Part 16 (1/2)

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 t.i.tles 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 masters.h.i.+p. ”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 ba.n.a.l t.i.tle, 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts, 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 sc.r.a.ps of anecdotes and western history, along with testimonials, to the pamphlet, the latest edition I have seen being about 1906, printed in Worcester, Ma.s.sachusetts.

STEEDMAN, CHARLES J. _Bucking the Sagebrush_, New York, 1904. OP.

Charming; much of nature. Ill.u.s.trated by Russell.

{ill.u.s.t. 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 pa.s.sing.

STUART, GRANVILLE. _Forty Years on the Frontier_, two volumes, Cleveland, 1925. Nothing better on the cowboy has ever been written than the chapter ent.i.tled ”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 ent.i.tled _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 alb.u.m of cattle brands--priced at $10.00. The introduction is one of the spa.r.s.e 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.