Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 12

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 n.o.ble 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 cla.s.sic.

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 Doc.u.ment 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, ill.u.s.trated 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 t.i.tle 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 ill.u.s.trated, 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 a.s.signments have made his book a recognized cla.s.sic.

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 l.u.s.t 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 gra.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances have they changed "the gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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.

{ill.u.s.t. 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 s.e.x. 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 doc.u.ments.

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. Ma.s.s production inundating the ma.s.ses 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 compet.i.tion, 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 _Ill.u.s.trated London News_.

"A man who read Shakespeare and the _Ill.u.s.trated 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 s.e.x 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 cla.s.sic 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 pa.s.sion 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.