Chapter III: Part 3

BROWNLOW, W. G. _Portrait and Biography of Parson Brownlow, the Tennessee Patriot_, 1862. Brownlow was a very representative figure. Under the title of _William G Brownlow, Fighting Parson of the Southern Highland_, E. M Coulter has brought out a thorough life of him, published by University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1937.

BURLESON, RUFUS C. _Life and Writings_, 1901. OP. The autobiographical part of this amorphously arranged volume is a social document of the first rank.

CARTWRIGHT, PETER. _Autobiography_, 1857. Out of Kentucky, into Indiana and then into Illinois, where he ran against Lincoln for Congress, Cartwright rode with saddlebags and Bible. Sandburg characterizes him as "an enemy of whisky, gambling, jewelry, fine clothes, and higher learning." He seems to me more unlovely in his intolerance and sectarianism than most circuit riders of the Southwest, but as a militant, rough-and-ready "soldier of the Lord" he represented southwestern frontiers as well as his own.

CRANFILL, J. B. _Chronicle, A Story of Life in Texas_, 1916. Cranfill was a lot of things besides a Baptist preacher--trail driver, fiddler, publisher, always an observer. OP.

DEVILBISS, JOHN WESLEY. _Reminiscences and Events_ (compiled by H. A. Graves), 1886. The very essence of pioneering,

DOMENECH, ABBE. _Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico_ (translated from the French), London, 1858. OP. The Abbe always had eyes open for wonders. He saw them. Delicious narrative.

EVANS, WILL G. _Border Skylines_, published in Dallas, 1940, for Bloys Campmeeting Association, Fort Davis, Texas. Chronicles of the men and women--cow people--and cow country responsible for the best known campmeeting, held annually, Texas has ever had. OP.

GRAVIS, PETER W. _25 Years on the Outside Row of the Northwest Texas Annual Conference_, Comanche, Texas, 1892. Another one of those small personal records, privately printed but full of juice. OP.

LIDE, ANNA A. _Robert Alexander and the Early Methodist Church in Texas_, La Grange, Texas, 1935. OP.

MORRELL, Z. N. _Fruits and Flowers in the Wilderness_, 1872. Though reprinted three times, last in 1886, long OP. In many ways the best circuit rider's chronicle of the Southwest that has been published. Morrell fought Indians and Mexicans in Texas and was rich in other experiences.

MORRIS, T. A. _Miscellany_, 1884. The "Notes of Travel"--particularly to Texas in 1841--are what makes this book interesting.

PARISOT, P. F. _Reminiscences of a Texas Missionary_, 1899. Mostly the Texas-Mexican border.

POTTER, ANDREW JACKSON, commonly called the Fighting Parson. _Life_ of him by H. A. Graves, 1890, not nearly so good as Potter was himself.

THOMASON, JOHN W. _Lone Star Preacher_, Scribner's, New York, 1941. Fiction, true to humanity. The moving story of a Texas chaplain who carried a Bible in one hand and a captain's sword in the other through the Civil War.

14. Lawyers, Politicians, J. P.'s

STEPHEN F. AUSTIN wanted to exclude lawyers, along with roving frontiersmen, from his colonies in Texas, and hoped thus to promote a utopian society. The lawyers got in, however. Their wit, the anecdotes of which they were both subject and author, and the political stories they made traditional from the stump, have not been adequately set down. As criminal lawyers they stood as high in society as corporation lawyers stand now and were a good deal more popular, though less wealthy. The code of independence that fostered personal violence and justified killings--in contradistinction to murders--and that ran to excess in outlaws naturally fostered the criminal lawyer. His type is now virtually obsolete.

Keen observers, richly stored in experience and delightful in talk, as many lawyers of the Southwest have been and are, very few of them have written on other than legal subjects. James D. Lynch's _The Bench and the Bar of Texas_ (1885) is confined to the eminence of "eminent jurists" and to the mastery of "masters of jurisprudence." What we want is the flavor of life as represented by such characters as witty Three-Legged Willie (Judge R. M. Williamson) and mysterious Jonas Harrison. It takes a self-lover to write good autobiography. Lawyers are certainly as good at self-loving as preachers, but we have far better autobiographic records of circuit riders than of early-day lawyers.

Like them, the pioneer justice of peace resides more in folk anecdotes than in chroniclings. Horace Bell's expansive _On the Old West Coast_ so represents him. A continent away, David Crockett, in his _Autobiography_, confessed, "I was afraid some one would ask me what the judiciary was. If I knowed I wish I may be shot." Before this, however, Crockett had been a J. P. "I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on law learning to guide me; for I had never read a page in a law book in all my life."

COOMBES, CHARLES E. _The Prairie Dog Lawyer_, Dallas, 1945. OP. Experiences and anecdotes by a lawyer better read in rough-and-ready humanity than in law. The prairie dogs have all been poisoned out from the West Texas country over which he ranged from court to court.

HAWKINS, WALACE. _The Case of John C. Watrous, United States Judge for Texas: A Political Story of High Crimes and Misdemeanors_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1950. More technical than social.

KITTRELL, NORMAN G. _Governors Who Have Been and Other Public Men of Texas_, Houston, 1921. OP. Best collection of lawyer anecdotes of the Southwest.

ROBINSON, DUNCAN W. _Judge Robert McAlpin Williamson, Texas' Three-Legged Willie_, Texas State Historical Association, Austin, 1948. This was the Republic of Texas judge who laid a Colt revolver across a Bowie knife and said: "Here is the constitution that overrides the law."

SONNICHSEN, C. L. _Roy Bean, Law West of the Pecos_, Macmillan, New York, 1943. Roy Bean (1830-1903), justice of peace at Langtry, Texas, advertised himself as "Law West of the Pecos." He was more picaresque than picturesque; folk imagination gave him notoriety. The Texas State Highway Department maintains for popular edification the beer joint wherein he held court. Three books have been written about him, besides scores of newspaper and magazine articles. The only biography of validity is Sonnichsen's.

SLOAN, RICHARD E. _Memories of an Arizona Judge_, Stanford, California, 1932. Full of humanity. OP.

SMITH, E. F. _A Saga of Texas Law: A Factual Story of Texas Law, Lawyers, Judges and Famous Lawsuits_, Naylor, San Antonio, 1940. Interesting.

15. Pioneer Doctors

BEFORE the family doctors came, frontiersmen sawed off legs with handsaws, tied up arteries with horsetail hair, cauterized them with branding irons. Before homemade surgery with steel tools was practiced, Mexican _curanderas_ (herb women) supplied _remedios_, and they still know the medicinal properties of every weed and bush. Herb stores in San Antonio, Brownsville, and El Paso do a thriving business. Behind the _curanderas_ were the medicine men of the tribes. Not all their lore was superstition, as any one who reads the delectable autobiography of Gideon Lincecum, published by the Mississippi Historical Society in 1904, will agree. Lincecum, learned in botany, a sharply-edged individual who later moved to Texas, went out to live with a Choctaw medicine man and wrote down all his lore about the virtues of native plants. The treatise has never been printed.

The extraordinary life of Lincecum has, however, been interestingly delineated in Samuel Wood Geiser's _Naturalists of the Frontier_, Southern Methodist University Press, 1937, 1948, and in Pat Ireland Nixon's _The Medical Story of Early Texas_, listed below. No historical novelist could ask for a richer theme than Gideon Lincecum or Edmund Montgomery, the subject of I. K. Stephens' biography listed below.

BUSH, I. J. _Gringo Doctor_, Caldwell, Idaho, 1939. OP. Dr. Bush represented frontier medicine and surgery on both sides of the Rio Grande. Living at El Paso, he was for a time with the Maderistas in the revolution against Diaz.

COE, URLING C. _Frontier Doctor_, New York, 1939. OP. Not of the Southwest but representing other frontier doctors. Lusty autobiography full of characters and anecdotes.

DODSON, RUTH. "Don Pedrito Jaramillo: The Curandero of Los Olmos," in _The Healer of Los Olmos and Other Mexican Lore_ (Publication of the Texas Folklore Society XXIV), edited by Wilson M. Hudson, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1951. Don Pedrito was no more of a fraud than many an accredited psychiatrist, and he was the opposite of offensive.

NIXON, PAT IRELAND. _A Century of Medicine in San Antonio_, published by the author, San Antonio, 1936. Rich in information, diverting in anecdote, and tonic in philosophy. Bibliography. _The Medical Story of Early Texas, 1528-1835_ [San Antonio], 1946. Lightness of life with scholarly thoroughness; many character sketches.

RED, MRS. GEORGE P. _The Medicine Man in Texas_, Houston, 1930. Biographical. OP.

STEPHENS, I. K. _The Hermit Philosopher of Liendo_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1951. Well-conceived and well-written biography of Edmund Montgomery--illegitimate son of a Scottish lord, husband of the sculptress Elisabet Ney--who, after being educated in Germany and becoming a member of the Royal College of Physicians of London, came to Texas with his wife and sons and settled on Liendo Plantation, near Hempstead, once known as Sixshooter Junction. Here, in utter isolation from people of cultivated minds, he conducted scientific experiments in his inadequate laboratory and thought out a philosophy said to be half a century ahead of his time. He died in 1911. His life was the drama of an elevated soul of complexities, far more tragic than any life associated with the lurid "killings" around him.

WOODHULL, FROST. "Ranch Remedios," in _Man, Bird, and Beast_, Texas Folklore Society Publication VIII, 1930. The richest and most readable collection of pioneer remedies yet published.

16. Mountain Men

AS USED HERE, the term "Mountain Men" applies to those trappers and traders who went into the Rocky Mountains before emigrants had even sought a pass through them to the west or cattle had beat out a trail on the plains east of them. Beaver fur was the lodestar for the Mountain Men. Their span of activity was brief, their number insignificant. Yet hardly any other distinct class of men, irrespective of number or permanence, has called forth so many excellent books as the Mountain Men. The books are not nearly so numerous as those connected with range life, but when one considers the writings of Stanley Vestal, Sabin, Ruxton, Fer gusson, Chittenden, Favour, Garrard, Inman, Irving, Reid, and White in this Seld, one doubts whether any other form of American life at all has been so well covered in ballad, fiction, biography, history.

See James Hobbs, James O. Pattie, and Reuben Gold Thwaites under "Surge of Life in the West," also "Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail."

ALTER, J. CECIL. _James Bridger_, Salt Lake City, 1925. A hogshead of life. Bibliography. OP. Republished by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio.

BONNER, T. D. _The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, 1856_; reprinted in 1931, with an illuminating introduction by Bernard DeVoto. OP. Beckwourth was the champion of all western liars.

BREWERTON, G. D. _Overland with Kit Carson_, New York, 1930. Good narrative. OP.

CHITTENDEN, _H. M. The American Fur Trade of the_ _Far West_, New York, 1902. OP. Basic work. Bibliography.

CLELAND, ROBERT GLASS. _This Reckless Breed of Men: The Trappers and Fur Traders of the Southwest_, Knopf, New York, 1950. Fresh emphasis on the California-Arizona-New Mexico region by a knowing scholar. Economical in style without loss of either humanity or history. Bibliography.

CONRAD, HOWARD L. _Uncle Dick Wootton_, 1890. Primary source. OP.

COYNER, D. H. _The Lost Trappers_, 1847.

DAVIDSON, L. J., and BOSTWICK, P. _The Literature of the Rocky Mountain West 1803-1903_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1939. Davidson and Forrester Blake, editors. _Rocky Mountain Tales_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1947.

DEVOTO, BERNARD. _Across the Wide Missouri_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1947. Superbly illustrated by reproductions of Alfred Jacob Miller. DeVoto has amplitude and is a master of his subject as well as of the craft of writing.

FAVOUR, ALPHEUS H. _Old Bill Williams, Mountain Man_, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1936. Flavor and facts both. Full bibliography.

FERGUSSON, HARVEY. _Rio Grande_, 1933, republished by Tudor, New York. The drama and evolution of human life in New Mexico, written out of knowledge and with power. _Wolf Song_, New York, 1927. OP. Graphic historical novel of Mountain Men. It sings with life.

GARRARD, LEWIS H. _Wah-toyah and the Taos Trail_, 1850. One of the basic works.

GRANT, BLANCHE C. _When Old Trails Were New--The Story of Taos_, New York, 1934. OP. Taos was rendezvous town for the free trappers.

GUTHRIE, A. B., JR. _The Big Sky_, Sloane, New York, 1947 (now published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston). "An unusually original novel, superb as historical fiction."--Bernard DeVoto. I still prefer Harvey Fergusson's _Wolf Song_.

HAMILTON, W. T. _My Sixty Years on the Plains_, New York, 1905. Now published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio.

INMAN, HENRY. _The Old Santa Fe Trail_, 1897.

IRVING, WASHINGTON. _The Adventures of Captain Bonneville_ and _Astoria_. The latter book was founded on Robert Stuart's Narratives. In 1935 these were prepared for the press, with much illuminative material, by Philip Ashton Rollins and issued under the title of _The Discovery of the Oregon Trail_.

LARPENTEUR, CHARLES. _Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri_, edited by Elliott Coues, New York, 1898. As Milo Milton Quaife shows in an edition of the narrative issued by the Lakeside Press, Chicago, 1933, the indefatigable Coues just about rewrote the old fur trader's narrative. It is immediate and vigorous.

LAUT, A. C. _The Story of the Trapper_, New York, 1902. A popular survey, emphasizing types and characters.

LEONARD, ZENAS. _Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard_, Clearfield, Pa., 1839. In 1833 the Leonard trappers reached San Francisco Bay, boarded a Boston ship anchored near shore, and for the first time in two years varied their meat diet by eating bread and drinking "Coneac." One of the trappers had a gun named Knock-him-stiff. Such earthy details abound in this narrative of adventures in a brand new world.

LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. _Arizona Characters_, Los Angeles, 1928. Very readable biographic sketches. OP.

MILLER, ALFRED JACOB. _The West of Alfred Jacob Miller_, with an account of the artist by Marvin C. Ross, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1950. Although Miller painted the West during 1837-38, only now is he being discovered by the public. This is mainly a picture book, in the top rank.

PATTIE, JAMES OHIO. _The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie of Kentucky_, Cincinnati, 1831. Pattie and his small party went west in 1824. For grizzlies, thirst, and other features of primitive adventure the narrative is primary.

REID, MAYNE. _The Scalp Hunters_. An antiquated novel, but it has some deep-dyed pictures of Mountain Men.

ROSS, ALEXANDER. _Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River_ (1849) and _The Fur Hunters of the Far West_ (1855). The trappers of the Southwest can no more be divorced from the trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company than can Texas cowboys from those of Montana.

RUSSELL, OSBORNE. _Journal of a Trapper_, Boise, Idaho, 1921. In the winter of 1839, at Fort Hall on Snake River, Russell and three other trappers "had some few books to read, such as Byron, Shakespeare and Scott's works, the Bible and Clark's Commentary on it, and some small works on geology, chemistry and philosophy." Russell was wont to speculate on Life and Nature. In perspective he approaches Ruxton.

RUXTON, GEORGE F. _Life in the Far West_, 1848; reprinted by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951, edited by LeRoy R. Hafen. No other contemporary of the Mountain Men has been so much quoted as Ruxton. He remains supremely readable.

SABIN, EDWIN L. _Kit Carson Days_, 1914. A work long standard, rich on rendezvous, bears, and many other associated subjects. Bibliography. Republished in rewritten form, 1935. OP.

VESTAL, STANLEY (pseudonym for Walter S. Campbell). _Kit Carson_, 1928. As a clean-running biographic narrative, it is not likely to be superseded. _Mountain Men_, 1937, OP; _The Old Santa Fe Trail_, 1939. Vestal's "Fandango," a tale of the Mountain Men in Taos, is among the most spirited ballads America has produced. It and a few other Mountain Men ballads are contained in the slight collection, _Fandango_, 1927. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, published the aforementioned titles. _James Bridger, Mountain Man_, Morrow, New York, 1946, is smoother than J. Cecil Alter's biography but not so savory. _Joe Meek, the Merry Mountain Man_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1952.

WHITE, STEWART EDWARD. _The Long Rifle_, 1932, and _Ranchero_, 1933, Doubleday, Doran, Garden City, N. Y. Historical fiction.

17. Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Trail

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.

18. Stagecoaches, Freighting

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.

19. Pony Express

"PRESENTLY the driver exclaims, `Here he comes!'

"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."

20. Surge of Life in the West

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.

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.

{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

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.