GIPSON, FRED. Fabulous Empire, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1946. Biography of Zack Miller of the 101 Ranch and 101 Wild West Show.

GOODWYN, FRANK. Life on the King Ranch, Crowell, New York, 1951. The author was reared on the King Ranch. He is especially refreshing on the vaqueros, their techniques and tales.

GRAY, FRANK S. Pioneer Adventures, 1948, and Pioneering in Southwest Texas, 1949, both printed by the author, Copperas Cove, Texas. These books are listed because the author has the perspective of a civilized gentleman and integrates home life on frontier ranches with range work.

GREER, JAMES K. Bois d'Arc to Barbed Wire, Dallas, 1936. Outstanding horse lore. OP.

HAGEDORN, HERMANN. Roosevelt in the Bad Lands, Boston, 1921. A better book than Roosevelt's own Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail. OP.

HALEY, J. EVETTS. The XIT Ranch of Texas, Chicago, 1929. As county and town afford the basis for historical treatment of many areas, ranches have afforded bases for various range country histories. Of such this is tops. A lawsuit for libel brought by one or more individuals mentioned in the book put a stop to the selling of copies by the publishers and made it very "rare." Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman, Boston, 1936, reissued by University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. Goodnight, powerful individual and extraordinary observer, summed up in himself the whole life of range and trail. Haley's book, packed with realities of incident and character, paints him against a mighty background. George W. Littlefield, Texan, University of Oklahoma Presss Norman, Okla., 1943, is a lesser biography of a lesser man.

HAMILTON, W. H. Autobiography of a Cowman, in South Dakota Historical Collections, XIX (1938), 475-637. A first-rate narrative of life on the Dakota range.

HAMNER, LAURA V. Short Grass and Longhorns, Norman, Oklahoma, 1943. Sketches of Panhandle ranches and ranch people. OP.

HARRIS, FRANK. My Reminiscences as a Cowboy, 1930. A blatant farrago of lies, included in this list because of its supreme worthlessness. However, some judges might regard the debilitated and puerile lying in The Autobiography of Frank Tarbeaux, as told to Donald H. Clarke, New York, 1930, as equally worthless.

HART, JOHN A., and Others. History of Pioneer Days in Texas and Oklahoma. No date or place of publication; no table of contents. This slight book was enlarged into Pioneer Days in the Southwest from 1850 to 1879, "Contributions by Charles Goodnight, Emanuel Dubbs, John A. Hart and Others," Guthrie, Oklahoma, 1909. Good on the way frontier ranch families lived. The writers show no sense of humor and no idea of being literary.

HASTINGS, FRANK S. A Ranchman's Recollections, Chicago, 1921. OP. Hastings was urbane, which means he had perspective; "Old Gran'pa" is the most pulling cowhorse story I know.

HENRY, O. Heart of the West. Interpretative stories of Texas range life, which O. Henry for a time lived. His range stories are scattered through several volumes. "The Last of the Troubadours" is a classic.

HENRY, STUART. Our Great American Plains, New York, 1930. OP. An unworshipful, anti-Philistinic picture of Abilene, Kansas, when it was at the end of the Chisholm Trail. While not a primary range book, this is absolutely unique in its analysis of cow-town society, both citizens and drovers. Stuart Henry came to Abilene as a boy in 1868. His brother was the first mayor of the town. After graduating from the University of Kansas in 1881, he in time acquired "the habit of authorship." He had written a book on London and French Essays and Profiles and Hours with Famous Parisians before he returned to Kansas for a subject. Some of his non-complimentary characterizations of westerners aroused a mighty roar among panegyrists of the West. They did not try to refute his anecdote about the sign of the Bull Head Saloon. This sign showed the whole of a great red bull. The citizens of Abilene were used to seeing bulls driven through town and they could go out any day and see bulls with cows on the prairie. Nature might be good, but any art suggesting nature's virility was indecent. There was such an uprising of Victorian taste that what distinguishes a bull from a cow had to be painted out. A similar artistic operation had to be performed on the bull signifying Bull Durham tobacco—once the range favorite for making cigarettes.

HILL, J. L. The End of the Cattle Trail, Long Beach, California [May, 1924]. Rare and meaty pamphlet.

HOLDEN, W. C. Rollie Burns, Dallas, 1932. Biography of a Plains cowman. OP. The Spur Ranch, Boston, 1934. History of a great Texas ranch. OP.

HORN, TOM. Life of Tom Horn... Written by Himself, together with His Letters and Statements by His Friends, A Vindication. Published (for John C. Coble) by the Louthan Book Company, Denver, 1904. Who wrote the book has been somewhat in debate. John C. Coble's name is signed to the preface attributing full authorship to Horn. Of Pennsylvania background, wealthy and educated, he had employed Horn as a stock detective on his Wyoming ranch. He had the means and ability to see the book through the press. A letter from his wife to me, from Cheyenne, June 21,1926, says that Horn wrote the book. Charles H. Coe, who succeeded Horn as stock detective in Wyoming, says in Juggling a Rope (Pendleton, Oregon, 1927, P. 108), that Horn wrote it. I have a copy, bought from Fred Rosenstock of the Bargain Book Store in Denver, who got it from Hattie Horner Louthan, of Denver also. For years she taught English in the University of Denver, College of Commerce, and is the author of more than one textbook. The Louthan Book Company of Denver was owned by her family. This copy of Tom Horn contains her bookplate. On top of the first page of the preface is written in pencil: "I wrote this—'Ghost wrote.' H. H. L." Then, penciled at the top of the first page of "Closing Word," is "I wrote this."

Glendolene Myrtle Kimmell was a schoolteacher in the country where Tom Horn operated. As her picture shows, she was lush and beautiful. Pages 287-309 print "Miss Kimmell's Statement." She did her best to keep Tom Horn from hanging. She frankly admired him and, it seems to me, loved him. Jay Monaghan, The Legend of Tom Horn, Last of the Bad Men, Indianapolis and New York, 1946, says (p. 267), without discussion or proof, that after Horn was hanged and buried Miss Kimmell was "writing a long manuscript about a Sir Galahad horseman who was 'crushed between the grinding stones of two civilizations,' but she never found a publisher who thought her book would sell. It was entitled The True Life of Tom Horn."

The main debate has been over Horn himself. The books about him are not highly important, but they contribute to a spectacular and highly controversial phase of range history, the so-called Johnson County War of Wyoming. Mercer's Banditti of the Plains, Mokler's History of Natrona County, Wyoming, Canton's Frontier Trails, and David's Malcolm Campbell, Sheriff (all listed in this chapter) are primary sources on the subject.

HOUGH, EMERSON. The Story of the Cowboy, New York, 1897. Exposition not nearly so good as Philip Ashton Rollins' The Cowboy. North of 36, New York, 1923. Historical novel of the Chisholm Trail. The best character in it is Old Alamo, lead steer. A young woman owner of the herd trails with it. The success of the romance caused Emerson Hough to advise his friend Andy Adams to put a woman in a novel about trail driving—so Andy Adams told me. Adams replied that a woman with a trail herd would be as useless as a fifth wheel on a wagon and that he would not violate reality by having her. For a devastation of Hough's use of history in North of 36 see the Appendix in Stuart Henry's Conquering Our Great American Plains. Yet the novel does have the right temper.

HOYT, HENRY F. A Frontier Doctor, Boston, 1929. Texas Panhandle and New Mexico during Billy the Kid days. Reminiscences.

HUNT, FRAZIER. Cat Mossman: Last of the Great Cowmen, illustrated by Ross Santee, Hastings House, New York, 1951. Few full-length biographies of big operators among cowmen have been written. This reveals not only Cap Mossman's operations on enormous ranges, but the man.

HUNTER, J. MARVIN (compiler). The Trail Drivers of Texas, two volumes, Bandera, Texas, 1920, 1923. Reprinted in one volume, 1925. All OP. George W. Saunders, founder of the Old Time Trail Drivers Association and for many years president, prevailed on hundreds of old-time range and trail men to write autobiographic sketches. He used to refer to Volume II as the "second edition"; just the same, he was not ignorant, and he had a passion for the history of his people. The chronicles, though chaotic in arrangement, comprise basic source material. An index to the one-volume edition of The Trail Drivers of Texas is printed as an appendix to The Chisholm Trail and Other Routes, by T. U. Taylor, San Antonio, 1936—a hodgepodge.

JAMES, WILL. Cowboys North and South, New York, 1924. The Drifting Cowboy, 1925. Smoky—a cowhorse story—1930. Several other books, mostly repetitious. Will James knew his frijoles, but burned them up before he died, in 1942. He illustrated all his books. The best one is his first, written before he became sophisticated with life—without becoming in the right way more sophisticated in the arts of drawing and writing. Lone Cowboy: My Life Story (1930) is without a date or a geographical location less generalized than the space between Canada and Mexico.

JAMES, W. S. Cowboy Life in Texas, Chicago, 1893. A genuine cowboy who became a genuine preacher and wrote a book of validity. This is the best of several books of reminiscences by cowboy preachers, some of whom are as lacking in the real thing as certain cowboy artists. Next to Cowboy Life in Texas, in its genre, might come From the Plains to the Pulpit, by J. W. Anderson, Houston, 1907. The second edition (reset) has six added chapters. The third, and final, edition, Goose Creek, Texas, 1922, again reset, has another added chapter. J. B. Cranfill was a trail driver from a rough range before he became a Baptist preacher and publisher. His bulky Chronicle, A Story of Life in Texas, 1916, is downright and concrete.

KELEHER, WILLIAM A. Maxwell Land Grant: A New Mexico Item, Santa Fe, 1942. The Maxwell grant of 1,714,764 acres on the Cimarron River was at one time perhaps the most famous tract of land in the West. This history brings in ranching only incidentally; it focuses on the land business, including grabs by Catron, Dorsey, and other affluent politicians. Perhaps stronger on characters involved during long litigation over the land, and containing more documentary evidence, is The Grant That Maxwell Bought, by F. Stanley, The World Press, Denver, 1952 (a folio of 256 pages in an edition of 250 copies at $15.00). Keleher is a lawyer; Stanley is a priest. Harvey Fergusson in his historical novel Grant of Kingdom, New York, 1950, vividly supplements both. Keleher's second book, The Fabulous Frontier, Rydal, Santa Fe, 1945, illuminates connections between ranch lands and politicians; principally it sketches the careers of A. B. Fall, John Chisum, Pat Garrett, Oliver Lee, Jack Thorp, Gene Rhodes, and other New Mexico notables.

KENT, WILLIAM. Reminiscences of Outdoor Life, San Francisco, 1929. OP. This is far from being a straight-out range book. It is the easy talk of an urbane man associated with ranches and ranch people who was equally at home in a Chicago office and among fellow congressmen. He had a country-going nature and gusto for character.

KING, FRANK M. Wranglin' the Past, Los Angeles, 1935. King went all the way from Texas to California, listening and looking. OP. His second book, Longhorn Trail Drivers (1940), is worthless. His Pioneer Western Empire Builders (1946) and Mavericks (1947) are no better. Most of the contents of these books appeared in Western Livestock Journal, Los Angeles.

KUPPER, WINIFRED. The Golden Hoof, New York, 1945. Story of the sheep and sheep people of the Southwest. Facts, but, above that, truth that comes only through imagination and sympathy. OP. Texas Sheepman, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1951. The edited reminiscences of Robert Maudslay. He drove sheep all over the West, and lived up to the ideals of an honest Englishman in writing as well as in ranching. He had a sense of humor.

LAMPMAN, CLINTON PARKS. The Great Western Trail, New York, 1939. OP. In the upper bracket of autobiographic chronicles, by a sensitive man who never had the provincial point of view. Lampman contemplated as well as observed He felt the pathos of human destiny.

LANG, LINCOLN A. Ranching with Roosevelt, Philadelphia, 1926. Civilized. OP.

LEWIS, ALFRED HENRY. Wolfville (1897) and other Wolfville books. All OP. Sketches and rambling stories faithful to cattle backgrounds; flavor and humanity through fictionized anecdote. "The Old Cattleman," who tells all the Wolfville stories, is a substantial and flavorsome creation.

LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. Arizona Characters, Los Angeles, 1928. Skilfully written biographies. OP.

MCCARTY, JOHN L. Maverick Town, University of Oklahoma Press, 1946. 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 Illustrations 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. "God pity the wight for whom this vivid, honest story has no interest," John Lomax pronounced. It is one of several brief books of reminiscences brought out in small editions in the "Range Life Series," under the editorship 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. Illustrations 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 title of Powder River Invasion, War on the Rustlers in 1892, "Rewritten by John Mercer Boots." Reprinted 1935, with Foreword by James Mitchell Clarke, by the Grabhorn Press, San Francisco. All editions OP. Bloody 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 illustration 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 illustrated, of reatas, spurs, bits, saddles, and other gear. Californios, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1949. Profusely illustrated. 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 Document No. 267, House of Representatives, 48th Congress, 2nd Session, Washington, D. C., 1885. Printed also in one or more other government documents. A statistical record concerning grazing lands, trail driving, railroad shipping of cattle, markets, foreign investments in ranches, etc. This document 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, Washington, 1936, lists many government publications both state and national.

NORDYKE, LEWIS. Cattle Empire, Morrow, New York, 1949. History, largely political, of the XIT Ranch. Not so careful in documentation 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 illustration 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 scholarship. 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 shipping 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 classed 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 Grass, 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 noble book, rich in anecdote and character. The subtitle reads: "A History of the World's Greatest Cattle Trail, together with a Description of the Persons, a Narrative of the Events, and Reminiscences associated 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 illustrate how titles 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 assembled 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 Association, 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 subtitle, 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 grass, 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 illustrated, 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, illustrations saying more than written words.

Russell's illustrations 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." Passages 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.

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 titles 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 illustrations 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 banal title, 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 advertisements, 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 scraps of anecdotes and western history, along with testimonials, to the pamphlet, the latest edition I have seen being about 1906, printed in Worcester, Massachusetts.

STEEDMAN, CHARLES J. Bucking the Sagebrush, New York, 1904. OP. Charming; much of nature. Illustrated by Russell.

{illust. 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 passing.

STUART, GRANVILLE. Forty Years on the Frontier, two volumes, Cleveland, 1925. Nothing better on the cowboy has ever been written than the chapter entitled "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 entitled 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 album of cattle brands—priced at $10.00. The introduction is one of the sparse 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 titles suggesting the tenor of the book.

Vocabulario y Refranero Criollo, text and illustrations by Tito Saudibet, Guillermo Kraft Ltda., Buenos Aires, 1945. North American ranges have called forth nothing to compare with this fully illustrated, 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 entitled "The Cattle Kingdom." The book is an analysis 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 album 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-class 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 manuscript than he had used and stapled a pamphlet entitled 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 coons and an alligator to spend the summer on that cotton plantation.... Cowpunchers were superstitious 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 title 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 Association resolved a Historical Commission into existence. A committee was appointed and, naturally, one man did the work. In 1923 a fifty-five-page pamphlet entitled Letters from Old Friends and Members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association was printed at Cheyenne. It is made up of unusually informing and pungent recollections by intelligent cowmen.



22. Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads

{illust. 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 title. 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 unsurpassed 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 title page), 1936; reprinted by Macmillan, New York. A noble, 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 Association 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, illustrated 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 compass 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. Illustrations 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.

{illust. 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 illustrations 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 illustrations—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 illustrations; illuminating text. OP.

MULLER, DAN. Horses, Reilly and Lee, Chicago, 1936. Interesting illustrations.

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, illustrated 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.

{illust. 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 classified as literature. Wise in the blend of horse, land, and people.

WENTWORTH, LADY. The Authentic Arabian Horse and His Descendants, London, 1945. Rich in knowledge and both magnificent and munificent in illustrations. Almost immediately after publication, this noble volume entered the rare book class.

WYMAN, WALKER D. The Wild Horse of the West, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1945. A scholarly sifting of virtually all available material on mustangs. Readable. Only thorough bibliography on subject so far published.



24. The Bad Man Tradition

PLENTY of six-shooter play is to be found in most of the books about old-time cowboys; yet hardly one of the professional bad men was a representative cowboy. Bad men of the West and cowboys alike wore six-shooters and spurs; they drank each other's coffee; they had a fanatical passion for liberty—for themselves. But the representative cowboy was a reliable hand, hanging through drought, blizzard, and high water to his herd, whereas the bona fide bad man lived on the dodge. Between the killer and the cowboy standing up for his rights or merely shooting out the lights for fun, there was as much difference as between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. Of course, the elements were mixed in the worst of the bad men, as they are in the best of all good men. No matter what deductions analysis may lead to, the fact remains that the western bad men of open range days have become a part of the American tradition. They represent six-shooter culture at its zenith—the wild and woolly side of the West—a stage between receding bowie knife individualism of the backwoods and blackguard, machine-gun gangsterism of the city.

The songs about Sam Bass, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid reflect popular attitude toward the hard-riding outlaws. Sam Bass, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, the Daltons, Cole Younger, Joaquin Murrieta, John Wesley Hardin, Al Jennings, Belle Starr, and other "long riders" with their guns in their hands have had their biographies written over and over. They were not nearly as immoral as certain newspaper columnists lying under the cloak of piety. As time goes on, they, like antique Robin Hood and the late Pancho Villa, recede from all realistic judgment. If the picture show finds in them models for generosity, gallantry, and fidelity to a code of liberty, and if the public finds them picturesque, then philosophers may well be thankful that they lived, rode, and shot.

{illust. caption = Tom Lea: Pancho Villa, in Southwest Review (1951)}

"The long-tailed heroes of the revolver," to pick a phrase from Mark Twain's unreverential treatment of them in Roughing It, often did society a service in shooting each other—aside from providing entertainment to future generations. As "The Old Cattleman" of Alfred Henry Lewis' Wolfville stories says, "A heap of people need a heap of killing." Nor can the bad men be logically segregated from the long-haired killers on the side of the law like Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp. W. H. Hudson once advanced the theory that bloodshed and morality go together. If American civilization proceeds, the rage for collecting books on bad men will probably subside until a copy of Miguel Antonio Otero's The Real Billy the Kid will bring no higher price than a first edition of A. Edward Newton's The Amenities of Book-Collecting.

See "Fighting Texians," "Texas Rangers," "Range Life," "Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads."

AIKMAN, DUNCAN. Calamity Jane and the Lady Wildcats, 1927. OP. Patronizing in the H. L. Mencken style.

BILLY THE KID. We ve got to take him seriously, not so much for what he was—

There are twenty-one men I have put bullets through, And Sheriff Pat Garrett must make twenty-two—

as for his provocations. Popular imagination, represented by writers of all degrees, goes on playing on him with cumulative effect. As a figure in literature the Kid has come to lead the whole field of western bad men. The Saturday Review, for October 11, 1952, features a philosophical essay entitled "Billy the Kid: Faust in America—The Making of a Legend." The growth of this legend is minutely traced through a period of seventy-one years (1881-1952) by J. C. Dykes in Billy the Kid: The Bibliography of a Legend, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1952 (186 pages). It lists 437 titles, including magazine pieces, mimeographed plays, motion pictures, verses, pamphlets, fiction. In a blend of casualness and scholarship, it gives the substance and character of each item. Indeed, this bibliography reads like a continued story, with constant references to both antecedent and subsequent action. Pat Garrett, John Chisum, and other related characters weave all through it. A first-class bibliography that is also readable is almost a new genre.

Pat F. Garrett, sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, killed the Kid about midnight, July 14, 1881. The next spring his Authentic Life of Billy the Kid was published at Santa Fe, at least partly written, according to good evidence, by a newspaperman named Ash Upton. This biography is one of the rarities in Western Americana. In 1927 it was republished by Macmillan, New York, under title of Pat F. Garrett's Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, edited by Maurice G. Fulton. This is now OP but remains basic. The most widely circulated biography has been The Saga of Billy the Kid by Walter Noble Burns, New York, 1926. It contains a deal of fictional conversation and it has no doubt contributed to the Robin-Hoodizing of the lethal character baptized as William H. Bonney, who was born in New York in 1859 and now lives with undiminished vigor as Billy the Kid. Walter Noble Burns was not so successful with The Robin Hood of El Dorado: The Saga of Joaquin Murrieta (1932), or, despite hogsheads of blood, with Tombstone (1927).

CANTON, FRANK M. Frontier Trails, Boston, 1930.

COE, GEORGE W. Frontier Fighter, Boston, 1934; reprinted by University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. The autobiography of one of Billy the Kid's men as recorded by Nan Hillary Harrison.

COOLIDGE, DANE. Fighting Men of the West, New York, 1932. Biographical sketches. OP.

CUNNINGHAM, EUGENE. Triggernometry, 1934; reprinted by Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho. Excellent survey of codes and characters. Written by a man of intelligence and knowledge. Bibliography.

FORREST, E. R. Arizona's Dark and Bloody Ground, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1936.

GARD, WAYNE. Sam Bass, Boston, 1936. Most of the whole truth. OP.

HALEY, J. EVETTS. Jeff Milton—A Good Man with a Gun, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. Jeff Milton the whole man as well as the queller of bad men.

HENDRICKS, GEORGE. The Bad Man of the West, Naylor, San Antonio, 1941. Analyses and classifications go far toward making this treatment of old subjects original. Excellent bibliographical guide.

HOUGH, EMERSON. The Story of the Outlaw, 1907. OP. An omnibus carelessly put together with many holes in it.

LAKE, STUART. Wyatt Earp, Boston, 1931. Best written of all gunmen biographies. Earp happened to be on the side of the law.

LANKFORD, N. P. Vigilante Days and Ways, 1890, 1912. OP. Full treatment of lawlessness in the Northwest.

LOVE, ROBERTUS. The Rise and Fall of Jesse James, New York, 1926. Excellently written. OP.

RAINE, WILLIAM MCLEOD. Famous s and Western Outlaws, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1929. A rogues' gallery. Guns of the Frontier, Boston, 1940. Another miscellany. OP.

RASCOE, BURTON. Belle Starr, New York, 1941. OP.

RIPLEY, THOMAS. They Died with Their Boots On, 1935. Mostly about John Wesley Hardin. OP.

SABIN, EDWIN L. Wild Men of the Wild West, New York, 1929. Biographic survey of killers from the Mississippi to the Pacific. OP.

WILD BILL HICKOK. The subject of various biographies, among them those by Frank J. Wilstach (1926) and William E. Connelley (1933). The Nebraska History Magazine (Volume X) for April-June 1927 is devoted to Wild Bill and contains a "descriptive bibliography" on him by Addison E. Sheldon.

WOODHULL, FROST. Folk-Lore Shooting, in Southwestern Lore, Publication IX of the Texas Folklore Society, 1931. Rich. Humor.



25. Mining and Oil

DURING the twentieth century oil has brought so much money to the Southwest that the proceeds from cattle have come to look like tips. This statement is not based on statistics, though statistics no doubt exist—even on the cost of catching sun perch. Geological, legal, and economic writings on oil are mountainous in quantity, but the human drama of oil yet remains, for the most part, to be written. It is odd to find such a modern book as Erna Fergusson's Our Southwest not mentioning oil. It is odd that no book of national reputation comes off the presses about any aspect of oil. The nearest to national notice on oil is the daily report of transactions on the New York Stock Exchange. Oil companies subsidize histories of themselves, endow universities with money to train technicians they want, control state legislatures and senates, and dictate to Congress what they want for themselves in income tax laws; but so far they have not been able to hire anybody to write a book about oil that anybody but the hirers themselves wants to read. Probably they don't read them. The first thing an oilman does after amassing a few millions is buy a ranch on which he can get away from oil—and on which he can spend some of his oil money.

People live a good deal by tradition and fight a good deal by tradition also, voting more by prejudice. When one considers the stream of cow country books and the romance of mining living on in legends of lost mines and, then, the desert of oil books, one realizes that it takes something more than money to make the mare of romance run. Geology and economics are beyond the aim of this Guide, but if oil money keeps on buying up ranch land, the history of modern ranching will be resolved into the biographies of a comparatively few oilmen.

BOATRIGHT, MODY C. Gib Morgan: Minstrel of the Oil Fields. Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1945. Folk tales about Gib rather than minstrelsy. OP.

BOONE, LALIA PHIPPS. The Petroleum Dictionary, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1952. "More than 6,000 entries: definitions of technical terms and everyday expressions, a comprehensive guide to the language of the oil industry."

CAUGHEY, JOHN WALTON. Gold Is the Cornerstone (1948). Adequate treatment of the discovery of California gold and of the miners. Rushing for Gold (1949). Twelve essays by twelve writers, with emphasis on travel to California. Both books published by University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

CENDRARS, BLAISE. Sutter's Gold, London, 1926. OP.

CLARK, JAMES A., and HALBOUTY, MICHEL T. Spindletop, Random House, New York, 1952. On January 10, 1901, the Spindletop gusher, near Beaumont, Texas, roared in the oil age. This book, while it presumes to record what Pat Higgins was thinking as he sat in front of a country store, seems to be "the true story." The bare facts in it make drama.

DE QUILLE, DAN (pseudonym for William Wright). The Big Bonanza, Hartford, 1876. Reprinted, 1947. OP.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. Coronado's Children, Dallas, 1930; reprinted by Grosset and Dunlap, New York. Legendary tales of lost mines and buried treasures of the Southwest. Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver, Little, Brown, Boston, 1939. More of the same thing.

EMRICH, DUNCAN, editor. Comstock Bonanza, Vanguard, New York, 1950. A collection of writings, garnered mostly from West Coast magazines and newspapers, bearing on mining in Nevada during the boom days of Mark Twain's.

{illust. caption = Tom Lea, in Santa Rita by Martin W. Schwettmann (1943)}

Roughing It. James G. Gally's writing is a major discovery in a minor field.

FORBES, GERALD. Flush Production: The Epic of Oil in the Gulf-Southwest, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942.

GILLIS, WILLIAM R. Goldrush Days with Mark Twain, New York, 1930. OP.

GLASSCOCK, LUCILLE. A Texas Wildcatter, Naylor, San Antonio, 1952. The wildcatter is Mrs. Glasscock's husband. She chronicles this player's main moves in the game and gives an insight into his energy-driven ambition.

HOUSE, BOYCE. Oil Boom, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1941. With Boyce House's earlier Were You in Ranger?, this book gives a contemporary picture of the gushing days of oil, money, and humanity.

LYMAN, GEORGE T. The Saga of the Comstock Lode, 1934, and Ralston's Ring, 1937. Both published by Scribner's, New York.

MCKENNA, JAMES A. Black Range Tales, New York, 1936. Reminiscences of prospecting life. OP.

MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career of E. W. Marland, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951. Mature in style and in interpretative power, John Joseph Mathews goes into the very life of an oilman who was something else.

RISTER, C. C. Oil! Titan of the Southwest, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. Facts in factual form. Plenty of oil wealth and taxes; nothing on oil government.

SHINN, CHARLES H. Mining Camps, 1885, reprinted by Knopf, New York, 1948. Perhaps the most competent analysis extant on the behavior of the gold hunters, with emphasis on their self-government. The Story of the Mine as Illustrated by the Great Comstock Lode of Nevada, New York, 1896. OP. Shinn knew and he knew also how to combine into form.

STUART, GRANVILLE. Forty Years on the Frontier, Cleveland, 1925. Superb on California and Montana hunger for precious metals. OP.

TAIT, SAMUEL W. Wildcatters: An Informal History of Oil-Hunting in America, Princeton University Press, 1946. OP.

TWAIN, MARK. Roughing It. The mining boom itself.



26. Nature; Wild Life; Naturalists

"NO MAN," says Mary Austin, "has ever really entered into the heart of any country until he has adopted or made up myths about its familiar objects." A man might reject the myths but he would have to know many facts about its natural life and have imagination as well as knowledge before entering into a country's heart. The history of any land begins with nature, and all histories must end with nature.

"The character of a country is the destiny of its people," wrote Harvey Fergusson in Rio Grande. Ross Calvin, also of New Mexico, had the same idea in mind when he entitled his book Sky Determines. "Culture mocks at the boundaries set up by politics," Clark Wissler said. "It approaches geographical boundaries with its hat in its hand." The engineering of water across mountains, electric translation of sounds, refrigeration of air and foods, and other technical developments carry human beings a certain distance across some of nature's boundaries, but no cleverness of science can escape nature. The inhabitants of Yuma, Arizona, are destined forever to face a desert devoid of graciousness. Technology does not create matter; it merely uses matter in a skilful way—uses it up.

Man advances by learning the secrets of nature and taking advantage of his knowledge. He is deeply happy only when in harmony with his work and environments. The backwoodsman, early settler, pioneer plainsman, mountain man were all like some infuriated beast of Promethean capabilities tearing at its own vitals. Driven by an irrational energy, they seemed intent on destroying not only the growth of the soil but the power of the soil to reproduce. Davy Crockett, the great bear killer, was "wrathy to kill a bear," and as respects bears and other wild life, one may search the chronicles of his kind in vain for anything beyond the incidents of chase and slaughter. To quote T. B. Thorpe's blusterous bear hunter, the whole matter may be summed up in one sentence: "A bear is started and he is killed." For the average American of the soil, whether wearing out a farm, shotgunning with a headlight the last doe of a woodland, shooting the last buffalo on the range, trapping the last howling lobo, winging the last prairie chicken, running down in an automobile the last antelope, making a killer's target of any hooting owl or flying heron that comes within range, poisoning the last eagle to fly over a sheep pasture for him the circumstances of the killing have expressed his chief intellectual interest in nature.

A sure sign of advancing civilization has been the rapidly changing popular attitude toward nature during recent years. People are becoming increasingly interested not merely in conserving game for sportsmen to shoot, but in preserving all wild life, in observing animals, in cultivating native flora, in building houses that harmonize with climate and landscape. Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds has become one of the popular standard works of America.

The story of the American Indian is—despite taboos and squalor—a story of harmonizations with nature. "Wolf Brother," in Long Lance, by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, is a poetic concretion of this harmony. As much at ease with the wilderness as any Blackfoot Indian was George Frederick Ruxton, educated English officer and gentleman, who rode horseback from Vera Cruz to the Missouri River and wrote Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains. In this book he tells how a lobo followed him for days from camp to camp, waiting each evening for his share of fresh meat and sometimes coming close to the fire at night. Any orthodox American would have shot the lobo at first appearance. Ruxton had the civilized perspective on nature represented by Thoreau and Saint Francis of Assisi. Primitive harmony was run over by frontier wrath to kill, a wrath no less barbaric than primitive superstitions.

But the coyote's howl is more tonic than all theories about nature; the buck's whistle more invigorating; the bull's bellow in the canyon more musical; the call of the bobwhite more serene; the rattling of the rattlesnake more logical; the scream of the panther more arousing to the imagination; the odor from the skunk more lingering; the sweep of the buzzard in the air more majestical; the wariness of the wild turkey brighter; the bark of the prairie dog lighter; the guesses of the armadillo more comical; the upward dartings and dippings of the scissortail more lovely; the flight of the sandhill cranes more fraught with mystery.

There is an abundance of printed information on the animal life of America, to the west as well as to the east. Much of it cannot be segregated; the earthworm, on which Darwin wrote a book, knows nothing of regionalism. The best books on nature come from and lead to the Grasshopper's Library, which is free to all consultants. I advise the consultant to listen to the owl's hoot for wisdom, plant nine bean rows for peace, and, with Wordsworth, sit on an old gray stone listening for "authentic tidings of invisible things." Studies are only to "perfect nature." In the words of Mary Austin, "They that make the sun noise shall not fail of the sun's full recompense."

Like knowledge in any other department of life, that on nature never comes to a stand so long as it has vitality. A continuing interest in natural history is nurtured by Natural History, published by the American Museum of Natural History, New York; Nature, published in Washington, D. C.; The Living Wilderness, also from Washington; Journal of Mammalogy, a quarterly, Baltimore, Maryland; Audubon Magazine (formerly Bird Lore), published by the National Audubon Society, New York; American Forests, Washington, D. C., and various other publications.

In addition to books of natural history interest listed below, others are listed under "Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters," "Bears and Bear Hunters," "Coyotes, Lobos, and Panthers," "Birds and Wild Flowers," and "Interpreters." Perhaps a majority of worthy books pertaining to the western half of America look on the outdoors.

ADAMS, W. H. DAVENPORT (from the French of Benedict Revoil). The Hunter and the Trapper of North America, London, 1875. A strange book.

ARNOLD, OREN. Wild Life in the Southwest, Dallas, 1936. Helpful chapters on various characteristic animals and plants. OP.

BAILEY, VERNON. Mammals of New Mexico, United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Biological Survey, Washington, D. C., 1931. Biological Survey of Texas, 1905. OP. The "North American Fauna Series," to which these two books belong, contains or points to the basic facts covering most of the mammals of the Southwest.

BAILLIE-GROHMAN, WILLIAM A. Camps in the Rockies, 1882. A true sportsman, Baillie-Grohman was more interested in living animals than in just killing. OP.

BEDICHEK, ROY. Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1947. To be personal, Roy Bedichek has the most richly stored mind I have ever met; it is as active as it is full. Liberal in the true sense of the word, it frees other minds. Here, using facts as a means, it gives meanings to the hackberry tree, limestone, mockingbird, Inca dove, Mexican primrose, golden eagle, the Davis Mountains, cedar cutters, and many another natural phenomenon. Adventures with a Texas Naturalist is regarded by some good judges as the wisest book in the realm of natural history produced in America since Thoreau wrote.

The title of Bedichek's second book, Karankaway Country (Garden City, 1950), is misleading. The Karankawa Indians start it off, but it goes to coon inquisitiveness, prairie chicken dances, the extinction of species to which the whooping crane is approaching, browsing goats, dignified skunks, swifts in love flight, a camp in the brush, dust, erosion, silt—always with thinking added to seeing. The foremost naturalist of the Southwest, Bedichek constantly relates nature to civilization and human values.

BROWNING, MESHACH. Forty-Four Years of the Life of a Hunter, 1859; reprinted, Philadelphia, 1928. Prodigal on bear and deer.

CAHALANE, VICTOR H. Mammals of North America, Macmillan, New York, 1947. The author is a scientist with an open mind on the relationships between predators and game animals. His thick, delightfully illustrated book is the best dragnet on American mammals extant. It contains excellent lists of references.

CATON, JUDGE JOHN DEAN. Antelope and Deer of America, 1877. Standard work. OP.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. The Longhorns (1941) and The Mustangs (1952), while hardly to be catalogued as natural history books, go farther into natural history than most books on cattle and horses go. On the Open Range (1931; reprinted by Banks Upshaw, Dallas) contains a number of animal stories more or less true. Ben Lilly of The Ben Lilly Legend (Boston, 1950) thought that God had called him to hunt. He spent his life, therefore, in hunting. He saw some things in nature beyond targets.

DODGE, RICHARD I. The Hunting Grounds of the Great West, London, 1877. Published in New York the same year under title of The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants. Outstanding survey of outstanding wild creatures.

DUNRAVEN, EARL OF. The Great Divide, London, 1876; reprinted under title of Hunting in the Yellowstone, 1925. OP.

ELLIOTT, CHARLES (editor). Fading Trails, New York, 1942. Humanistic review of characteristic American wild life. OP.

FLACK, CAPTAIN. The Texas Ranger, or Real Life in the Backwoods, 1866; another form of A Hunter's Experience in the Southern States of America, by Captain Flack, "The Ranger," London, 1866.

GANSON, EVE. Desert Mavericks, Santa Barbara, California, 1928. Illustrated; delightful. OP.

GEISER, SAMUEL WOOD. Naturalists of the Frontier, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1937; revised and enlarged edition, 1948. Biographies of men who were characters as well as scientists, generally in environments alien to their interests.

GERSTAECKER, FREDERICK. Wild Sports in the Far West, 1854. A translation from the German. Delightful reading and revealing picture of how backwoodsmen of the Mississippi Valley "lived off the country."

GRAHAM, GID. Animal Outlaws, Collinsville, Oklahoma, 1938. OP. A remarkable collection of animal stories. Privately printed.

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Between 1893 and 1913, Grinnell, partly in collaboration with Theodore Roosevelt, edited five volumes for The Boone and Crockett Club that contain an extraordinary amount of information, written mostly by men of civilized perspective, on bears, deer, mountain sheep, buffaloes, cougars, elk, wolves, moose, mountains, and forests. The series, long out of print, is a storehouse of knowledge not to be overlooked by any student of wild life in the West. The titles are: American Big-Game Hunting, 1893; Hunting in Many Lands, 1895; Trail and Camp-Fire, 1897; American Big Game in Its Haunts, 1904; Hunting at High Altitudes, 1913.

GRINNELL, JOSEPH; DIXON, JOSEPH S.; and LINSDALE, JEAN M. Fur-Bearing Mammals of California: Their Natural History, Systematic Status, and Relation to Man, two volumes, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1937. The king, so far, of all state natural histories.

HALL, E. RAYMOND. Mammals of Nevada, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1946. So far as my knowledge goes, this is the only respect-worthy book extant pertaining to the state whose economy is based on fees from divorces and gambling and whose best-known citizen is Senator Pat McCarran.

HARTMAN, CARL G. Possum, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1952. This richly illustrated book comprehends everything pertaining to the subject from prehistoric marsupium to baking with sweet potatoes in a Negro cabin. It is the outcome of a lifetime's scientific investigation not only of possums but of libraries and popular talk. Thus, in addition to its biographical and natural history aspects, it is a study in the evolution of man's knowledge about one of the world's folkiest creatures.

{illust. caption = Charles M. Russell, in The Blazed Trail of the Old Frontier by Agnes C. Laut (1926)}

HORNADAY, WILLIAM T. Camp Fires on Desert and Lava, London, n.d. OP. Dr. Hornaday, who died in 1937, was the first director of the New York Zoological Park. He was a great conservationist and an authority on the wild life of America.

HUDSON, W. H. The Naturalist in La Plata, New York, 1892. Not about the Southwest or even North America, but Hudson's chapters on "The Puma," "Some Curious Animal Weapons," "The Mephitic Skunk," "Humming Birds," "The Strange Instincts of Cattle," "Horse and Man," etc. come home to the Southwest. Few writers tend to make readers so aware; no other has written so delightfully of the lands of grass.

INGERSOLL, ERNEST. Wild Neighbors, New York, 1897. OP. A superior work. Chapter II, "The Father of Game," is on the cougar; Chapter IV, "The Hound of the Plains," is on the coyote; there is an excellent essay on the badger. Each chapter is provided with a list of books affording more extended treatment of the subject.

JAEGER, EDMUND C. Denizens of the Desert, Boston, 1922. OP. "Don Coyote," the roadrunner, and other characteristic animals. Our Desert Neighbors, Stanford University Press, California, 1950.

LOCKE, LUCIE H. Naturally Yours, Texas, Naylor, San Antonio, 1949. Charm must never be discounted; it is far rarer than facts, and often does more to lead to truth. This slight book is in verse and drawings, type integrated with delectable black-and-white representations of the prairie dog, armadillo, sanderling, mesquite, whirlwind, sand dune, mirage, and dozens of other natural phenomena. The only other book in this list to which it is akin is Eve Ganson's Desert Mavericks.

LUMHOLTZ, CARL. Unknown Mexico, New York, 1902. Nearly anything about animals as well as about Indians and mountains of Mexico may be found in this extraordinary two-volume work. OP.

MCILHENNY, EDWARD A. The Alligator s Life History, Boston, 1935. OP. The alligator got farther west than is generally known—at least within reach of Laredo and Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande. McIlhenny's book treats—engagingly, intimately, and with precision—of the animal in Louisiana. Hungerers for anatomical biology are referred to The Alligator and Its Allies by A. M. Reese, New York, 1915. I have more to say about McIlhenny in Chapter 30.

MARCY, COLONEL R. B. Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border, New York, 1866. Marcy had a scientific mind and a high sense of values. He knew how to write and what he wrote remains informing and pleasant.

MARTIN, HORACE T. Castorologia, or The History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver, London, 1892. OP. The beaver is a beaver, whether on Hudson's Bay or the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. Much has been written on this animal, the propeller of the trappers of the West, but this famous book remains the most comprehensive on facts and the amplest in conception. The author was humorist as well as scientist.

MENGER, RUDOLPH. Texas Nature Observations and Reminiscences, San Antonio, 1913. OP. Being of an educated German family, Dr. Menger found many things in nature more interesting than two-headed calves.

MILLS, ENOS. The Rocky Mountain Wonderland, Wild Life on the Rockies, Waiting in the Wilderness, and other books. Some naturalists have taken exception to some observations recorded by Mills; nevertheless, he enlarges and freshens mountain life.

MUIR, JOHN. The Mountains of California, Our National Parks, and other books. Muir, a great naturalist, had the power to convey his wise sympathies and brooded-over knowledge.

MURPHY, JOHN MORTIMER. Sporting Adventures in the Far West, London, 1879. One of the earliest roundups of game animals of the West.

NEWSOME, WILLIAM M. The Whitetailed Deer, New York, 1926. OP. Standard work.

PALLISER, JOHN. The Solitary Hunter; or Storting Adventures in the Prairies, London, 1857.

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, with a chapter entitled "Books on Big Game"; Hunting Adventures in the West; The Wilderness Hunter; Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail; A Book Lover's Holiday in the Open; The Deer Family (in collaboration).

SEARS, PAUL B. Deserts on the March, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1935. Dramatic picturization of the forces of nature operating in what droughts of the 1930's caused to be called "the Dust Bowl." "Drought and Wind and Man" might be another title.

SETON, ERNEST THOMPSON. Wild Animals I Have Known; Lives of the Hunted. Probably no other writer of America has aroused so many people, young people especially, to an interest in our wild animals. Natural history encyclopedias he has authored are Life Histories of Northern Animals, New York, 1920, and Lives of Game Animals, New York, 1929. Seton's final testament, Trail of an Artist Naturalist (Scribner's, New York, 1941), has a deal on wild life of the Southwest.

THORPE, T. B. The Hive of the Bee-Hunter, New York, 1854. OP. Juicy.

WARREN, EDWARD ROYAL. The Mammals of Colorado, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942. OP.



27. Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters

THE LITERATURE on the American bison, more popularly called buffalo, is enormous. Nearly everything of consequence pertaining to the Plains Indians touches the animal. The relationship of the Indian to the buffalo has nowhere been better stated than in Note 49 to the Benavides Memorial, edited by Hodge and Lummis. "The Great Buffalo Hunt at Standing Rock," a chapter in My Friend the Indian by James McLaughlin, sums up the hunting procedure; other outstanding treatments of the buffalo in Indian books are to be found in Long Lance by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance; Letters and Notes on... the North American Indians by George Catlin; Forty Years a Fur Trader by Charles Larpenteur. Floyd B. Streeter's chapter on "The Buffalo Range" in Prairie Trails and Cow Towns lists twenty-five sources of information.

The bibliography that supersedes all other bibliographies is in the book that supersedes all other books on the subject—Frank Gilbert Roe's The North American Buffalo. More about it in the list that follows.

Nearly all men who got out on the plains were "wrathy to kill" buffaloes above all else. The Indians killed in great numbers but seldom wastefully. The Spaniards were restrained by Indian hostility. Mountain men, emigrants crossing the plains, Santa Fe traders, railroad builders, Indian fighters, settlers on the edge of the plains, European sportsmen, all slaughtered and slew. Some observed, but the average American hunter's observations on game animals are about as illuminating as the trophy-stuffed den of a rich oilman or the lockers of a packing house. Lawrence of Arabia won his name through knowledge and understanding of Arabian life and through power to lead and to write. Buffalo Bill won his name through power to exterminate buffaloes. He was a buffalo man in the way that Hitler was a Polish Jew man.

{illust. caption = Harold D. Bugbee: Buffaloes

It is a pleasure to note the writings of sportsmen with inquiring minds and of scientists and artists who hunted. Three examples are: The English Sportsman in the Western Prairies, by the Hon. Grantley F. Berkeley, London, 1861; Travels in the Interior of North America, 1833-1834, by Maximilian, Prince of Wied (original edition, 1843), included in that "incomparable storehouse of buffalo lore from early eye-witnesses," Early Western Travels, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites; George Catlin's Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians, London, 1841.

Three aspects of the buffalo stand out: the natural history of the great American animal; the interrelationship between Indian and buffalo; the white hunter—and exterminator.

ALLEN, J. A. The American Bison, Living and Extinct, Cambridge, Mass., 1876. Reprinted in 9th Annual Report of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey, Washington, 1877. Basic and rich work, much of it appropriated by Hornaday.

BRANCH, E. DOUGLAS. The Hunting of the Buffalo, New York, 1925. Interpretative as well as factual. OP.

COOK, JOHN R. The Border and the Buffalo. Topeka, Kansas, 1907. Personal narrative.

DIXON, OLIVE. Billy Dixon, Guthrie, Oklahoma, 1914; reprinted, Dallas, 1927. Bully autobiography; excellent on the buffalo hunter as a type. OP.

DODGE, R. I. The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants, New York, 1877. One of the best chapters of this source book is on the buffalo.

GARRETSON, MARTIN S. The American Bison, New York Zoological Society, New York, 1938. Not thorough, but informing. Limited bibliography. OP.

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD (1849-1938) may be classed next to J. A. Allen and W. T. Hornaday as historian of the buffalo. His primary sources were the buffaloed plains and the Plains Indians, whom he knew intimately. "In Buffalo Days" is a long and excellent essay by him in American Big-Game Hunting, edited by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, New York, 1893. He has another long essay, "The Bison," in Musk-Ox, Bison, Sheep and Goat by Caspar Whitney, George Bird Grinnell, and Owen Wister, New York, 1904. His noble and beautifully simple When Buffalo Ran, New Haven, 1920, is specific on work from a buffalo horse. Again in his noble two-volume work on The Cheyenne Indians (1923) Grinnell is rich not only on the animal but on the Plains Indian relationship to it. All OP.

HALEY, J. EVETTS. Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman, 1936. Goodnight killed and also helped save the buffalo. Haley has preserved his observations.

HORNADAY, W. T. Extermination of the American Bison (Smithsonian Reports for 1887, published in 1889, Part II). Hornaday was a good zoologist but inferior in research.

INMAN, HENRY. Buffalo Jones Forty Years of Adventure, Topeka, Kansas, 1899. A book rich in observations as well as experience, though Jones was a poser. OP.

LAKE, STUART N. Wyatt Earp, Boston, 1931. Early chapters excellent on buffalo hunting.

MCCREIGHT, M. I. Buffalo Bone Days, Sykesville, Pa., 1939. OP. A pamphlet strong on buffalo bones, for fertilizer.

PALLISER, JOHN (and others). Journals, Detailed Reports, and Observations, relative to Palliser's Exploration of British North America, 1857-1860, London, 1863. According to Frank Gilbert Roe, "a mine of inestimable information" on the buffalo.

Panhandle-Plains Historical Review, Canyon, Texas. Articles and reminiscences, passim.

PARKMAN, FRANCIS. The Oregon Trail, 1847. Available in various editions, this book contains superb descriptions of buffaloes and prairies.

POE, SOPHIE A. Buckboard Days (edited by Eugene Cunningham), Caldwell, Idaho, 1936. Early chapters. OP.

ROE, FRANK GILBERT. The North American Buffalo, University of Toronto Press, 1951. A monumental work comprising and critically reviewing virtually all that has been written on the subject and supplanting much of it. No other scholar dealing with the buffalo has gone so fully into the subject or viewed it from so many angles, brought out so many aspects of natural history and human history. In a field where ignorance has often prevailed, Roe has to be iconoclastic in order to be constructive. If his words are sometimes sharp, his mind is sharper. The one indispensable book on the subject.

RYE, EDGAR. The Quirt and the Spur, Chicago, 1909. Rye was in the Fort Griffin, Texas, country when buffalo hunters dominated it. OP.

SCHULTZ, JAMES WILLARD. Apauk, Caller of Buffalo, New York, 1916. OP. Whether fiction or nonfiction, as claimed by the author, this book realizes the relationships between Plains Indian and buffalo.

WEEKES, MARY. The Last Buffalo Hunter (as told by Norbert Welsh), New York, 1939. OP. The old days recalled with upspringing sympathy. Canada—but buffaloes and buffalo hunters were pretty much the same everywhere.

West Texas Historical Association (Abilene, Texas) Year Books. Reminiscences and articles, passim.

WILLIAMS, O. W. A privately printed letter of eight unnumbered pages, dated from Fort Stockton, Texas, June 30, 1930, containing the best description of a buffalo stampede that I have encountered. It is reproduced in Dobie's On the Open Range.



28. Bears and Bear Hunters

THE BEAR, whether black or grizzly, is a great American citizen. Think of how many children have been put to sleep with bear stories! Facts about the animal are fascinating; the effect he has had on the minds of human beings associated with him transcends naturalistic facts. The tree on which Daniel Boone carved the naked fact that here he "Killed A. Bar In the YEAR 1760" will never die. Davy Crockett killed 105 bars in one season, and his reputation as a bar hunter, plus ability to tell about his exploits, sent him to Congress. He had no other reason for going. The grizzly was the hero of western tribes of Indians from Alaska on down into the Sierra Madre. Among western white men who met him, occasionally in death, the grizzly inspired a mighty saga, the cantos of which lie dispersed in homely chronicles and unrecorded memories as well as in certain vivid narratives by Ernest Thompson Seton, Hittell's John Capen Adams, John G. Neihardt, and others.