Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest Part 14

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_, ill.u.s.trated 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."

FORD, GUS L. _Texas Cattle Brands_, Dallas, 1936. A catalogue of brands.

OP.

FRENCH, WILLIAM. _Some Recollections of a Western Ranchman_, London, 1927. A civilized Englishman remembers. OP.

GANN, WALTER. _The Trail Boss_, Boston, 1937. Faithful fiction, with a steer that Charlie Russell should have painted. OP.

GARD, WAYNE. _Frontier Justice_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. This book could be cla.s.sified under "The Bad Man Tradition,"

but it has authentic chapters on fence-cutting, the so-called "Johnson County Cattlemen's War" of Wyoming, and other range "difficulties."

Clearly written from an equable point of view. Useful bibliography of range books.

GIBSON, J. W. (Watt). _Recollections of a Pioneer_, St. Joseph, Missouri (about 1912). Like many another book concerned only incidentally with range life, this contains essential information on the subject. Here it is trailing cattle from Missouri to California in the 1840's and 1850's. Cattle driving from the East to California was not economically important. The outstanding account on the subject is _A Log of the Texas-California Cattle Trail, 1854_, by James G. Bell, edited by J. Evetts Haley, published in the _Southwestern Historical Quarterly_, 1932 (Vols. x.x.xV and x.x.xVI). Also reprinted as a separate.

{ill.u.s.t. caption = Tom Lea, in _The Longhorns_ by J. Frank Dobie (1941)}

GILFILLAN, ARCHER B. _Sheep_, Boston, 1929. With humor and grace, this sheepherder, who collected books on Samuel Pepys, tells more about sheep dogs, sheep nature, and sheepherder life than any other writer I know.

OP.

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 refres.h.i.+ng 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 Gra.s.s 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 cla.s.sic.

HENRY, STUART. _Our Great American Plains_, New York, 1930. OP. An unwors.h.i.+pful, 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 authors.h.i.+p." 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 authors.h.i.+p 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 ma.n.u.script 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 ent.i.tled _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_, ill.u.s.trated 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 a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.sion 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 repet.i.tious. Will James knew his frijoles, but burned them up before he died, in 1942. He ill.u.s.trated 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 s.p.a.ce 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 doc.u.mentary 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; princ.i.p.ally 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 a.s.sociated 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.