Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 16

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 t.i.tles 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 ba.n.a.l t.i.tle, 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts, 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 sc.r.a.ps of anecdotes and western history, along with testimonials, to the pamphlet, the latest edition I have seen being about 1906, printed in Worcester, Ma.s.sachusetts.

STEEDMAN, CHARLES J. _Bucking the Sagebrush_, New York, 1904. OP.

Charming; much of nature. Ill.u.s.trated by Russell.

{ill.u.s.t. 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 pa.s.sing.

STUART, GRANVILLE. _Forty Years on the Frontier_, two volumes, Cleveland, 1925. Nothing better on the cowboy has ever been written than the chapter ent.i.tled "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 ent.i.tled _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 alb.u.m of cattle brands--priced at $10.00. The introduction is one of the spa.r.s.e 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 t.i.tles suggesting the tenor of the book.

_Vocabulario y Refranero Criollo_, text and ill.u.s.trations by t.i.to Saudibet, Guillermo Kraft Ltda., Buenos Aires, 1945. North American ranges have called forth nothing to compare with this fully ill.u.s.trated, 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 ent.i.tled "The Cattle Kingdom." The book is an a.n.a.lysis 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 alb.u.m 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-cla.s.s 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 ma.n.u.script than he had used and stapled a pamphlet ent.i.tled _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 c.o.o.ns and an alligator to spend the summer on that cotton plantation.... Cowpunchers were superst.i.tious 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 t.i.tle 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 a.s.sociation resolved a Historical Commission into existence. A committee was appointed and, naturally, one man did the work. In 1923 a fifty-five-page pamphlet ent.i.tled _Letters from Old Friends and Members of the Wyoming Stock Growers a.s.sociation_ was printed at Cheyenne. It is made up of unusually informing and pungent recollections by intelligent cowmen.

22. Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads