Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 13

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 Ca.s.sidy 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 "doc.u.mentary." Believers in the True Faith say now that Leonardo da Vinci is doc.u.mentary 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 ent.i.tled _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 Const.i.tution--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." n.o.body 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 GLa.s.s. _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 inst.i.tution. 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 pa.s.sed by a stage stand in Oklahoma; autobiographical. Beautifully printed and ill.u.s.trated. 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 spa.r.s.ely 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 ill.u.s.trated by photographs and all OP.

c.o.x, 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 (ill.u.s.trated) 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 cla.s.sic 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--