Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 17

{ill.u.s.t. 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 t.i.tle. 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 unsurpa.s.sed 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 t.i.tle page), 1936; reprinted by Macmillan, New York. A n.o.ble, 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 a.s.sociation 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_, ill.u.s.trated 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 compa.s.s 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. Ill.u.s.trations 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.

{ill.u.s.t. 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 ill.u.s.trations--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 ill.u.s.trations; illuminating text. OP.

MULLER, DAN. _Horses_, Reilly and Lee, Chicago, 1936. Interesting ill.u.s.trations.

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, ill.u.s.trated 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.

{ill.u.s.t. 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 cla.s.sified as literature. Wise in the blend of horse, land, and people.