Part 16 (2/2)
VESTAL, STANLEY (pen name for Walter S. Campbell). _Queen of Cow Towns, Dodge City_, Harper, New York, 1952. ”Bibulous Babylon,” ”Killing of Dora Hand,” and ”Marshals for Breakfast” are chapter t.i.tles suggesting the tenor of the book.
_Vocabulario y Refranero Criollo_, text and ill.u.s.trations by t.i.to Saudibet, Guillermo Kraft Ltda., Buenos Aires, 1945. North American ranges have called forth nothing to compare with this fully ill.u.s.trated, thorough, magnificent history-dictionary of the gaucho world. It stands out in contrast to American slapdash, puerile-minded pretenses at dictionary treatises on cowboy life.
”He who knows only the history of his own country does not know it.” The cowboy is not a singular type. He was no better rider than the Cossack of Asia. His counterpart in South America, developed also from Spanish cattle, Spanish horses, and Spanish techniques, is the gaucho.
Literature on the gaucho is extensive, some of it of a high order.
Primary is _Martin Fierro_, the epic by Jose Hernandez (published 1872-79). A translation by Walter Owen was published in the United States in 1936. No combination of knowledge, sympathy, imagination, and craftsmans.h.i.+p has produced stories and sketches about the cowboy equal to those on the gaucho by W. H. Hudson, especially in _Tales of the Pampas_ and _Far Away and Long Ago_, and by R. B. Cunninghame Graham, whose writings are dispersed and difficult to come by.
WEBB, WALTER PRESCOTT. _The Great Plains_, Ginn, Boston, 1931. While this landmark in historical interpretation of the West is by no means limited to the subject of grazing, it contains a long and penetrating chapter ent.i.tled ”The Cattle Kingdom.” The book is an a.n.a.lysis of land, climate, barbed wire, dry farming, wells and windmills, native animal life, etc. No other work on the plains country goes so meatily into causes and effects.
WELLMAN, PAUL I. _The Trampling Herd_, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1939; reissued, 1951. An attempt to sum up the story of the cattle range in America.
WHITE, STEWART EDWARD. _Arizona Nights_, 1902. ”Rawhide,” one of the stories in this excellent collection, utilizes folk motifs about rawhide with much skill.
WILLIAMS, J. R. _Cowboys Out Our Way_, with an Introduction by J.
Frank Dobie, Scribner's, New York, 1951. An alb.u.m reproducing about two hundred of the realistic, humorous, and human J. R. Williams syndicated cartoons. This book was preceded by _Out Our Way_, New York, 1943, and includes numerous cartoons therein printed. There was an earlier and less extensive collection. Modest Jim Williams has been progressively dissatisfied with all his cartoon books--and with cartoons not in books.
I like them and in my Introduction say why.
WISTER, OWEN. _The Virginian_, 1902. Wister was an outsider looking in.
His hero, ”The Virginian,” is a cowboy without cows--like the cowboys of Eugene Manlove Rhodes; but this hero does not even smell of cows, whereas Rhodes's men do. Nevertheless, the novel authentically realizes the code of the range, and it makes such absorbing reading that in fifty years (1902-52) it sold over 1,600,000 copies, not counting foreign translations and paper reprints.
Wister was an urbane Harvard man, of clubs and travels. In 1952 the University of Wyoming celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of _The Virginian_. To mark the event, Frances K. W. Stokes wrote _My Father Owen Wister_, a biographical pamphlet including ”ten letters written to his mother during his trip to Wyoming in 1885”--a trip that prepared him to write the novel. The pamphlet is published at Laramie, Wyoming, name of publisher not printed on it.
WRIGHT, PETER. _A Three-Foot Stool_, New York and London, 1909. Like several other Englishmen who went west, Wright had the perspective that enabled him to comprehend some aspects of ranch life more fully than many range men who knew nothing but their own environment and times.
He compares the cowboy to the cowherd described by Queen Elizabeth's Spenser. Into exposition of ranching on the Gila, he interweaves talk on Arabian afreets, Stevenson's philosophy of adventure, and German imperialism.
WRIGHT, ROBERT M. _Dodge City, Cowboy Capital_, Wichita, Kansas, 1913; reprinted. Good on the most cowboyish of all the cow towns.
PAMPHLETS
Pamphlets are an important source of knowledge in all fields. No first-cla.s.s library is without them. Most of them become difficult to obtain, and some bring higher prices than whole sets of books. Of numerous pamphlets pertaining to the range, only a few are listed here.
_History of the Chisum War, or Life of Ike Fridge_, by Ike Fridge, Electra, Texas (undated), is as compact as jerked beef and as laconic as conversation in alkali dust. James F. Hinkle, in his _Early Days of a Cowboy on the Pecos_, Roswell, New Mexico, 1937, says: ”One noticeable characteristic of the cowpunchers was that they did not talk much.” Some people don't have to talk to say plenty. Hinkle was one of them. At a reunion of trail drivers in San Antonio in October, 1928, Fred S.
Millard showed me his laboriously written reminiscences. He wanted them printed. I introduced him to J. Marvin Hunter of Bandera, Texas, publisher of _Frontier Times_. I told Hunter not to ruin the English by trying to correct it, as he had processed many of the earth-born reminiscences in _The Trail Drivers of Texas_. He printed Millard's _A Cowpuncher of the Pecos_ in pamphlet form shortly thereafter. It begins: ”This is a piece I wrote for the Trail Drivers.” They would understand some things on which he was not explicit.
About 1940, as he told me, Bob Beverly of Lovington, New Mexico, made a contract with the proprietor of the town's weekly newspaper to print his reminiscences. By the time the contractor had set eighty-seven pages of type he saw that he would lose money if he set any more. He gave Bob Beverly back more ma.n.u.script than he had used and stapled a pamphlet ent.i.tled _Hobo of the Rangeland_. The philosophy in it is more interesting to me than the incidents. ”The cowboy of the old West worked in a land that seemed to be grieving over something--a kind of sadness, loneliness in a deathly quiet. One not acquainted with the plains could not understand what effect it had on the mind. It produced a heartache and a sense of exile.”
Crudely printed, but printed as the author talked, is _The End of the Long Horn Trail_, by A. P. (Ott) Black, Selfridge, North Dakota (August, 1939). As I know from a letter from his _compadre_, Black was blind and sixty-nine years old when he dictated his memoirs to a college graduate who had sense enough to retain the flavor. Black's history is badly botched, but reading him is like listening. ”It took two c.o.o.ns and an alligator to spend the summer on that cotton plantation.... Cowpunchers were superst.i.tious about owls. One who rode into my camp one night had killed a man somewhere and was on the dodge. He was lying down by the side of the campfire when an owl flew over into some hackberry trees close by and started hooting. He got up from there right now, got his horse in, saddled up and rode off into the night.”
John Alley is--or was--a teacher. His _Memories of Roundup Days_, University of Oklahoma Press, 1934 (just twenty small pages), is an appraisal of range men, a criticism of life seldom found in old-timers who look back. On the other hand, some pamphlets prized by collectors had as well not have been written. Here is the full t.i.tle of an example: _An Aged Wanderer, A Life Sketch of J. M. Parker, A Cowboy of the Western Plains in the Early Days_. ”Price 40 cents. Headquarters, Elkhorn Wagon Yard, San Angelo, Texas.” It was printed about 1923. When Parker wrote it he was senile, and there is no evidence that he was ever possessed of intelligence. The itching to get into print does not guarantee that the itcher has anything worth printing.
Some of the best reminiscences have been pried out of range men. In 1914 the Wyoming Stock Growers a.s.sociation resolved a Historical Commission into existence. A committee was appointed and, naturally, one man did the work. In 1923 a fifty-five-page pamphlet ent.i.tled _Letters from Old Friends and Members of the Wyoming Stock Growers a.s.sociation_ was printed at Cheyenne. It is made up of unusually informing and pungent recollections by intelligent cowmen.
22. Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads
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