Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest

J >> J. Frank Dobie >> Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest

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_21_

Range Life: Cowboys, Cattle, Sheep

THE COWBOY ORIGINATED in Texas. The Texas cowboy, along with
the Texas cowman, was an evolvement from and a blend of the
riding, shooting, frontier-formed southerner, the Mexican-
Indian horseback worker with livestock (the vaquero), and the
Spanish open-range rancher. The blend was not in blood, but in
occupational techniques. I have traced this genesis with more
detail in _The Longhorns_. Compared with evolution in species,
evolution in human affairs is meteor-swift. The driving of
millions of cattle and horses from Texas to stock the whole
plains area of North America while, following the Civil War,
it was being denuded of buffaloes and secured from Indian
domination, enabled the Texas cowboy to set his impress upon
the whole ranching industry. The cowboy became the best-known
occupational type that America has given the world. He exists
still and will long exist, though much changed from the
original. His fame derives from the past.

Romance, both genuine and spurious, has obscured the realities
of range and trail. The realities themselves have, however,
been such that few riders really belonging to the range wished
to lead any other existence. Only by force of circumstances
have they changed "the grass beneath and the sky above" for a
more settled, more confining, and more materially remunerative
way of life. Some of the old-time cowboys were little more
adaptable to change than the Plains Indians; few were less
reluctant to plow or work in houses. Heaven in their dreams
was a range better watered than the one they knew, with grass
never stricken by drought,
plenty of fat cattle, the best horses and comrades of their
experience, more of women than they talked about in public,
and nothing at all of golden streets, golden harps, angel
wings, and thrones; it was a mere extension, somewhat
improved, of the present. Bankers, manufacturers, merchants,
and mechanics seldom so idealize their own occupations; they
work fifty weeks a year to go free the other two.

For every hired man on horseback there have been hundreds of
plowmen in America, and tens of millions of acres of
rangelands have been plowed under, but who can cite a single
autobiography of a laborer in the fields of cotton, of corn,
of wheat? Or do coal miners, steelmongers, workers in oil
refineries, factory hands of any kind of factory, the
employees of chain stores and department stores ever write
autobiographies? Many scores of autobiographies have been
written by range men, perhaps half of them by cowboys who
never became owners at all. A high percentage of the
autobiographies are in pamphlet form; many that were written
have not been published. The trail drivers of open range days,
nearly all dead now, felt the urge to record experiences more
strongly than their successors. They realized that they had
been a part of an epic life.

The fact that the hired man on horseback has been as good a
man as the owner and, on the average, has been a more spirited
and eager man than the hand on foot may afford some
explanation of the validity and vitality of his chroniclings,
no matter how crude they be. On the other hand, the fact that
the rich owner and the college-educated aspirant to be a
cowboy soon learned, if they stayed on the range, that _a
man's a man for a' that_ may to some extent account for a
certain generous amplitude of character inherent in their most
representative reminiscences. Sympathy for the life biases my
judgment; that judgment, nevertheless, is that some of the
strongest and raciest autobiographic writing produced by
America has been by range men.

This is not to say that these chronicles are of a high
literary order. Their writers have generally lacked the
maturity

{illust. caption =
Tom Lea, in _The Longhorns_ by J. Frank Dobie (1941)}

of mind, the reflective wisdom, and the power of observation
found in personal narratives of the highest order. No man who
camped with a chuck wagon has written anything remotely
comparable to Charles M. Doughty's _Arabia Deserta_, a
chronicle at once personal and impersonal, restrainedly
subjective and widely objective, of his life with nomadic
Bedouins. Perspective is a concomitant of civilization. The
chronicles of the range that show perspective have come mostly
from educated New Englanders, Englishmen, and Scots. The great
majority of the chronicles are limited in subject matter to
physical activities. They make few concessions to "the desire
of the moth for the star"; they hardly enter the complexities
of life, including those of sex. In one section of the West at
one time the outstanding differences among range men were
between owners of sheep and owners of cattle, the ambition of
both being to hog the whole country. On another area of the
range at another time, the outstanding difference was between
little ranchers, many of whom were stealing, and big ranchers,
plenty of whom had stolen. Such differences are not exponents
of the kind of individualism that burns itself into great
human documents.

Seldom deeper than the chronicles does range fiction go below
physical surface into reflection, broodings, hungers-- the
smolderings deep down in a cowman oppressed by drought and
mortgage sitting in a rocking chair on a ranch gallery looking
at the dust devils and hoping for a cloud; the goings-on
inside a silent cowboy riding away alone from an empty pen to
which he will never return; the streams of consciousness in a
silent man and a silent woman bedded together in a wind-lashed
frame house away out on the lone prairie. The wide range of
human interests leaves ample room for downright, straightaway
narratives of the careers of strong men. If the literature of
the range ever matures, however, it will include keener
searchings for meanings and harder struggles for human truths
by writers who strive in "the craft so long to lerne." For
three-quarters of a century the output of fiction on the
cowboy has been tremendous, and
it shows little diminution. Mass production inundating the
masses of readers has made it difficult for serious
fictionists writing about range people to get a hearing.

The code of the West was concentrated into the code of the
range--and not all of it by any means depended upon the six-
shooter. No one can comprehend this code without knowing
something about the code of the Old South, whence the Texas
cowboy came.

Mexican goats make the best eating in Mexico and mohair has
made good money for many ranchers of the Southwest. Goats,
goat herders, goatskins, and wine in goatskins figure in the
literature of Spain as prominently as six-shooters in Blazing
Frontier fiction--and far more pleasantly. Read George
Borrow's _The Bible in Spain_, one of the most delectable of
travel books. Beyond a few notices of Mexican goat herders,
there is on the subject of goats next to nothing readable in
American writings. Where there is no competition, supremacy is
small distinction; so I should offend no taste by saying that
"The Man of Goats" in my own _Tongues of the Monte_ is about
the best there is so far as goats go.

Although sheep are among the most salient facts of range life,
they have, as compared with cattle and horses, been a dim item
in the range tradition. Yet, of less than a dozen books on
sheep and sheepmen, more than half of them are better written
than hundreds of books concerning cowboy life. Mary Austin's
_The Flock_ is subtle and beautiful; Archer B. Gilfillan's
_Sheep_ is literature in addition to having much information;
Hughie Call's _Golden Fleece_ is delightful; Winifred Kupper's
_The Golden Hoof_ and _Texas Sheepman_ have charm--a rare
quality in most books on cows and cow people. Among
furnishings in the cabin of Robert Maudslay, "the Texas
Sheepman," were a set of Sir Walter Scott's works,
Shakespeare, and a file of the _Illustrated London News_. "A
man who read Shakespeare and the _Illustrated London News_ had
little to contribute to
Come a ti yi yoopee
Ti yi ya!"

O. Henry's ranch experiences in Texas were largely confined to
a sheep ranch. The setting of his "Last of the Troubadours" is
a sheep ranch. I nominate it as the best range story in
American fiction.

"Cowboy Songs" and "Horses" are separate chapters following
this. The literature cited in them is mostly range literature,
although precious little in all the songs rises to the status
of poetry. A considerable part of the literature listed under
"Texas Rangers" and "The Bad Man Tradition" bears on range
life.

ABBOTT, E. C., and SMITH, HELENA HUNTINGTON. We _Pointed Them
North_, New York, 1939. Abbott, better known as Teddy Blue,
used to give his address as Three Duce Ranch, Gilt Edge,
Montana. Helena Huntington Smith, who actually wrote and
arranged his reminiscences, instead of currying him down and
putting a checkrein on him, spurred him in the flanks and told
him to swaller his head. He did. This book is franker about
the women a rollicky cowboy was likely to meet in town than
all the other range books put together. The fact that Teddy
Blue's wife was a half-breed Indian, daughter of Granville
Stuart, and that Indian women do not object to the truth about
sex life may account in part for his frankness. The book is
mighty good reading. OP.

ADAMS, ANDY. _The Log of a Cowboy_ (1903). In 1882, at the age
of twenty-three, Andy Adams came to Texas from Indiana. For
about ten years he traded horses and drove them up the trail.
He knew cattle people and their ranges from Brownsville to
Caldwell, Kansas. After mining for another decade, he began to
write. If all other books on trail driving were destroyed, a
reader could still get a just and authentic conception of
trail men, trail work, range cattle, cow horses, and the cow
country in general from _The Log of a Cowboy_. It is a novel
without a plot, a woman, character development, or sustained
dramatic incidents; yet it is the classic of the occupation.
It is a simple, straightaway narrative that takes a trail herd
from the Rio Grande to the Canadian line,
the hands talking as naturally as cows chew cuds, every page
illuminated by an easy intimacy with the life. Adams wrote six
other books. _The Outlet, A Texas Matchmaker, Cattle Brands_,
and _Reed Anthony, Cowman_ all make good reading. _Wells
Brothers_ and _The Ranch on the Beaver_ are stories for boys.
I read them with pleasure long after I was grown. All but _The
Log of a Cowboy_ are OP, published by Houghton Mifflin,
Boston.

ADAMS, RAMON F. _Cowboy Lingo_, Boston, 1936. A dictionary of
cowboy words, figures of speech, picturesque phraseology,
slang, etc., with explanations of many factors peculiar to
range life. OP. _Western Words_, University of Oklahoma Press,
1944. A companion book. _Come an' Get It_, University of
Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1952. Informal exposition of chuck
wagon cooks.

ALDRIDGE, REGINALD. _Ranch Notes_, London, 1884. Aldridge, an
educated Englishman, got into the cattle business before, in
the late eighties, it boomed itself flat. His book is not
important, but it is maybe a shade better than _Ranch Life in
Southern Kansas and the Indian Territory_ by Benjamin S.
Miller, New York, 1896. Aldridge and Miller were partners, and
each writes kindly about the other.

ALLEN, JOHN HOUGHTON. _Southwest_, Lippincott, Philadelphia,
1952. A chemical compound of highly impressionistic
autobiographic nonfiction and highly romantic fiction and folk
tales. The setting is a ranch of Mexican tradition in the
lower border country of Texas, also saloons and bawdy houses
of border towns. Vaqueros and their work in the brush are
intensely vivid. The author has a passion for superlatives and
for "a joyous cruelty, a good cruelty, a young cruelty."

ARNOLD, OREN, and HALE, J. P. _Hot Irons_, Macmillan, New
York, 1940. Technique and lore of cattle brands. OP.

AUSTIN, MARY. _The Flock_, Boston, 1906, OP. Mary Austin saw
the meanings of things; she was a creator. Very quietly she
sublimated life into the literature of pictures and
emotions.

Australian ranching is not foreign to American ranching.
The best book on the subject that I have found is _Pastures
New_, by R. V. Billis and A. S. Kenyon, London, 1930.

BARNARD, EVAN G. ("Parson"). _A Rider of the Cherokee Strip_,
Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1936. Savory with little incidents
and cowboy humor. OP.

BARNES, WILL C. _Tales from the X-Bar Horse Camp_, Chicago,
1920. OP. Good simple narratives. _Apaches and Longhorns_, Los
Angeles, 1941. Autobiography. OP. _Western Grazing Grounds and
Forest Ranges_, Chicago, 1913. OP. Governmentally factual.
Barnes was in the U.S. Forest Service and was informed.

BARROWS, JOHN R. _Ubet_, Caldwell, Idaho, 1934. Excellent on
Northwest; autobiographical. OP.

BECHDOLT, FREDERICK R. _Tales of the Old Timers_, New York,
1924. Vivid, economical stories of "The Warriors of the Pecos"
(Billy the Kid and the troubles on John Chisum's ranch-
empire), of Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch in their Wyoming
hide-outs, of the way frontier Texans fought Mexicans and
Comanches over the open ranges. Research clogs the style of
many historians; perhaps it is just as well that Bechdolt did
not search more extensively into the arcana of footnotes. OP.

BOATRIGHT, MODY C. _Tall Tales from Texas Cow Camps_, Dallas,
1934. The tales are tall all right and true to cows that never
saw a milk bucket. OP. Reprinted 1946 by Haldeman-Julius,
Girard, Kansas.

BOREIN, EDWARD. _Etchings of the West_, edited by Edward S.
Spaulding, Santa Barbara, California, 1950. OP. A very
handsome folio; primarily a reproduction of sketches, many of
which are on range subjects. Ed Borein tells more in them than
hundreds of windbags have told in tens of thousands of pages.
They are beautiful and authentic, even if they are what post-
impressionists call "documentary." Believers in the True Faith
say now that Leonardo da Vinci is documentary in his painting
of the Lord's Supper. Ed Borein was a great friend of Charlie
Russell's but not an imitator. _Etchings of the West_ will
soon be among the rarities of Western books.

BOWER, B. M. _Chip of the Flying U_, New York, 1904. Charles
Russell illustrated this and three other Bower novels.
Contrary to his denial, he is supposed to have been the
prototype for Chip. A long time ago I read _Chit of the Flying
U_ and _The Lure of the Dim Trails_ and thought them as good
as Eugene Manlove Rhodes's stories. That they have faded
almost completely out of memory is a commentary on my memory;
just the same, a character as well named as Chip should, if he
have substance beyond his name, leave an impression even on
weak memories. B. M. Bower was a woman, Bower being the name
of her first husband. A Montana cowpuncher named "Fiddle Back"
Sinclair was her second, and Robert Ellsworth Cowan became the
third. Under the name of Bud Cowan he published a book of
reminiscences entitled _Range Rider_ (Garden City, N. Y.,
1930). B. M. Bower wrote a slight introduction to it; neither
he nor she says anything about being married to the other. In
the best of her fiction she is truer to life than he is in a
good part of his nonfiction. Her chaste English is partly
explained in an autobiographic note contributed to _Adventure_
magazine, December 10, 1924. Her restless father had moved the
family from Minnesota to Montana. There, she wrote, he "taught
me music and how to draw plans of houses (he was an architect
among other things) and to read _Paradise Lost_ and Dante and
H. Rider Haggard and the Bible and the Constitution--and my
taste has been extremely catholic ever since."

BRANCH, E. DOUGLAS. _The Cowboy and His Interpreters_, New
York, 1926. Useful bibliography on range matters, and
excellent criticism of two kinds of fiction writers. OP.

BRATT, JOHN. _Trails of Yesterday_, Chicago, 1921. John Bratt,
twenty-two years old, came to America from England in 1864,
went west, and by 1870 was ranching on the Platte.
He became a big operator, but his reminiscences, beautifully
printed, are stronger on camp cooks and other hired hands than
on cattle "kings." Nobody ever heard a cowman call himself or
another cowman a king. "Cattle king" is journalese.

BRISBIN, GENERAL JAMES S. _The Beef Bonanza; or, How to Get
Rich on the Plains_, Philadelphia, 1881. One of several books
of its decade designed to appeal to eastern and European
interest in ranching as an investment. Figureless and with
more human interest is _Prairie Experiences in Handling Cattle
and Sheep_, by Major W. Shepherd (of England), London? 1884.

BRONSON, EDGAR BEECHER. _Cowboy Life on the Western Plains_,
Chicago, 1910. _The Red Blooded_, Chicago, 1910. Freewheeling
nonfiction.

BROOKS, BRYANT B. _Memoirs_, Gardendale, California, 1939. The
book never was published; it was merely printed to satisfy the
senescent vanity of a property-worshiping, cliche-parroting
reactionary who made money ranching before he became governor
of Wyoming. He tells a few good anecdotes of range days.
Numerous better books pertaining to the range are NOT
listed here; this mediocrity represents a particular type.

BROTHERS, MARY HUDSON. A _Pecos Pioneer_, University of New
Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1943. Superior to numerous better-
known books. See comment under "Women Pioneers."

BROWN, DEE, and SCHMITT, MARTIN F. _Trail Driving Days_,
Scribner's, New York, 1952. Primarily a pictorial record, more
on the side of action than of realism, except for post-trailing period.
Excellent bibliography.

BURTON, HARLEY TRUE. A _History of the J A Ranch_, Austin,
1928. Facts about one of the greatest ranches of Texas and its
founder, Charles Goodnight. OP.

CALL, HUGHIE. _Golden Fleece_, Boston, 1942. Hughie married a
sheepman, and after mothering the range as well as children
with him for a quarter of a century, concluded that Montana is
still rather masculine. Especially good on domestic life and
on sheepherders. OP.

CANTON, FRANK M. _Frontier Trails_, edited by E. E. Dale,
Boston, 1930. OP. Good on tough hombres.

CLAY, JOHN. My _Life on the Range_, privately printed,
Chicago, 1924. OP. John Clay, an educated Scot, came to Canada
in 1879 and in time managed some of the largest British-owned
ranches of North America. His book is the best of all sources
on British-owned ranches. It is just as good on cowboys and
sheepherders. Clay was a fine gentleman in addition to being a
canny businessman in the realm of cattle and land. He
appreciated the beautiful and had a sense of style.

CLELAND, ROBERT GLASS. _The Cattle on a Thousand Hills_,
Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 1941 (revised,
1951). Scholarly work on Spanish-Mexican ranching in
California.

CLEAVELAND, AGNES MORLEY. _No Life for a Lady_, Houghton
Mifflin, Boston, 1941. Best book on range life from a woman's
point of view ever published. The setting is New Mexico; humor
and humanity prevail.

COLLINGS, ELLSWORTH. _The 101 Ranch_, University of Oklahoma
Press, Norman, 1937. The 101 Ranch was far more than a ranch;
it was a unique institution. The 101 Ranch Wild West Show is
emphasized in this book. OP.

COLLINS, DENNIS. _The Indians' Last Fight or the Dull Knife
Raid_, Press of the Appeal to Reason, Girard, Kansas, n.d.
Nearly half of this very scarce book deals autobiographically
with frontier range life. Realistic, strong, written from the
perspective of a man who "wanted something to read" in camp.

COLLINS, HUBERT E. _Warpath and Cattle Trail_, New York, 1928.
The pageant of trail life as it passed by a stage stand in
Oklahoma; autobiographical. Beautifully printed and
illustrated. Far better than numerous other out-of-print books
that bring much higher prices in the second-hand market.

CONN, WILLIAM (translator). _Cow-Boys and Colonels: Narrative
of a Journey across the Prairie and over the Black Hills of
Dakota_, London, 1887; New York (1888?). More of a curiosity
than an illuminator, the book is a sparsely annotated
translation of _Dans les Montagnes Rocheuses_, by Le Baron E.
de Mandat-Grancey, Paris, October, 1884. (The
only copy I have examined is of 1889 printing.) It is a
gossipy account of an excursion made in 1883-84; cowboys and
ranching are viewed pretty much as a sophisticated Parisian
views a zoo. The author must have felt more at home with the
fantastic Marquis de Mores of Medora, North Dakota. The book
appeared at a time when European capital was being invested in
western ranches. It was followed by _La Breche aux Buffles:
Un Ranch Francais dans le Dakota_, Paris, 1889. Not
translated so far as I know.

COOK, JAMES H. _Fifty Years on the Old Frontier_, 1923. Cook
came to Texas soon after the close of the Civil War and became
a brush popper on the Frio River. Nothing better on cow work
in the brush country and trail driving in the seventies has
appeared. OP. A good deal of the same material was put into
Cook's _Longhorn Cowboy_ (Putnam's, 1942), to which the
pushing Mr. Howard R. Driggs attached his name.

COOLIDGE, DANE. _Texas Cowboys_, 1937. Thin, but genuine.
_Arizona Cowboys_, 1938. _Old California Cowboys_, 1939. All
well illustrated by photographs and all OP.

Cox, JAMES. _The Cattle Industry of Texas and Adjacent
Territory_, St. Louis, 1895. Contains many important
biographies and much good history. In 1928 I traded a pair of
store-bought boots to my uncle Neville Dobie for his copy of
this book. A man would have to throw in a young Santa
Gertrudis bull now to get a copy.

CRAIG, JOHN R. _Ranching with lords and Commons_, Toronto,
1903. During the great boom of the early 1880'S in the range
business, Craig promoted a cattle company in London and then
managed a ranch in western Canada. His book is good on
mismanaged range business and it is good on people, especially
lords, and the land. He attributes to De Quincey a Latin
quotation that properly, I think, belongs to Thackeray. He
quotes Hamlin Garland: "The trail is poetry; a wagon road is
prose; the railroad, arithmetic." He was probably not so good
at ranching as at writing. His book supplements _From Home to
Home_, by Alex. Staveley Hill, New York, 1885. Hill was a
major investor in the Oxley
Ranch, and was, I judge, the pompous cheat and scoundrel that
Craig said he was.

CRAWFORD, LEWIS F. _Rekindling Camp Fires: The Exploits of Ben
Arnold (Connor)_, Bismarck, North Dakota, 1926. OP. The skill
of Lewis F. Crawford of the North Dakota Historical Society
made this a richer autobiography than if Arnold had been
unaided. He was squaw man, scout, trapper, soldier, deserter,
prospector, and actor in other occupations as well as cowboy.
He had a fierce sense of justice that extended to Indians. His
outlook was wider than that of the average ranch hand.
_Badlands and Broncho Trails_, Bismarck, 1922, is a slight
book of simple narratives that catches the tune of the
Badlands life. OP. _Ranching Days in Dakota_, Wirth Brothers,
Baltimore, 1950, is good on horse-raising and the terrible
winter of 1886-87.

CULLEY, JOHN. _Cattle, Horses, and Men_, Los Angeles, 1940.
Much about the noted Bell Ranch of New Mexico. Especially good
on horses. Culley was educated at Oxford. When I visited him
in California, he had on his table a presentation copy of a
book by Walter Pater. His book has the luminosity that comes
from cultivated intelligence. OP.

DACY, GEORGE F. _Four Centuries of Florida Ranching_, St.
Louis, 1940. OP. In _Crooked Trails_, Frederic Remington has a
chapter (illustrated) on "Cracker Cowboys of Florida," and
_Lake Okeechobee_, by A. J. Hanna and Kathryn Abbey,
Indianapolis, 1948, treats of modern ranching in Florida, but
the range people of that state have been too lethargic-minded
to write about themselves and no Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings has
settled in their midst to interpret them.

DALE, E. E. _The Range Cattle Industry_, Norman, Oklahoma,
1930. Economic aspects. Bibliography. _Cow Country,_ Norman,
Oklahoma, 1942. Bully tales and easy history. Both books are
OP.

DANA, RICHARD HENRY. _Two Years Before the Mast_, 1841. This
transcript of reality has been reprinted many times. It is the
classic of the hide and tallow trade of California.

DAVID, ROBERT D. _Malcolm Campbell, Sheriff_, Casper, Wyoming,
1932. Much of the "Johnson County War" between cowmen and
thieving nesters. OP.

DAYTON, EDSON C. _Dakota Days_. Privately printed by the
author at Clifton Springs, New York, 1937--three hundred
copies only. Dayton was more sheepman than cowman. He had a
spiritual content. His very use of the word _intellectual_ on
the second page of his book; his estimate of Milton and
Gladstone, adjacent to talk about a frontier saloon; his
consciousness of his own inner growth--something no extravert
cowboy ever noticed, usually because he did not have it; his
quotation to express harmony with nature:

I have some kinship to the bee,
I am boon brother with the tree;
The breathing earth is part of me--

all indicate a refinement that any gambler could safely bet
originated in the East and not in Texas or the South.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _A Vaquero of the Brush Country_, 1929. Much
on border troubles over cattle, the "skinning war," running
wild cattle in the brush, mustanging, trail driving; John
Young's narrative, told in the first person, against range
backgrounds. _The Longhorns_, illustrated by Tom Lea, 1941.
History of the Longhorn breed, psychology of stampedes; days
of maverickers and mavericks; stories of individual lead
steers and outlaws of the range; stories about rawhide and
many other related subjects. The book attempts to reveal the
blend made by man, beast, and range. Both books published by
Little, Brown, Boston. _The Mustangs_, 1952. See under
"Horses."

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