Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 15

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 Ill.u.s.trations 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. "G.o.d pity the wight for whom this vivid, honest story has no interest," John Lomax p.r.o.nounced. It is one of several brief books of reminiscences brought out in small editions in the "Range Life Series," under the editors.h.i.+p 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. Ill.u.s.trations 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 t.i.tle of _Powder River Invasion, War on the Rustlers in 1892_, "Rewritten by John Mercer Boots." Reprinted 1935, with Foreword by James Mitch.e.l.l Clarke, by the Grabhorn Press, San Francisco. All editions OP. b.l.o.o.d.y 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 ill.u.s.trated, of reatas, spurs, bits, saddles, and other gear. _Californios_, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1949. Profusely ill.u.s.trated. 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 Doc.u.ment No. 267, House of Representatives, 48th Congress, 2nd Session, Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., 1885.

Printed also in one or more other government doc.u.ments. A statistical record concerning grazing lands, trail driving, railroad s.h.i.+pping of cattle, markets, foreign investments in ranches, etc. This doc.u.ment 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, Was.h.i.+ngton, 1936, lists many government publications both state and national.

NORd.y.k.e, LEWIS. _Cattle Empire_, Morrow, New York, 1949. History, largely political, of the XIT Ranch. Not so careful in doc.u.mentation 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 scholars.h.i.+p.

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 s.h.i.+pping 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 cla.s.sed 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 Gra.s.s_, 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 n.o.ble book, rich in anecdote and character. The subt.i.tle reads: "A History of the World's Greatest Cattle Trail, together with a Description of the Persons, a Narrative of the Events, and Reminiscences a.s.sociated 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 ill.u.s.trate how t.i.tles 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 a.s.sembled 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 a.s.sociation_, 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 subt.i.tle, _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 gra.s.s, 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 ill.u.s.trated, 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, ill.u.s.trations saying more than written words.

Russell's ill.u.s.trations 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." Pa.s.sages 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.