as a separate.

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

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 collection, 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 introduced 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.

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

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 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.

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

"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 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.

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

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;