THERE WAS Independence on the Missouri River, then eight hundred miles of twisting trail across hills, plains, and mountains, all uninhabited save by a few wandering Indians and uncountable buffaloes. Then there was Santa Fe. On west of it lay nearly a thousand miles of wild broken lands before one came to the village of Los Angeles. But there was no trail to Los Angeles. At Santa Fe the trail turned south and after crawling over the Jornada del Muerto—Journey of the Dead Man—threading the great Pass of the North (El Paso) and crossing a vast desert, reached Chihuahua City.
Looked at in one way, Santa Fe was a mud village. In another way, it was the solitary oasis of human picturesqueness in a continent of vacancy. Like that of Athens, though of an entirely different quality, its fame was out of all proportion to its size. In a strong chapter, entitled "A Caravan Enters Santa Fe," R. L. Duffus (The Santa Fe Trail) elaborates on how for all travelers the town always had "the lure of adventure." Josiah Gregg doubted whether "the first sight of the walls of Jerusalem were beheld with much more tumultuous and soul-enrapturing joy" than Santa Fe was by a caravan topping the last rise and, eight hundred miles of solitude behind it, looking down on the town's shining walls and cottonwoods.
No other town of its size in America has been the subject of and focus for as much good literature as Santa Fe. Pittsburgh and dozens of other big cities all put together have not inspired one tenth of the imaginative play that Santa Fe has inspired. Some of the transcontinental railroads probably carry as much freight in a day as went over the Santa Fe Trail in all the wagons in all the years they pulled over the Santa Fe Trail. But the Santa Fe Trail is one of the three great trails of America that, though plowed under, fenced across, and cemented over, seem destined for perennial travel—by those happily able to go without tourist guides. To quote Robert Louis Stevenson, "The greatest adventures are not those we go to seek." The other two trails comparable to the Santa Fe are also of the West—the Oregon Trail for emigrants and the Chisholm Trail for cattle.
For additional literature see "Mountain Men," "Stagecoaches, Freighting," "Surge of Life in the West."
CATHER, WILLA. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Knopf, New York, 1927. Historical novel.
CONNELLEY, W. E. (editor). Donithan's Expedition, 1907. Saga of the Mexican War. OP.
DAVIS, W. W. H. El Gringo, or New Mexico and Her People, 1856; reprinted by Rydal, Santa Fe, 1938. OP. Excellent on manners and customs.
DUFFUS, R. L. The Santa Fe Trail, New York, 1930. OP. Bibliography. Best book of this century on the subject.
DUNBAR, SEYMOUR. History of Travel in America, 1915; revised edition issued by Tudor, New York, 1937.
GREGG, JOSIAH. Commerce of the Prairies, two vols., 1844. Reprinted, but all OP. Gregg wrote as a man of experience and not as a professional writer. He wrote not only the classic of the Santa Fe trade and trail but one of the classics of bedrock Americana. It is a commentary on civilization in the Southwest that his work is not kept in print. Harvey Fergusson, in Rio Grande, has written a penetrating criticism of the man and his subject. In 1941 and 1944 the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, issued two volumes of the Diary and Letters of Josiah Gregg, edited by Maurice G. Fulton with Introductions by Paul Horgan. These volumes, interesting in themselves, are a valuable complement to Gregg's major work.
INMAN, HENRY. The Old Santa Fe Trail, 1897. A mine of lore.
LAUGHLIN, RUTH (formerly Ruth Laughlin Barker). Caballeros, New York, 1931; republished by Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1946. Essayical goings into the life of things. Especially delightful on burros. A book to be starred. The Wind Leaves No Shadow, New York, 1948; Caxton, 1951. A novel around Dona Tules Barcelo, the powerful, beautiful, and silvered mistress of Santa Fe's gambling sala in the 1830's and '40's.
MAGOFFIN, SUSAN SHELBY. Down the Santa Fe Trail, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1926. Delectable diary.
PILLSBURY, DOROTHY L. No High Adobe, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950. Sketches, pleasant to read, that make the gente very real.
RUXTON, GEORGE FREDERICK. Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains, London, 1847. In 1924 the second half of this book was reprinted under title of Wild Life in the Rocky Mountains. In 1950, with additional Ruxton writings discovered by Clyde and Mae Reed Porter, the book, edited by LeRoy R. Hafen, was reissued under title of Ruxton of the Rockies, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Santa Fe is only one incident in it. Ruxton illuminates whatever he touches. He was in love with the wilderness and had a fire in his belly. Other writers add details, but Ruxton and Gregg embodied the whole Santa Fe world.
VESTAL, STANLEY. The Old Santa Fe Trail, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1939.
A GOOD INTRODUCTION to a treatment of the stagecoach of the West would be Thomas De Quincey's "The English Mail-Coach." The proper place to read about the coaches would be in Doctor Lyon's Pony Express Museum, out from Pasadena, California. May it never perish! Old Monte drives up now and then in Alfred Henry Lewis' Wolfville tales, and Bret Harte made Yuba Bill crack the Whip; but, somehow, considering all the excellent expositions and reminiscing of stage-coaching in western America, the proud, insolent, glorious figure of the driver has not been adequately pictured.
Literature on "Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail" is pertinent. See also under "Pony Express."
BANNING, WILLIAM, and BANNING, GEORGE HUGH. Six Horses, New York, 1930. A combination of history and autobiography. Routes to and in California; much of Texas. Enjoyable reading. Excellent on drivers, travelers, stations, "pass the mustard, please." Bibliography. OP.
CONKLING, ROSCOE P. and MARGARET B. The Butterfield Overland Trail, 1857-1869, Arthur H. Clark Co., Glendage, California. Three volumes replete with facts from politics in Washington over mail contracts to Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos River.
DOBBIE, J. FRANK. Chapter entitled "Pistols, Poker and the Petit Mademoiselle in a Stagecoach," in The Flavor of Texas 1936. OP.
DUFFUS, R. L. The Santa Fe Trail New York, 1930. Swift reading. Well selected bibliography. OP.
FREDERICK, J. V. Ben Holladay, the Stage Coach King, Clark, Glendale, California, 1940. Bibliography.
HALEY, J. EVETTS. Chapter v, "The Stage-Coach Mail," in Fort Concho and the Texas Frontier, illustrated by Harold Bugbee, San Angelo Standard-Times, San Angelo, Texas, 1952. Strong on frontier crossed by stage line.
HUNGERFORD, EDWARD. Wells Fargo: Advancing the Frontier, Random House, New York, 1949. Written without regard for the human beings that the all-swallowing corporation crushed. Facts on highwaymen.
INMAN, HENRY. The Old Santa Fe Trail, New York, 1897. OP. The Great Salt Lake Trail, 1898. OP. Many first-hand incidents and characters.
MAJORS, ALEXANDER. Seventy Years on the Frontier, Chicago, 1893. Reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Majors was the lead steer of all freighters.
ORMSBY, W. L. The Butterfield Overland Mail, edited by Lyle H. Wright and Josephine M. Bynum, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 1942. Ormsby rode the stage from St. Louis to San Francisco in 1858 and contributed to the New York Herald the lively articles now made into this book.
ROOT, FRANK A., and CONNELLEY, W. E. The Overland Stage to California, Topeka, Kansas, 1901. Reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. A full storehouse. Basic.
SANTLEBEN, AUGUST. A Texas Pioneer, edited by I. D. Affleck, New York, 1910. OP. Best treatise available on freighting on Chihuahua Trail.
TWAIN, MARK. Roughing It, 1871. Mark Twain went west by stage.
WINTHER, O. O. Express and Stagecoach Days in California, Stanford University Press, 1926. Compact, with bibliography. OP.
"Every neck is stretched and every eye strained. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky. In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling sweeping towards us nearer and nearer—growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined—nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear—another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck [of the stagecoach], a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go swinging away like a belated fragment of a storm."—Mark Twain, Roughing It.
A word cannot be defined in its own terms; nor can a region, or a feature of that region. Analogy and perspective are necessary for comprehension. The sense of horseback motion has never been better realized than by Kipling in "The Ballad of East and West." See "Horses."
BRADLEY, GLENN D. The Story of the Pony Express, Chicago, 1913. Nothing extra. OP.
BREWERTON, G. D. Overland with Kit Carson, New York, 1930. Bibliography on West in general.
CHAPMAN, ARTHUR. The Pony Express, Putnam's, New York, 1932. Good reading and bibliography.
DOBIE, J. FRANK. Chapter on "Rides and Riders," in On the Open Range, published in 1931; reprinted by Banks Up shaw, Dallas. Chapter on "Under the Saddle" in The Mustangs.
HAPEN, LEROY. The Overland Mail, Cleveland, 1926. Factual, bibliography. OP.
ROOT, FRANK A., and CONNELLEY, W. E. The Overland Stage to California, Topeka, Kansas, 1901. Reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Basic work.
VISSCHER, FRANK J. A Thrilling and Truthful History of the Pony Express, Chicago, 1908. OP. Not excessively "thrilling."
THE WANDERINGS of Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, De Soto, and La Salle had long been chronicled, although the chronicles had not been popularized in English, when in 1804 Captain Meriwether Lewis and Captain William Clark set out to explore not only the Louisiana Territory, which had just been purchased for the United States by President Thomas Jefferson, but on west to the Pacific. Their Journals, published in 1814, initiated a series of chronicles comparable in scope, vitality, and manhood adventure to the great collection known as Hakluyt's Voyages.
Between 1904 and 1907 Reuben Gold Thwaites, one of the outstanding editors of the English-speaking world, brought out in thirty-two volumes his epic Early Western Travels. This work includes the Lewis and Clark Journals, every student of the West, whether Northwest or Southwest, goes to the collection sooner or later. It is a commentary on the values of life held by big rich boasters of patriotism in the West that virtually all the chronicles in the collection remain out of print.
An important addendum to the Thwaites collection of Early Western Travels is "The Southwest Historical Series," edited by Ralph P. Bieber—twelve volumes, published 1931-43, by Clark, Glendale, California.
The stampede to California that began in 1849 climaxed all migration orgies of the world in its lust for gold; but the lust for gold was merely one manifestation of a mighty population's lust for life. Railroads raced each other to cross the continent. Ten million Longhorns were going up the trails; from Texas while the last of a hundred million buffaloes, killed in herds—the greatest slaughter in history—were being skinned. Dodge City was the Cowboy Capital of the world, and Chicago was becoming "hog butcher of the world." Miller and Lux were expanding their ranges so that, as others boasted, their herds could trail from Oregon to Baja California and bed down every night on Miller and Lux's own grass.
Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832-1918) was massing in San Francisco at his own expense the greatest assemblage of historical documents any one individual ever assembled. While his interviewers and note-takers sorted down tons of manuscript, he was employing a corps of historians to write what, at first designed as a history of the Pacific states, grew in twenty-eight volumes to embrace also Alaska, British Columbia, Texas, Mexico, and Central America, aside from five volumes on the Native Races and six volumes of essays. Meantime he was printing these volumes in sets of thousands and selling them through an army of agents that covered America.
Collis P. Huntington (1821-1900) was building the Southern Pacific Railroad into a network, interlocked with other systems and steamship lines, not only enveloping California land but also the whole economic and political life of that and other states, with headquarters in the U.S. Congress. Then his nephew, Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927), taking over his wealth and power, was building gardens at San Marino, California, collecting art, books, and manuscripts to make, without benefit of any institution of learning and in defiance of all the slow processes of tradition found at Oxford and Harvard, a Huntington Library and a Huntington Art Gallery that, set down amid the most costly botanical profusion imaginable, now rival the world's finest.
The dreams were of empire. Old men and young toiled as "terribly" as mighty Raleigh. The "spacious times" of Queen Elizabeth seemed, indeed, to be translated to another sphere, though here the elements that went into the mixture were less diverse. Boom methods of Gargantuan scale were applied to cultural factors as well as to the physical. Few men stopped to reflect that while objects of art may be bought by the wholesale, the development of genuine culture is too intimately personal and too chemically blended with the spiritual to be bartered for. The Huntingtons paid a quarter of a million dollars for Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy." It is very beautiful. Meanwhile the mustang grapevine waits for some artist to paint the strong and lovely grace of its drapery and thereby to enrich for land-dwellers every valley where it hangs over elm or oak.
Most of the books in this section could be placed in other sections. Many have been. They represent the vigor, vitality, energy, and daring characteristic of our frontiers. To quote Harvey Fergusson's phrase, the adventures of mettle have always had "a tension that would not let them rest."
BARKER, EUGENE C. The Life of Stephen F. Austin, Dallas, 1925. Republished by Texas State Historical Association, Austin. Iron-wrought biography of the leader in making Texas Anglo-American.
BELL, HORACE. Reminiscences of a Ranger, or Early Times in California, Los Angeles, 1881; reprinted, but OP. In this book and in On the Old West Coast, Bell caught the lift and spiritedness of life-hungry men.
BIDWELL, JOHN (1819-1900). Echoes of the Past, Chico, California (about 1900). Bidwell got to California several years before gold was discovered. He became foremost citizen and entertained scientists, writers, scholars, and artists at his ranch home. His brief accounts of the trip across the plains and of pioneer society in California are graphic, charming, telling. The book goes in and out of print but is not likely to die.
BILLINGTON, RAY ALLEN. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier, Macmillan, New York, 1949. This Alpha to Omega treatise concludes with a seventy-five-page, double-column, fine-print bibliography which not only lists but comments upon most books and articles of any consequence that have been published on frontier history.
BOURKE, JOHN G. On the Border with Crook, New York, 1891. Now published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Bourke had an eager, disciplined mind, at once scientific and humanistic; he had imagination and loyalty to truth and justice; he had a strong body and joyed in frontier exploring. He was a captain in the army but had nothing of the littleness of the army mind exhibited by Generals Nelson Miles and O. O. Howard in their egocentric reminiscences. I rank his book as the meatiest and richest of all books dealing with campaigns against Indians. In its amplitude it includes the whole frontier. General George Crook was a wise, generous, and noble man, but his Autobiography (edited by Martin F. Schmitt; University of Oklahoma Press) lacks that power in writing necessary to turn the best subject on earth into a good book and capable also, as Darwin demonstrated, of turning earthworms into a classic.
BURNHAM, FREDERICK RUSSELL. Scouting on Two Continents, New York, 1926; reprinted, Los Angeles, 1942. A brave book of enthralling interest. The technique of scouting in the Apache Country is illuminated by that of South Africa in the Boer War. Hunting for life, Major Burnham carried it with him. OP.
DEVOTO, BERNARD. The Year of Decision 1846, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1943. Critical interpretation as well as depiction. The Mexican War, New Mexico, California, Mountain Men, etc. DeVoto's Across the Wide Missouri is wider in spirit, less bound to political complexities. See under "Mountain Men."
EMORY, LIEUTENANT COLONEL WILLIAM H. Notes of a Military Reconnaissance from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri, to San Diego, in California, including Part of the Arkansas, Del Norte, and Gila Rivers, Washington, 1848. Emory's own vivid report is only one item in Executive Document No. 41, 30th Congress, 1st Session, with which it is bound. Lieutenant J. W. Albert's Journal and additional Report on New Mexico, St. George Cooke's Odyssey of his march from Santa Fe to San Diego, another Journal by Captain A. R. Johnson, the Torrey-Englemann report on botany, illustrated with engravings, all go to make this one of the meatiest of a number of meaty government publications. The Emory part of it has been reprinted by the University of New Mexico Press, under title of Lieutenant Emory Reports, Introduction and Notes by Ross Calvin, Albuquerque, 1951.
Emory's great two-volume Report on United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, Washington 1857 and 1859, is, aside from descriptions of borderlands and their inhabitants, a veritable encyclopedia, wonderfully illustrated, on western flora and fauna. United States Commissioner on this Boundary Survey (following the Mexican War) was John Russell Bartlett. While exploring from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific and far down into Mexico, he wrote Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora and Chihuahua. published in two volumes, New York, 1854. For me very little rewritten history has the freshness and fascination of these strong, firsthand personal narratives, though I recognize many of them as being the stuff of literature rather than literature itself.
FOWLER, JACOB. The Journal of Jacob Fowler, 1821-1822, edited by Elliott Coues, New York, 1898. Hardly another chronicle of the West is so Defoe-like in homemade realism, whether on Indians and Indian horses or Negro Paul's experience with the Mexican "Lady" at San Fernando de Taos. Should be reprinted.
GAMBRELL, HERBERT. Anson Jones: The Last President of Texas, Garden City, New York, 1948; now distributed by Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, Texas. Anson Jones was more surged over than surgent. Infused with a larger comprehension than that behind many a world figure, this biography of a provincial figure is perhaps the most artfully written that Texas has produced. It goes into the soul of the man.
HOBBS, JAMES. Wild Life in the Far West, Hartford, 1872. Hobbs saw just about all the elephants and heard just about all the owls to be seen and heard in the Far West including western Mexico. Should be reprinted.
HULBERT, ARCHER BUTLER. Forty-Niners: The Chronicle of the California Trail, Little, Brown, Boston, 1931. Hulbert read exhaustively in the exhausting literature by and about the gold hunters rushing to California. Then he wove into a synthetic diary the most interesting and illuminating records on happenings, characters, ambitions, talk, singing, the whole life of the emigrants.
IRVING, WASHINGTON. Irving made his ride into what is now Oklahoma in 1832. He had recently returned from a seventeen-year stay in Europe and was a mature literary man—as mature as a conforming romanticist could become Prairie life refreshed him. A Tour on the Prairies, published in 1835, remains refreshing. It is illuminated by Washington Irving on the Prairie; or, A Narrative of the Southwest in the Year 1832, by Henry Leavitt Ellsworth (who accompanied Irving), edited by Stanley T. Williams and Barbara D. Simison, New York, 1937; by The Western Journals of Washington Irving, excellently edited by John Francis McDermott, Norman, Oklahoma, 1944; and by Charles J. Latrobe's The Rambler in North America, 1832-1833, New York, 1835.
JAMES, MARQUIS. The Raven, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1929. Graphic life of Sam Houston.
KURZ, RUDOLPH FRIEDERICH. Journal of Rudolph Friederich Kurz: ... His Experiences among Fur Traders and American Indians on the Mississippi and Upper Missouri Rivers, during the Years of 1846-1852, U.S. Bureau of Ethnology Bulletin 115, Washington, 1937. The public has not had a chance at this book, which was printed rather than published. Kurz both saw and recorded with remarkable vitality. He was an artist and the volume contains many reproductions of his paintings and drawings. One of the most readable and illuminating of western journals.
LEWIS, OSCAR. The Big Four, New York, 1938. Railroad magnates.
LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. Arizona Characters, Los Angeles, California, 1928. Fresh sketches of representative men. The book deserves to be better known than it is. OP.
LYMAN, GEORGE D. John Marsh Pioneer, New York, 1930. Prime biography and prime romance. Laid mostly in California. This book almost heads the list of all biographies of western men. OP.
PARKMAN, FRANCIS. The Oregon Trail, 1849. Parkman knew how to write but some other penetrators of the West put down about as much. School assignments have made his book a recognized classic.
PATTIE, JAMES O. Personal Narrative, Cincinnati, 1831; reprinted, but OP. Positively gripping chronicle of life in New Mexico and the Californias during Mexican days.
PIKE, ZEBULON M. The Southwestern Expedition of Zebulon M. Pike, Philadelphia, 1810. The 1895 edition edited by Elliott Coues is the most useful to students. No edition is in print. Pike's explorations of the Southwest (1806-7) began while the great Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-6) was ending. His journal is nothing like so informative as theirs but is just as readable. The Lost Pathfinder is a biography of Pike by W. Eugene Hollon, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949.
TWAIN, MARK. Roughing It, 1872. Mark Twain was a man who wrote and not merely a writer in man-form. He was frontier American in all his fibers. He was drunk with western life at a time when both he and it were standing on tiptoe watching the sun rise over the misty mountain tops, and he wrote of what he had seen and lived before he became too sober. Roughing It comes nearer catching the energy, the youthfulness, the blooming optimism, the recklessness, the lust for the illimitable in western life than any other book. It deals largely with mining life, but the surging vitality of this life as reflected by Mark Twain has been the chief common denominator of all American frontiers and was as characteristic of Texas "cattle kings" when grass was free as of Virginia City "nabobs" in bonanza.
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.
{illust. caption = Tom Lea, in The Longhorns by J. Frank Dobie (1941)}
This is not to say that these chronicles are of a high literary order. Their writers have generally lacked the maturity 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
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: