Chapter 1

and he had a passion for the history of his people. The chronicles, though chaotic in arrangement, comprise basic source material. An index to the one-volume edition of _The Trail Drivers of Texas_ is printed as an appendix to _The Chisholm Trail and Other Routes_, by T. U. Taylor, San Antonio, 1936--a hodgepodge.

JAMES, WILL. _Cowboys North and South_, New York, 1924. _The Drifting Cowboy_, 1925. _Smoky_--a cowhorse story--1930. Several other books, mostly repetitious. Will James knew his frijoles, but burned them up before he died, in 1942. He illustrated all his books. The best one is his first, written before he became sophisticated with life--without becoming in the right way more sophisticated in the arts of drawing and writing. _Lone Cowboy: My Life Story_ (1930) is without a date or a geographical location less generalized than the space between Canada and Mexico.

JAMES, W. S. _Cowboy Life in Texas_, Chicago, 1893. A genuine cowboy who became a genuine preacher and wrote a book of validity. This is the best of several books of reminiscences by cowboy preachers, some of whom are as lacking in the real thing as certain cowboy artists. Next to _Cowboy Life in Texas_, in its genre, might come _From the Plains to the Pulpit_, by J. W. Anderson, Houston, 1907. The second edition (reset) has six added chapters. The third, and final, edition, Goose Creek, Texas, 1922, again reset, has another added chapter. J. B. Cranfill was a trail driver from a rough range before he became a Baptist preacher and publisher. His bulky _Chronicle, A Story of Life in Texas_, 1916, is downright and concrete.

KELEHER, WILLIAM A. _Maxwell Land Grant: A New Mexico Item_, Santa Fe, 1942. The Maxwell grant of 1,714,764 acres on the Cimarron River was at one time perhaps the most famous tract of land in the West. This history brings in ranching only incidentally; it focuses on the land business, including grabs by Catron, Dorsey, and other affluent politicians. Perhaps stronger on characters involved during long litigation over the land, and containing more documentary evidence, is _The Grant That Maxwell Bought_, by F. Stanley, The World Press, Denver, 1952 (a folio of 256 pages in an edition of 250 copies at $15.00). Keleher is a lawyer; Stanley is a priest. Harvey Fergusson in his historical novel _Grant of Kingdom_, New York, 1950, vividly supplements both. Keleher's second book, _The Fabulous Frontier_, Rydal, Santa Fe, 1945, illuminates connections between ranch lands and politicians; principally it sketches the careers of A. B. Fall, John Chisum, Pat Garrett, Oliver Lee, Jack Thorp, Gene Rhodes, and other New Mexico notables.

KENT, WILLIAM. _Reminiscences of Outdoor Life_, San Francisco, 1929. OP. This is far from being a straight-out range book. It is the easy talk of an urbane man associated with ranches and ranch people who was equally at home in a Chicago office and among fellow congressmen. He had a country-going nature and gusto for character.

KING, FRANK M. _Wranglin' the Past_, Los Angeles, 1935. King went all the way from Texas to California, listening and looking. OP. His second book, _Longhorn Trail Drivers_ (1940), is worthless. His _Pioneer Western Empire Builders_ (1946) and _Mavericks_ (1947) are no better. Most of the contents of these books appeared in _Western Livestock Journal_, Los Angeles.

KUPPER, WINIFRED. _The Golden Hoof_, New York, 1945. Story of the sheep and sheep people of the Southwest. Facts, but, above that, truth that comes only through imagination and sympathy. OP. _Texas Sheepman_, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1951. The edited reminiscences of Robert Maudslay. He drove sheep all over the West, and lived up to the ideals of an honest Englishman in writing as well as in ranching. He had a sense of humor.

LAMPMAN, CLINTON PARKS. _The Great Western Trail_, New York, 1939. OP. In the upper bracket of autobiographic chronicles, by a sensitive man who never had the provincial point of view. Lampman contemplated as well as observed He felt the pathos of human destiny.

LANG, LINCOLN A. _Ranching with Roosevelt_, Philadelphia, 1926. Civilized. OP.

LEWIS, ALFRED HENRY. _Wolfville_ (1897) and other Wolfville books. All OP. Sketches and rambling stories faithful to cattle backgrounds; flavor and humanity through fictionized anecdote. "The Old Cattleman," who tells all the Wolfville stories, is a substantial and flavorsome creation.

LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. _Arizona Characters_, Los Angeles, 1928. Skilfully written biographies. OP.

MCCARTY, JOHN L. _Maverick Town_, University of Oklahoma Press, 1946. Tascosa, Texas, on the Canadian River, with emphasis on the guns.

MCCAULEY, JAMES EMMIT. _A Stove-up Cowboy's Story_, with Introduction by John A. Lomas and Illustrations by Tom Lea, Austin, 1943. OP. "My parents be poor like Job's turkey," McCauley wrote. He was a common cowhand with uncommon saltiness of speech. He wrote as he talked. "God pity the wight for whom this vivid, honest story has no interest," John Lomax pronounced. It is one of several brief books of reminiscences brought out in small editions in the "Range Life Series," under the editorship of J. Frank Dobie, by the Texas Folklore Society. The two others worth having are _A Tenderfoot Kid on Gyp Water_, by Carl Peters Benedict (1943) and _Ed Nichols Rode a Horse_, as told to Ruby Nichols Cutbirth (1943).

MCCOY, JOSEPH G. _Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest_, Kansas City, 1874. In 1867, McCoy established at Abilene, Kansas, terminus of the Chisholm Trail, the first market upon which Texas drovers could depend. He went broke and thereupon put his sense, information, and vinegar into the first of all range histories. It is a landmark. Of the several reprinted editions, the one preferred is that edited by Ralph P. Bieber, with an information-packed introduction and many illuminating notes, Glendale, California, 1940. This is Volume VIII in the "Southwest Historical Series," edited by Bieber, and the index to it is included in the general index to the whole series. Available is an edition published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. About the best of original sources on McCoy is _Twenty Years of Kansas City's Live Stock and Traders_, by Cuthbert Powell, Kansas City, 1893--one of the rarities.

MACKAY, MALCOLM S. _Cow Range and Hunting Trail_, New York, 1925. Among the best of civilized range books. Fresh observations and something besides ordinary narrative. OP. Illustrations by Russell.

MANDAT-GRANCEY, BARON E. DE. See Conn, William.

MERCER, A. S. _Banditti of the Plains, or The Cattlemen's Invasion of Wyoming in 1892_, Cheyenne, 1894; reprinted at Chicago in 1923 under title of _Powder River Invasion, War on the Rustlers in 1892_, "Rewritten by John Mercer Boots." Reprinted 1935, with Foreword by James Mitchell Clarke, by the Grabhorn Press, San Francisco. All editions OP. Bloody troubles between cowmen and nesters in Wyoming, the "Johnson County War." For more literature on the subject, consult the entry under Tom Horn in this chapter.

MILLER, LEWIS B. _Saddles and Lariats_, Boston, 1912. A fictional chronicle, based almost entirely on facts, of a trail herd that tried to get to California in the fifties. The author was a Texan. OP.

MOKLER, ALFRED JAMES. _History of Natrona County, Wyoming, 1888-1922_, Chicago, 1923. Contains some good material on the "Johnson County War." This book is listed as an illustration of many county histories of western states containing concrete information on ranching. Other examples of such county histories are S. D. Butcher's _Pioneer History of Custer County_ (Nebraska), Broken Bow, Nebraska, 1901; _History of Jack County_ (Texas), Jacksboro, Texas (about 1935); _Historical Sketch of Parker County and Weatherford, Texas_, St. Louis, 1877.

MORA, JO. _Trail Dust and Saddle Leather_, Scribner's, New York, 1946. No better exposition anywhere, and here tellingly illustrated, of reatas, spurs, bits, saddles, and other gear. _Californios_, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1949. Profusely illustrated. Largely on vaquero techniques. Jo Mora knew the California vaquero, but did not know the range history of other regions and, therefore, judged as unique what was widespread.

NIMMO, JOSEPH, JR. _The Range and Ranch Cattle Traffic in the Western States and Territories_, Executive Document No. 267, House of Representatives, 48th Congress, 2nd Session, Washington, D. C., 1885. Printed also in one or more other government documents. A statistical record concerning grazing lands, trail driving, railroad shipping of cattle, markets, foreign investments in ranches, etc. This document is the outstanding example of factual material to be found in various government publications, Volume III of the _Tenth Census of the United States_ (1880) being another. _The Western Range: Letter from the Secretary of Agriculture_, etc (a "letter" 620 pages long), United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1936, lists many government publications both state and national.

NORDYKE, LEWIS. _Cattle Empire_, Morrow, New York, 1949. History, largely political, of the XIT Ranch. Not so careful in documentation as Haley's _XIT Ranch of Texas_, and not so detailed on ranch operations, but thoroughly illuminative on the not-heroic side of big businessmen in big land deals. The two histories complement each other.

O'NEIL, JAMES B. _They Die But Once_, New York, 1935. The biographical narrative of a Tejano who vigorously swings a very big loop; fine illustration of the fact that a man can lie authentically. OP.

OSGOOD, E. S. _The Day of the Cattleman_, Minneapolis, 1929. Excellent history and excellent bibliography. Northwest. OP.

PEAKE, ORA BROOKS. _The Colorado Range Cattle Industry_, Clark, Glendale, California, 1937. Dry on facts, but sound in scholarship. Bibliography.

PELZER, LOUIS. _The Cattlemen's Frontier_, Clark, Glendale, California, 1936. Economic treatment, faithful but static. Bibliography.

PENDER, ROSE. A _Lady's Experiences in the Wild West in 1883_, London (1883?); second printing with a new preface, 1888. Rose Pender and two fellow-Englishmen went through Wyoming ranch country, stopping on ranches, and she, a very intelligent, spirited woman, saw realities that few other chroniclers suggest. This is a valuable bit of social history.

PERKINS, CHARLES E. _The Pinto Horse_, Santa Barbara, California, 1927. _The Phantom Bull_, Boston, 1932. Fictional narratives of veracity; literature. OP.

PILGRIM, THOMAS (under pseudonym of Arthur Morecamp). _Live Boys; or Charley and Nasho in Texas_, Boston, 1878. The chronicle, little fictionized, of a trail drive to Kansas. So far as I know, this is the first narrative printed on cattle trailing or cowboy life that is to be accounted authentic. The book is dated from Kerrville, Texas.

PONTING, TOM CANDY. _The Life of Tom Candy Ponting_, Decatur, Illinois [1907], reprinted, with Notes and Introduction by Herbert O. Brayer, by Branding Iron Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1952. An account of buying cattle in Texas in 1853, driving them to Illinois, and later shipping some to New York. Accounts of trail driving before about 1870 have been few and obscurely printed. The stark diary kept by George C. Duffield of a drive from San Saba County, Texas, to southern Iowa in 1866 is as realistic--often agonizing--as anything extant on this much romanticized subject. It is published in _Annals of Iowa_, Des Moines, IV (April, 1924), 243-62.

POTTER, JACK. Born in 1864, son of the noted "fighting parson," Andrew Jackson Potter, Jack became a far-known trail boss and ranch manager. His first published piece, "Coming Down the Trail," appeared in _The Trail Drivers of Texas_, compiled by J. Marvin Hunter, and is about the livest thing in that monumental collection. Jack Potter wrote for various Western magazines and newspapers. He was more interested in cow nature than in gun fights; he had humor and imagination as well as mastery of facts and a tangy language, though small command over form. His privately printed booklets are: _Lead Steer_ (with Introduction by J. Frank Dobie), Clayton, N. M., 1939; _Cattle Trails of the Old West_ (with map), Clayton, N.M., 1935; _Cattle Trails of the Old West_ (virtually a new booklet), Clayton, N. M., 1939. All OP.

_Prose and Poetry of the Live Stock Industry of the United States_, Denver, 1905. Biographies of big cowmen and history based on genuine research. The richest in matter of all the hundred-dollar-and-up rare books in its field.

RAINE, WILLIAM MCLEOD, and BARNES, WILL C. _Cattle_, Garden City, N. Y., 1930. A succinct and vivid focusing of much scattered history. OP.

RAK, MARY KIDDER. _A Cowman s Wife_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1934. Unglossed, impersonal realism about life on a small modern Arizona ranch. _Mountain Cattle_, 1936, and OP, is an extension of the first book.

REMINGTON, FREDERIC. _Pony Tracks_, New York, 1895 (now published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio); _Crooked Trails_, New York, 1898. Sketches and pictures.

RHODES, EUGENE MANLOVE. _West Is West, Once in the Saddle, Good Men and True, Stepsons of Light_, and other novels. "Gene" Rhodes had the "right tune." He achieved a style that can be called literary. _The Hired Man on Horseback_, by May D. Rhodes, is a biography of the writer. Perhaps "Paso Por Aqui" will endure as his masterpiece. Rhodes had an intense loyalty to his land and people; he was as gay, gallant, and witty as he was earnest. More than most Western writers, Rhodes was conscious of art. He had the common touch and also he was a writer for writing men. The elements of simplicity and the right kind of sophistication, always with generosity and with an unflagging zeal for the rights of human beings, were mixed in him. The reach of any ample-natured man exceeds his grasp. Rhodes was ample-natured, but he cannot be classed as great because his grasp was too often disproportionately short of the long reach. His fiction becomes increasingly dated.

_The Best Novels and, Stories of Eugene Manlove Rhodes_, edited by Frank V. Dearing, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1949, contains an introduction, with plenty of anecdotes and too much enthusiasm, by J. Frank Dobie.

RICHARDS, CLARICE E. A _Tenderfoot Bride_, Garden City, N. Y., 1920. The experiences of a ranchman's wife in Colorado. The telling has charm, warmth, and flexibility. In the way that art is always truer than a literal report, _A Tenderfoot Bride_ brings out truths of life that the literalistic _A Cowman's Wife_ by Mary Kidder Rak misses.

RICHTER, CONRAD. _The Sea of Grass_, Knopf, New York, 1937. A poetic portrait in fiction, with psychological values, of a big cowman and his wife.

RICKETTS, W. P. _50 Years in the Saddle_, Sheridan, Wyoming, 1942. OP. A natural book with much interesting information. It contains the best account of trailing cattle from Oregon to Wyoming that I have seen.

RIDINGS, SAM P. _The Chisholm Trail_, 1926. Sam P. Ridings, a lawyer, published this book himself from Medford, Oklahoma. He had gone over the land, lived with range men, studied history. A noble book, rich in anecdote and character. The subtitle reads: "A History of the World's Greatest Cattle Trail, together with a Description of the Persons, a Narrative of the Events, and Reminiscences associated with the Same." OP.

ROBINSON, FRANK C. _A Ram in a Thicket_, Abelard Press, New York, 1950. Robinson is the author of many Westerns, none of which I have read. This is an autobiography, here noted because it reveals a maturity of mind and an awareness of political economy and social evolution hardly suggested by other writers of Western fiction.

ROLLINS, ALICE WELLINGTON. _The Story of a Ranch_, New York, 1885. Philip Ashton Rollins (no relation that I know of to Alice Wellington Rollins) went into Charlie Everitt's bookstore in New York one day and said, "I want every book with the word _cowboy_ printed in it." _The Story of a Ranch_ is listed here to illustrate how titles often have nothing to do with subject. It is without either story or ranch; it is about some dilettanteish people who go out to a Kansas sheep farm, talk Chopin, and wash their fingers in finger bowls.

ROLLINS, PHILIP ASHTON. _The Cowboy_, Scribner's, New York, 1924. Revised, 1936. A scientific exposition; full. Rollins wrote two Western novels, not important. A wealthy man with ranch experience, he collected one of the finest libraries of Western books ever assembled by any individual and presented it to Princeton University.

ROLLINSON, JOHN K. _Pony Trails in Wyoming_, Caldwell, Idaho, 1941. Not inspired and not indispensable, but honest autobiography. OP. _Wyoming Cattle Trails_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1948. A more significant book than the autobiography. Good on trailing cattle from Oregon.

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. _Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail_, New York, 1888. Roosevelt understood the West. He became the peg upon which several range books were hung, Hagedorn's _Roosevelt in the Bad Lands_ and Lang's _Ranching with Roosevelt_ in particular. A good summing up, with bibliography, is _Roosevelt and the Stockman's Association_, by Ray H. Mattison, pamphlet issued by the State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck, 1950.

RUSH, OSCAR. _The Open Range_, Salt Lake City, 1930. Reprinted 1936 by Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho. A sensitive range man's response to natural things. The subtitle, _Bunk House Philosophy_, characterizes the book.

RUSSELL, CHARLES M. _Trails Plowed Under_, 1927, with introduction by Will Rogers. Russell was the greatest painter that ever painted a range man, a range cow, a range horse or a Plains Indian. He savvied the cow, the grass, the blizzard, the drought, the wolf, the young puncher in love with his own shadow, the old waddie remembering rides and thirsts of far away and long ago. He was a wonderful storyteller, and most of his pictures tell stories. He never generalized, painting "a man," "a horse," "a buffalo" in the abstract. His subjects are warm with life, whether awake or asleep, at a particular instant, under particular conditions. _Trails Plowed Under_, prodigally illustrated, is a collection of yarns and anecdotes saturated with humor and humanity. It incorporates the materials in two Rawhide Rawlins pamphlets. _Good Medicine_, published posthumously, is a collection of Russell's letters, illustrations saying more than written words.

Russell's illustrations have enriched numerous range books, B. M. Bower's novels, Malcolm S. Mackay's _Cow Range and Hunting Trail_, and Patrick T. Tucker's _Riding the High Country_ being outstanding among them. Tucker's book, autobiography, has a bully chapter on Charlie Russell. _Charles M. Russell, the Cowboy Artist: A Bibliography_, by Karl Yost, Pasadena, California, 1948, is better composed than its companion biography, _Charles M. Russell the Cowboy Artist_, by Ramon F. Adams and Homer E. Britzman. (Both OP.) One of the most concrete pieces of writing on Russell is a chapter in _In the Land of Chinook_, by Al. J. Noyes, Helena, Montana, 1917. "Memories of Charlie Russell," in _Memories of Old Montana_, by Con Price, Hollywood, 1945, is also good. All right as far as it goes, about a rock's throw away, is "The Conservatism of Charles M. Russell," by J. Frank Dobie, in a portfolio reproduction of _Seven Drawings by Charles M. Russell, with an Additional Drawing by Tom Lea_, printed by Carl Hertzog, El Paso [1950].

SANTEE, ROSS. _Cowboy_, 1928. OP. The plotless narrative, reading like autobiography, of a kid who ran away from a farm in East Texas to be a cowboy in Arizona. His cowpuncher teachers are the kind "who know what a cow is thinking of before she knows herself." Passages in _Cowboy_ combine reality and elemental melody in a way that almost no other range writer excepting Charles M. Russell has achieved. Santee is a pen-and-ink artist also. Among his other books, _Men and Horses_ is about the best.

SHAW, JAMES C. _North from Texas: Incidents in the Early Life of a Range Man in Texas, Dakota and Wyoming, 1852-1883_, edited by Herbert O. Brayer. Branding Iron Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1952. Edition limited to 750 copies. I first met this honest autobiography by long quotations from it in Virginia Cole Trenholm's _Footprints on the Frontier_ (Douglas, Wyoming, 1945), wherein I learned that Shaw's narrative had been privately printed in Cheyenne in 1931, in pamphlet form, for gifts to a few friends and members of the author's family. I tried to buy a copy but could find none for sale at any price. This reprint is in a format suitable to the economical prose, replete with telling incidents and homely details. It will soon be only a little less scarce than the original.

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 titles 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 illustrations 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 mastership. "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 banal title, 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 advertisements, 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 scraps of anecdotes and western history, along with testimonials, to the pamphlet, the latest edition I have seen being about 1906, printed in Worcester, Massachusetts.

STEEDMAN, CHARLES J. _Bucking the Sagebrush_, New York, 1904. OP. Charming; much of nature. Illustrated by Russell.

{illust. 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 passing.

STUART, GRANVILLE. _Forty Years on the Frontier_, two volumes, Cleveland, 1925. Nothing better on the cowboy has ever been written than the chapter entitled "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 entitled _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 album of cattle brands--priced at $10.00. The introduction is one of the sparse 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.

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 titles suggesting the tenor of the book.

_Vocabulario y Refranero Criollo_, text and illustrations by Tito Saudibet, Guillermo Kraft Ltda., Buenos Aires, 1945. North American ranges have called forth nothing to compare with this fully illustrated, 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 craftsmanship 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 entitled "The Cattle Kingdom." The book is an analysis 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 album 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-class 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 manuscript than he had used and stapled a pamphlet entitled _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 coons and an alligator to spend the summer on that cotton plantation.... Cowpunchers were superstitious 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 title 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 Association resolved a Historical Commission into existence. A committee was appointed and, naturally, one man did the work. In 1923 a fifty-five-page pamphlet entitled _Letters from Old Friends and Members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association_ was printed at Cheyenne. It is made up of unusually informing and pungent recollections by intelligent cowmen.

22. Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads

{illust. Lyrics = Kind friends, if you will listen, A story I will tell A-bout a final bust-up, That happened down in Dell.}

COWBOY SONGS and ballads are generally ranked alongside Negro spirituals as being the most important of America's contributions to folk song. As compared with the old English and Scottish ballads, the cowboy and all other ballads of the American frontiers generally sound cheap and shoddy. Since John A. Lomax brought out his collection in 1910, cowboy songs have found their way into scores of songbooks, have been recorded on hundreds of records, and have been popularized, often--and naturally--without any semblance to cowboy style, by thousands of radio singers. Two general anthologies are recommended especially for the cowboy songs they contain: _American Ballads and Folk Songs_, by John A. and Alan Lomax, Macmillan, New York, 1934; _The American Songbag_, by Carl Sandburg, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1927.

LARRIN, MARGARET. _Singing Cowboy_ (with music), New York, 1931. OP.

LOMAX, JOHN A., and LOMAX, ALAN. _Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads_, Macmillan, New York, 1938. This is a much added-to and revised form of Lomax's 1910 collection, under the same title. It is the most complete of all anthologies. More than any other man, John A. Lomax is responsible for having made cowboy songs a part of the common heritage of America. His autobiographic _Adventures of a Ballad Hunter_ (Macmillan, 1947) is in quality far above the jingles that most cowboy songs are.

Missouri, as no other state, gave to the West and Southwest. Much of Missouri is still more southwestern in character than much of Oklahoma. For a full collection, with full treatment, of the ballads and songs, including bad-man and cowboy songs, sung in the Southwest there is nothing better than _Ozark Folksongs_, collected and edited by Vance Randolph, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, 1946-50. An unsurpassed work in four handsome volumes.

OWENS, WILLIAM A. _Texas Folk Songs_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1950. A miscellany of British ballads, American ballads, "songs of doleful love," etc. collected in Texas mostly from country people of Anglo-American stock. Musical scores for all the songs.

The Texas Folklore Society has published many cowboy songs. Its publications _Texas and Southwestern Lore_ (1927) and _Follow de Drinkin' Gou'd_ (1928) contain scores, with music and anecdotal interpretations. Other volumes contain other kinds of songs, including Mexican.

THORP, JACK (N. Howard). _Songs of the Cowboys_, Boston, 1921. OP. Good, though limited, anthology, without music and with illuminating comments. A pamphlet collection that Thorp privately printed at Estancia, New Mexico, in 1908, was one of the first to be published. Thorp had the perspective of both range and civilization. He was a kind of troubadour himself. The opening chapter, "Banjo in the Cow Camps," of his posthumous reminiscences, _Pardner of the Wind, is_ delicious.

23. Horses: Mustangs and Cow Ponies

THE WEST WAS DISCOVERED, battled over, and won by men on horseback. Spanish conquistadores saddled their horses in Vera Cruz and rode until they had mapped the continents from the Horn to Montana and from the Floridas to the harbors of the Californias. The padres with them rode on horseback, too, and made every mission a horse ranch. The national dance of Mexico, the Jarabe, is an interpretation of the clicking of hoofs and the pawing and prancing of spirited horses that the Aztecs noted when the Spaniards came. Likewise, the chief contribution made by white men of America to the folk songs of the world--the cowboy songs--are rhythmed to the walk of horses.

Astride horses introduced by the conquistadores to the Americas, the Plains Indians became almost a separate race from the foot-moving tribes of the East and the stationary Pueblos of the Rockies. The men that later conquered and corralled these wild-riding Plains Indians were plainsmen on horses and cavalrymen. The earliest American explorers and trappers of both Plains and Rocky Mountains went out in the saddle. The first industrial link between the East and the West was a mounted pack train beating out the Santa Fe Trail. On west beyond the end of this trail, in Spanish California, even the drivers of oxen rode horseback. The first transcontinental express was the Pony Express.

Outlaws and bad men were called "long riders." The Texas Ranger who followed them was, according to his own proverb, "no better than his horse." Booted sheriffs from Brownsville on the Rio Grande to the Hole in the Wall in the Big Horn Mountains lived in the saddle. Climactic of all the riders rode the cowboy, who lived with horse and herd.

In the Old West the phrase "left afoot" meant nothing short of being left flat on your back. "A man on foot is no man at all," the saying went. If an enemy could not take a man's life, the next best thing was to take his horse. Where cow thieves went scot free, horse thieves were hanged, and to say that a man was "as common as a horse thief" was to express the nadir of commonness. The pillow of the frontiersmen who slept with a six-shooter under it was a saddle, and hitched to the horn was the loose end of a stake rope. Just as "Colonel Colt" made all men equal in a fight, the horse made all men equal in swiftness and mobility.

The proudest names of civilized languages when literally translated mean "horseman": eques, caballero, chevalier, cavalier. Until just yesterday the Man on Horseback had been for centuries the symbol of power and pride. The advent of the horse, from Spanish sources, so changed the ways and psychology of the Plains Indians that they entered into what historians call the Age of Horse Culture. Almost until the automobile came, the whole West and Southwest were dominated by a Horse Culture.

Material on range horses is scattered through the books listed under "Range Life," "Stagecoaches, Freighting," "Pony Express."

No thorough comprehension of the Spanish horse of the Americas is possible without consideration of this horse's antecedents, and that involves a good deal of the horse history of the world.

BROWN, WILLIAM ROBINSON. _The Horse of the Desert_ (no publisher or place on title page), 1936; reprinted by Macmillan, New York. A noble, beautiful, and informing book.

CABRERA, ANGEL. _Caballos de America_, Buenos Aires, 1945. The authority on Argentine horses.

CARTER, WILLIAM H. _The Horses of the World_, National Geographic Society, Washington, D. C., 1923. A concentrated survey.

_Cattleman_. Published at Fort Worth, this monthly magazine of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association began in 1939 to issue, for September, a horse number. It has published a vast amount of material both scientific and popular on range horses. Another monthly magazine worth knowing about is the _Western Horseman_, Colorado Springs, Colorado.

DENHARDT, ROBERT MOORMAN. _The Horse of the Americas_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1947. This historical treatment of the Spanish horse could be better ordered; some sections of the book are little more than miscellanies.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Mustangs_, illustrated by Charles Banks Wilson, Little, Brown, Boston, 1952. Before this handsome book arrives at the wild horses of North America, a third of it has been spent on the Arabian progenitors of the Spanish horse, the acquisition of the Spanish horse by western Indians, and the nature of Indian horses. There are many narratives of mustangs and mustangers and of Spanish-blooded horses under the saddle. The author has tried to compass the natural history of the animal and to blend vividness with learning. The book incorporates his _Tales of the Mustang_, a slight volume published in an edition of only three hundred copies in 1936. It also incorporates a large part of _Mustangs and Cow Horses_, edited by Dobie, Boatright, and Ransom, and issued by the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1940--a volume that went out of print not long after it was published.

DODGE, THEODORE A. _Riders of Many Lands_, New York, 1893. Illustrations by Remington. Wide and informed views.

GRAHAM, R. B. CUNNINGHAME. _The Horses of the Conquest_, London, 1930. Graham was both historian and horseman, as much at home on the pampas as in his ancient Scottish home. This excellent book on the Spanish horses introduced to the Western Hemisphere is in a pasture to itself. Reprinted in 1949 by the University of Oklahoma Press, with introduction and notes by Robert Moorman Denhardt.

{illust. caption = Charles Banks Wilson, in _The Mustangs_ by J. Frank Dobie (1952)}

GREER, JAMES K. _Bois d'Arc to Barbed Wire_, Dallas, 1936. OP.

HASTINGS, FRANK. _A Ranchman's Recollections_, Chicago, 1921. "Old Gran'pa" is close to the best American horse story I have ever read. OP.

HAYES, M. HORACE. _Points of the Horse_, London, 1904. This and subsequent editions are superior in treatment and illustrations to earlier editions. Hayes was a far traveler and scholar as well as horseman. One of the less than a dozen best books on the horse.

JAMES, WILL. _Smoky_, Scribner's, New York, 1930. Perhaps the best of several books that Will James--always with illustrations--has woven around horse heroes.

LEIGH, WILLIAM R. _The Western Pony_, New York, 1933. One of the most beautifully printed books on the West; beautiful illustrations; illuminating text. OP.

MULLER, DAN. _Horses_, Reilly and Lee, Chicago, 1936. Interesting illustrations.

PATTULLO, GEORGE. _The Untamed_, New York, 1911. A collection of short stories, among which "Corazon" and "Neutria" are excellent on horses. OP.

PERKINS, CHARLES ELLIOTT. _The Pinto Horse_, Santa Barbara, California, 1927. A fine narrative, illustrated by Edward Borein. OP.

RIDGEWAY, W. _The Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse_, Cambridge, England, 1905. A standard work, though many of its conclusions are disputed, especially by Lady Wentworth in her _Thoroughbred Racing Stock and Its Ancestors_, London, 1938.

SANTEE, ROSS. _Men and Horses_, New York, 1926. Three chapters of this book, "A Fool About a Horse," "The Horse Wrangler," and "The Rough String," are especially recommended. _Cowboy_, New York, 1928, reveals in a fine way the rapport between the cowboy and his horse. _Sleepy Black,_ New York, 1933, is a story of a horse designed for younger readers; being good on the subject, it is good for any reader. All OP.

SIMPSON, GEORGE GAYLOR. _Horses: The Story of the Horse Family in the Modern World and through Sixty Million Years of History_, Oxford University Press, New York, 1951. In the realm of paleontology this work supplants all predecessors. Bibliography.

STEELE, RUFUS. _Mustangs of the Mesas_, Hollywood, California, 1941. OP. Modern mustanging in Nevada; excellently written narratives of outstanding mustangs.

STONG, PHIL. _Horses and Americans_, New York, 1939. A survey and a miscellany combined. OP.

{illust. caption = Charles M. Russell, in _The Untamed_ by George Pattullo (1911)}

THORP, JACK (N. Howard) as told to Neil McCullough Clark. _Pardner of the Wind_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1945. Two chapters in this book make the "Spanish thunderbolts," as Jack Thorp called the mustangs and Spanish cow horses, graze, run, pitch, and go gentle ways as free as the wind. "Five Hundred Mile Horse Race" is a great story. No other range man excepting Ross Santee has put down so much everyday horse lore in such a fresh way.

TWEEDIE, MAJOR GENERAL W. _The Arabian Horse: His Country and People_, Edinburgh and London, 1894. One of the few horse books to be classified as literature. Wise in the blend of horse, land, and people.

WENTWORTH, LADY. _The Authentic Arabian Horse and His Descendants_, London, 1945. Rich in knowledge and both magnificent and munificent in illustrations. Almost immediately after publication, this noble volume entered the rare book class.

WYMAN, WALKER D. _The Wild Horse of the West_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1945. A scholarly sifting of virtually all available material on mustangs. Readable. Only thorough bibliography on subject so far published.

24. The Bad Man Tradition

PLENTY of six-shooter play is to be found in most of the books about old-time cowboys; yet hardly one of the professional bad men was a representative cowboy. Bad men of the West and cowboys alike wore six-shooters and spurs; they drank each other's coffee; they had a fanatical passion for liberty--for themselves. But the representative cowboy was a reliable hand, hanging through drought, blizzard, and high water to his herd, whereas the bona fide bad man lived on the dodge. Between the killer and the cowboy standing up for his rights or merely shooting out the lights for fun, there was as much difference as between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. Of course, the elements were mixed in the worst of the bad men, as they are in the best of all good men. No matter what deductions analysis may lead to, the fact remains that the western bad men of open range days have become a part of the American tradition. They represent six-shooter culture at its zenith--the wild and woolly side of the West--a stage between receding bowie knife individualism of the backwoods and blackguard, machine-gun gangsterism of the city.

The songs about Sam Bass, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid reflect popular attitude toward the hard-riding outlaws. Sam Bass, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, the Daltons, Cole Younger, Joaquin Murrieta, John Wesley Hardin, Al Jennings, Belle Starr, and other "long riders" with their guns in their hands have had their biographies written over and over. They were not nearly as immoral as certain newspaper columnists lying under the cloak of piety. As time goes on, they, like antique Robin Hood and the late Pancho Villa, recede from all realistic judgment. If the picture show finds in them models for generosity, gallantry, and fidelity to a code of liberty, and if the public finds them picturesque, then philosophers may well be thankful that they lived, rode, and shot.

{illust. caption = Tom Lea: Pancho Villa, in _Southwest Review_ (1951)}

"The long-tailed heroes of the revolver," to pick a phrase from Mark Twain's unreverential treatment of them in _Roughing It_, often did society a service in shooting each other--aside from providing entertainment to future generations. As "The Old Cattleman" of Alfred Henry Lewis' _Wolfville_ stories says, "A heap of people need a heap of killing." Nor can the bad men be logically segregated from the long-haired killers on the side of the law like Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp. W. H. Hudson once advanced the theory that bloodshed and morality go together. If American civilization proceeds, the rage for collecting books on bad men will probably subside until a copy of Miguel Antonio Otero's _The Real Billy the Kid_ will bring no higher price than a first edition of A. Edward Newton's _The Amenities of Book-Collecting_.

See "Fighting Texians," "Texas Rangers," "Range Life," "Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads."

AIKMAN, DUNCAN. _Calamity Jane and the Lady Wildcats_, 1927. OP. Patronizing in the H. L. Mencken style.

BILLY THE KID. We ve got to take him seriously, not so much for what he was--

There are twenty-one men I have put bullets through, And Sheriff Pat Garrett must make twenty-two--

as for his provocations. Popular imagination, represented by writers of all degrees, goes on playing on him with cumulative effect. As a figure in literature the Kid has come to lead the whole field of western bad men. The _Saturday Review_, for October 11, 1952, features a philosophical essay entitled "Billy the Kid: Faust in America--The Making of a Legend." The growth of this legend is minutely traced through a period of seventy-one years (1881-1952) by J. C. Dykes in _Billy the Kid: The Bibliography of a Legend_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1952 (186 pages). It lists 437 titles, including magazine pieces, mimeographed plays, motion pictures, verses, pamphlets, fiction. In a blend of casualness and scholarship, it gives the substance and character of each item. Indeed, this bibliography reads like a continued story, with constant references to both antecedent and subsequent action. Pat Garrett, John Chisum, and other related characters weave all through it. A first-class bibliography that is also readable is almost a new genre.

Pat F. Garrett, sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, killed the Kid about midnight, July 14, 1881. The next spring his _Authentic Life of Billy the Kid_ was published at Santa Fe, at least partly written, according to good evidence, by a newspaperman named Ash Upton. This biography is one of the rarities in Western Americana. In 1927 it was republished by Macmillan, New York, under title of _Pat F. Garrett's Authentic Life of Billy the Kid_, edited by Maurice G. Fulton. This is now OP but remains basic. The most widely circulated biography has been _The Saga of Billy the Kid_ by Walter Noble Burns, New York, 1926. It contains a deal of fictional conversation and it has no doubt contributed to the Robin-Hoodizing of the lethal character baptized as William H. Bonney, who was born in New York in 1859 and now lives with undiminished vigor as Billy the Kid. Walter Noble Burns was not so successful with _The Robin Hood of El Dorado: The Saga of Joaquin Murrieta_ (1932), or, despite hogsheads of blood, with _Tombstone_ (1927).

CANTON, FRANK M. _Frontier Trails_, Boston, 1930.

COE, GEORGE W. _Frontier Fighter_, Boston, 1934; reprinted by University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. The autobiography of one of Billy the Kid's men as recorded by Nan Hillary Harrison.

COOLIDGE, DANE. _Fighting Men of the West_, New York, 1932. Biographical sketches. OP.

CUNNINGHAM, EUGENE. _Triggernometry_, 1934; reprinted by Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho. Excellent survey of codes and characters. Written by a man of intelligence and knowledge. Bibliography.

FORREST, E. R. _Arizona's Dark and Bloody Ground_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1936.

GARD, WAYNE. _Sam Bass_, Boston, 1936. Most of the whole truth. OP.

HALEY, J. EVETTS. _Jeff Milton--A Good Man with a Gun_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. Jeff Milton the whole man as well as the queller of bad men.

HENDRICKS, GEORGE. _The Bad Man of the West_, Naylor, San Antonio, 1941. Analyses and classifications go far toward making this treatment of old subjects original. Excellent bibliographical guide.

HOUGH, EMERSON. _The Story of the Outlaw_, 1907. OP. An omnibus carelessly put together with many holes in it.

LAKE, STUART. _Wyatt Earp_, Boston, 1931. Best written of all gunmen biographies. Earp happened to be on the side of the law.

LANKFORD, N. P. _Vigilante Days and Ways_, 1890, 1912. OP. Full treatment of lawlessness in the Northwest.

LOVE, ROBERTUS. _The Rise and Fall of Jesse James_, New York, 1926. Excellently written. OP.

RAINE, WILLIAM MCLEOD. _Famous s and Western Outlaws_, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1929. A rogues' gallery. _Guns of the Frontier_, Boston, 1940. Another miscellany. OP.

RASCOE, BURTON. _Belle Starr_, New York, 1941. OP.

RIPLEY, THOMAS. _They Died with Their Boots On_, 1935. Mostly about John Wesley Hardin. OP.

SABIN, EDWIN L. _Wild Men of the Wild West_, New York, 1929. Biographic survey of killers from the Mississippi to the Pacific. OP.

WILD BILL HICKOK. The subject of various biographies, among them those by Frank J. Wilstach (1926) and William E. Connelley (1933). The _Nebraska History Magazine_ (Volume X) for April-June 1927 is devoted to Wild Bill and contains a "descriptive bibliography" on him by Addison E. Sheldon.

WOODHULL, FROST. Folk-Lore Shooting, in _Southwestern Lore_, Publication IX of the Texas Folklore Society, 1931. Rich. Humor.

25. Mining and Oil

DURING the twentieth century oil has brought so much money to the Southwest that the proceeds from cattle have come to look like tips. This statement is not based on statistics, though statistics no doubt exist--even on the cost of catching sun perch. Geological, legal, and economic writings on oil are mountainous in quantity, but the human drama of oil yet remains, for the most part, to be written. It is odd to find such a modern book as Erna Fergusson's _Our Southwest_ not mentioning oil. It is odd that no book of national reputation comes off the presses about any aspect of oil. The nearest to national notice on oil is the daily report of transactions on the New York Stock Exchange. Oil companies subsidize histories of themselves, endow universities with money to train technicians they want, control state legislatures and senates, and dictate to Congress what they want for themselves in income tax laws; but so far they have not been able to hire anybody to write a book about oil that anybody but the hirers themselves wants to read. Probably they don't read them. The first thing an oilman does after amassing a few millions is buy a ranch on which he can get away from oil--and on which he can spend some of his oil money.

People live a good deal by tradition and fight a good deal by tradition also, voting more by prejudice. When one considers the stream of cow country books and the romance of mining living on in legends of lost mines and, then, the desert of oil books, one realizes that it takes something more than money to make the mare of romance run. Geology and economics are beyond the aim of this _Guide_, but if oil money keeps on buying up ranch land, the history of modern ranching will be resolved into the biographies of a comparatively few oilmen.

BOATRIGHT, MODY C. _Gib Morgan: Minstrel of the Oil Fields_. Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1945. Folk tales about Gib rather than minstrelsy. OP.

BOONE, LALIA PHIPPS. _The Petroleum Dictionary_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1952. "More than 6,000 entries: definitions of technical terms and everyday expressions, a comprehensive guide to the language of the oil industry."

CAUGHEY, JOHN WALTON. _Gold Is the Cornerstone_ (1948). Adequate treatment of the discovery of California gold and of the miners. _Rushing for Gold_ (1949). Twelve essays by twelve writers, with emphasis on travel to California. Both books published by University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

CENDRARS, BLAISE. _Sutter's Gold_, London, 1926. OP.

CLARK, JAMES A., and HALBOUTY, MICHEL T. _Spindletop_, Random House, New York, 1952. On January 10, 1901, the Spindletop gusher, near Beaumont, Texas, roared in the oil age. This book, while it presumes to record what Pat Higgins was thinking as he sat in front of a country store, seems to be "the true story." The bare facts in it make drama.

DE QUILLE, DAN (pseudonym for William Wright). _The Big Bonanza_, Hartford, 1876. Reprinted, 1947. OP.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _Coronado's Children_, Dallas, 1930; reprinted by Grosset and Dunlap, New York. Legendary tales of lost mines and buried treasures of the Southwest. _Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver_, Little, Brown, Boston, 1939. More of the same thing.

EMRICH, DUNCAN, editor. _Comstock Bonanza_, Vanguard, New York, 1950. A collection of writings, garnered mostly from West Coast magazines and newspapers, bearing on mining in Nevada during the boom days of Mark Twain's.

{illust. caption = Tom Lea, in _Santa Rita_ by Martin W. Schwettmann (1943)}

_Roughing It_. James G. Gally's writing is a major discovery in a minor field.

FORBES, GERALD. _Flush Production: The Epic of Oil in the Gulf-Southwest_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942.

GILLIS, WILLIAM R. _Goldrush Days with Mark Twain_, New York, 1930. OP.

GLASSCOCK, LUCILLE. _A Texas Wildcatter_, Naylor, San Antonio, 1952. The wildcatter is Mrs. Glasscock's husband. She chronicles this player's main moves in the game and gives an insight into his energy-driven ambition.

HOUSE, BOYCE. _Oil Boom_, Caxton, Caldwell, Idaho, 1941. With Boyce House's earlier _Were You in Ranger?_, this book gives a contemporary picture of the gushing days of oil, money, and humanity.

LYMAN, GEORGE T. _The Saga of the Comstock Lode_, 1934, and _Ralston's Ring_, 1937. Both published by Scribner's, New York.

MCKENNA, JAMES _A. Black Range Tales_, New York, 1936. Reminiscences of prospecting life. OP.

MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. _Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career of E. W. Marland_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951. Mature in style and in interpretative power, John Joseph Mathews goes into the very life of an oilman who was something else.

RISTER, C. C. _Oil! Titan of the Southwest_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949. Facts in factual form. Plenty of oil wealth and taxes; nothing on oil government.

SHINN, CHARLES H. _Mining Camps_, 1885, reprinted by Knopf, New York, 1948. Perhaps the most competent analysis extant on the behavior of the gold hunters, with emphasis on their self-government. _The Story of the Mine as Illustrated by the Great Comstock Lode of Nevada_, New York, 1896. OP. Shinn knew and he knew also how to combine into form.

STUART, GRANVILLE. _Forty Years on the Frontier_, Cleveland, 1925. Superb on California and Montana hunger for precious metals. OP.

TAIT, SAMUEL W. _Wildcatters: An Informal History of Oil-Hunting in America_, Princeton University Press, 1946. OP.

TWAIN, MARK. _Roughing It_. The mining boom itself.

26. Nature; Wild Life; Naturalists

"NO MAN," says Mary Austin, "has ever really entered into the heart of any country until he has adopted or made up myths about its familiar objects." A man might reject the myths but he would have to know many facts about its natural life and have imagination as well as knowledge before entering into a country's heart. The history of any land begins with nature, and all histories must end with nature.

"The character of a country is the destiny of its people," wrote Harvey Fergusson in _Rio Grande_. Ross Calvin, also of New Mexico, had the same idea in mind when he entitled his book _Sky Determines_. "Culture mocks at the boundaries set up by politics," Clark Wissler said. "It approaches geographical boundaries with its hat in its hand." The engineering of water across mountains, electric translation of sounds, refrigeration of air and foods, and other technical developments carry human beings a certain distance across some of nature's boundaries, but no cleverness of science can escape nature. The inhabitants of Yuma, Arizona, are destined forever to face a desert devoid of graciousness. Technology does not create matter; it merely uses matter in a skilful way--uses it up.

Man advances by learning the secrets of nature and taking advantage of his knowledge. He is deeply happy only when in harmony with his work and environments. The backwoodsman, early settler, pioneer plainsman, mountain man were all like some infuriated beast of Promethean capabilities tearing at its own vitals. Driven by an irrational energy, they seemed intent on destroying not only the growth of the soil but the power of the soil to reproduce. Davy Crockett, the great bear killer, was "wrathy to kill a bear," and as respects bears and other wild life, one may search the chronicles of his kind in vain for anything beyond the incidents of chase and slaughter. To quote T. B. Thorpe's blusterous bear hunter, the whole matter may be summed up in one sentence: "A bear is started and he is killed." For the average American of the soil, whether wearing out a farm, shotgunning with a headlight the last doe of a woodland, shooting the last buffalo on the range, trapping the last howling lobo, winging the last prairie chicken, running down in an automobile the last antelope, making a killer's target of any hooting owl or flying heron that comes within range, poisoning the last eagle to fly over a sheep pasture for him the circumstances of the killing have expressed his chief intellectual interest in nature.

A sure sign of advancing civilization has been the rapidly changing popular attitude toward nature during recent years. People are becoming increasingly interested not merely in conserving game for sportsmen to shoot, but in preserving all wild life, in observing animals, in cultivating native flora, in building houses that harmonize with climate and landscape. Roger Tory Peterson's _Field Guide to the Birds_ has become one of the popular standard works of America.

The story of the American Indian is--despite taboos and squalor--a story of harmonizations with nature. "Wolf Brother," in _Long Lance_, by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, is a poetic concretion of this harmony. As much at ease with the wilderness as any Blackfoot Indian was George Frederick Ruxton, educated English officer and gentleman, who rode horseback from Vera Cruz to the Missouri River and wrote _Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains_. In this book he tells how a lobo followed him for days from camp to camp, waiting each evening for his share of fresh meat and sometimes coming close to the fire at night. Any orthodox American would have shot the lobo at first appearance. Ruxton had the civilized perspective on nature represented by Thoreau and Saint Francis of Assisi. Primitive harmony was run over by frontier wrath to kill, a wrath no less barbaric than primitive superstitions.

But the coyote's howl is more tonic than all theories about nature; the buck's whistle more invigorating; the bull's bellow in the canyon more musical; the call of the bobwhite more serene; the rattling of the rattlesnake more logical; the scream of the panther more arousing to the imagination; the odor from the skunk more lingering; the sweep of the buzzard in the air more majestical; the wariness of the wild turkey brighter; the bark of the prairie dog lighter; the guesses of the armadillo more comical; the upward dartings and dippings of the scissortail more lovely; the flight of the sandhill cranes more fraught with mystery.

There is an abundance of printed information on the animal life of America, to the west as well as to the east. Much of it cannot be segregated; the earthworm, on which Darwin wrote a book, knows nothing of regionalism. The best books on nature come from and lead to the Grasshopper's Library, which is free to all consultants. I advise the consultant to listen to the owl's hoot for wisdom, plant nine bean rows for peace, and, with Wordsworth, sit on an old gray stone listening for "authentic tidings of invisible things." Studies are only to "perfect nature." In the words of Mary Austin, "They that make the sun noise shall not fail of the sun's full recompense."

Like knowledge in any other department of life, that on nature never comes to a stand so long as it has vitality. A continuing interest in natural history is nurtured by _Natural History_, published by the American Museum of Natural History, New York; _Nature_, published in Washington, D. C.; _The Living Wilderness_, also from Washington; _Journal of Mammalogy_, a quarterly, Baltimore, Maryland; _Audubon Magazine_ (formerly _Bird Lore_), published by the National Audubon Society, New York; _American Forests_, Washington, D. C., and various other publications.

In addition to books of natural history interest listed below, others are listed under "Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters," "Bears and Bear Hunters," "Coyotes, Lobos, and Panthers," "Birds and Wild Flowers," and "Interpreters." Perhaps a majority of worthy books pertaining to the western half of America look on the outdoors.

ADAMS, W. H. DAVENPORT (from the French of Benedict Revoil). _The Hunter and the Trapper of North America_, London, 1875. A strange book.

ARNOLD, OREN. _Wild Life in the Southwest_, Dallas, 1936. Helpful chapters on various characteristic animals and plants. OP.

BAILEY, VERNON. _Mammals of New Mexico_, United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Biological Survey, Washington, D. C., 1931. _Biological Survey of Texas_, 1905. OP. The "North American Fauna Series," to which these two books belong, contains or points to the basic facts covering most of the mammals of the Southwest.

BAILLIE-GROHMAN, WILLIAM A. _Camps in the Rockies_, 1882. A true sportsman, Baillie-Grohman was more interested in living animals than in just killing. OP.

BEDICHEK, ROY. _Adventures with a Texas Naturalist_, Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y., 1947. To be personal, Roy Bedichek has the most richly stored mind I have ever met; it is as active as it is full. Liberal in the true sense of the word, it frees other minds. Here, using facts as a means, it gives meanings to the hackberry tree, limestone, mockingbird, Inca dove, Mexican primrose, golden eagle, the Davis Mountains, cedar cutters, and many another natural phenomenon. _Adventures with a Texas Naturalist_ is regarded by some good judges as the wisest book in the realm of natural history produced in America since Thoreau wrote.

The title of Bedichek's second book, _Karankaway Country_ (Garden City, 1950), is misleading. The Karankawa Indians start it off, but it goes to coon inquisitiveness, prairie chicken dances, the extinction of species to which the whooping crane is approaching, browsing goats, dignified skunks, swifts in love flight, a camp in the brush, dust, erosion, silt--always with thinking added to seeing. The foremost naturalist of the Southwest, Bedichek constantly relates nature to civilization and human values.

BROWNING, MESHACH. _Forty-Four Years of the Life of a Hunter_, 1859; reprinted, Philadelphia, 1928. Prodigal on bear and deer.

CAHALANE, VICTOR H. _Mammals of North America_, Macmillan, New York, 1947. The author is a scientist with an open mind on the relationships between predators and game animals. His thick, delightfully illustrated book is the best dragnet on American mammals extant. It contains excellent lists of references.

CATON, JUDGE JOHN DEAN. _Antelope and Deer of America_, 1877. Standard work. OP.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Longhorns_ (1941) and _The Mustangs_ (1952), while hardly to be catalogued as natural history books, go farther into natural history than most books on cattle and horses go. _On the Open Range_ (1931; reprinted by Banks Upshaw, Dallas) contains a number of animal stories more or less true. Ben Lilly of _The Ben Lilly Legend_ (Boston, 1950) thought that God had called him to hunt. He spent his life, therefore, in hunting. He saw some things in nature beyond targets.

DODGE, RICHARD I. _The Hunting Grounds of the Great West_, London, 1877. Published in New York the same year under title of _The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants_. Outstanding survey of outstanding wild creatures.

DUNRAVEN, EARL OF. _The Great Divide_, London, 1876; reprinted under title of _Hunting in the Yellowstone_, 1925. OP.

ELLIOTT, CHARLES (editor). _Fading Trails_, New York, 1942. Humanistic review of characteristic American wild life. OP.

FLACK, CAPTAIN. _The Texas Ranger, or Real Life in the Backwoods_, 1866; another form of _A Hunter's Experience in the Southern States of America_, by Captain Flack, "The Ranger," London, 1866.

GANSON, EVE. _Desert Mavericks_, Santa Barbara, California, 1928. Illustrated; delightful. OP.

GEISER, SAMUEL WOOD. _Naturalists of the Frontier_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1937; revised and enlarged edition, 1948. Biographies of men who were characters as well as scientists, generally in environments alien to their interests.

GERSTAECKER, FREDERICK. _Wild Sports in the Far West_, 1854. A translation from the German. Delightful reading and revealing picture of how backwoodsmen of the Mississippi Valley "lived off the country."

GRAHAM, GID. _Animal Outlaws_, Collinsville, Oklahoma, 1938. OP. A remarkable collection of animal stories. Privately printed.

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Between 1893 and 1913, Grinnell, partly in collaboration with Theodore Roosevelt, edited five volumes for The Boone and Crockett Club that contain an extraordinary amount of information, written mostly by men of civilized perspective, on bears, deer, mountain sheep, buffaloes, cougars, elk, wolves, moose, mountains, and forests. The series, long out of print, is a storehouse of knowledge not to be overlooked by any student of wild life in the West. The titles are: _American Big-Game Hunting_, 1893; _Hunting in Many Lands_, 1895; _Trail and Camp-Fire_, 1897; _American Big Game in Its Haunts_, 1904; _Hunting at High Altitudes_, 1913.

GRINNELL, JOSEPH; DIXON, JOSEPH S.; and LINSDALE, JEAN M. _Fur-Bearing Mammals of California: Their Natural History, Systematic Status, and Relation to Man_, two volumes, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1937. The king, so far, of all state natural histories.

HALL, E. RAYMOND. _Mammals of Nevada_, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1946. So far as my knowledge goes, this is the only respect-worthy book extant pertaining to the state whose economy is based on fees from divorces and gambling and whose best-known citizen is Senator Pat McCarran.

HARTMAN, CARL G. _Possum_, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1952. This richly illustrated book comprehends everything pertaining to the subject from prehistoric marsupium to baking with sweet potatoes in a Negro cabin. It is the outcome of a lifetime's scientific investigation not only of possums but of libraries and popular talk. Thus, in addition to its biographical and natural history aspects, it is a study in the evolution of man's knowledge about one of the world's folkiest creatures.

{illust. caption = Charles M. Russell, in _The Blazed Trail of the Old Frontier_ by Agnes C. Laut (1926)}

HORNADAY, WILLIAM T. _Camp Fires on Desert and Lava_, London, n.d. OP. Dr. Hornaday, who died in 1937, was the first director of the New York Zoological Park. He was a great conservationist and an authority on the wild life of America.

HUDSON, W. H. _The Naturalist in La Plata_, New York, 1892. Not about the Southwest or even North America, but Hudson's chapters on "The Puma," "Some Curious Animal Weapons," "The Mephitic Skunk," "Humming Birds," "The Strange Instincts of Cattle," "Horse and Man," etc. come home to the Southwest. Few writers tend to make readers so aware; no other has written so delightfully of the lands of grass.

INGERSOLL, ERNEST. _Wild Neighbors_, New York, 1897. OP. A superior work. Chapter II, "The Father of Game," is on the cougar; Chapter IV, "The Hound of the Plains," is on the coyote; there is an excellent essay on the badger. Each chapter is provided with a list of books affording more extended treatment of the subject.

JAEGER, EDMUND C. _Denizens of the Desert_, Boston, 1922. OP. "Don Coyote," the roadrunner, and other characteristic animals. _Our Desert Neighbors_, Stanford University Press, California, 1950.

LOCKE, LUCIE H. _Naturally Yours, Texas_, Naylor, San Antonio, 1949. Charm must never be discounted; it is far rarer than facts, and often does more to lead to truth. This slight book is in verse and drawings, type integrated with delectable black-and-white representations of the prairie dog, armadillo, sanderling, mesquite, whirlwind, sand dune, mirage, and dozens of other natural phenomena. The only other book in this list to which it is akin is Eve Ganson's _Desert Mavericks_.

LUMHOLTZ, CARL. _Unknown Mexico_, New York, 1902. Nearly anything about animals as well as about Indians and mountains of Mexico may be found in this extraordinary two-volume work. OP.

MCILHENNY, EDWARD A. _The Alligator s Life History_, Boston, 1935. OP. The alligator got farther west than is generally known--at least within reach of Laredo and Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande. McIlhenny's book treats--engagingly, intimately, and with precision--of the animal in Louisiana. Hungerers for anatomical biology are referred to _The Alligator and Its Allies_ by A. M. Reese, New York, 1915. I have more to say about McIlhenny in Chapter 30.

MARCY, COLONEL R. B. _Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border_, New York, 1866. Marcy had a scientific mind and a high sense of values. He knew how to write and what he wrote remains informing and pleasant.

MARTIN, HORACE T. _Castorologia, or The History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver_, London, 1892. OP. The beaver is a beaver, whether on Hudson's Bay or the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. Much has been written on this animal, the propeller of the trappers of the West, but this famous book remains the most comprehensive on facts and the amplest in conception. The author was humorist as well as scientist.

MENGER, RUDOLPH. _Texas Nature Observations and Reminiscences_, San Antonio, 1913. OP. Being of an educated German family, Dr. Menger found many things in nature more interesting than two-headed calves.

MILLS, ENOS. _The Rocky Mountain Wonderland, Wild Life on the Rockies, Waiting in the Wilderness_, and other books. Some naturalists have taken exception to some observations recorded by Mills; nevertheless, he enlarges and freshens mountain life.

MUIR, JOHN. _The Mountains of California, Our National Parks_, and other books. Muir, a great naturalist, had the power to convey his wise sympathies and brooded-over knowledge.

MURPHY, JOHN MORTIMER. _Sporting Adventures in the Far West_, London, 1879. One of the earliest roundups of game animals of the West.

NEWSOME, WILLIAM M. _The Whitetailed Deer_, New York, 1926. OP. Standard work.

PALLISER, JOHN. _The Solitary Hunter; or Storting Adventures in the Prairies_, London, 1857.

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. _Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter_, with a chapter entitled "Books on Big Game"; _Hunting Adventures in the West; The Wilderness Hunter; Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail; A Book Lover's Holiday in the Open; The Deer Family_ (in collaboration).

SEARS, PAUL B. _Deserts on the March_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1935. Dramatic picturization of the forces of nature operating in what droughts of the 1930's caused to be called "the Dust Bowl." "Drought and Wind and Man" might be another title.

SETON, ERNEST THOMPSON. _Wild Animals I Have Known; Lives of the Hunted_. Probably no other writer of America has aroused so many people, young people especially, to an interest in our wild animals. Natural history encyclopedias he has authored are _Life Histories of Northern Animals_, New York, 1920, and _Lives of Game Animals_, New York, 1929. Seton's final testament, _Trail of an Artist Naturalist_ (Scribner's, New York, 1941), has a deal on wild life of the Southwest.

THORPE, T. B. _The Hive of the Bee-Hunter_, New York, 1854. OP. Juicy.

WARREN, EDWARD ROYAL. _The Mammals of Colorado_, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942. OP.

27. Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters

THE LITERATURE on the American bison, more popularly called buffalo, is enormous. Nearly everything of consequence pertaining to the Plains Indians touches the animal. The relationship of the Indian to the buffalo has nowhere been better stated than in Note 49 to the Benavides _Memorial_, edited by Hodge and Lummis. "The Great Buffalo Hunt at Standing Rock," a chapter in _My Friend the Indian_ by James McLaughlin, sums up the hunting procedure; other outstanding treatments of the buffalo in Indian books are to be found in _Long Lance_ by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance; _Letters and Notes on... the North American Indians_ by George Catlin; _Forty Years a Fur Trader_ by Charles Larpenteur. Floyd B. Streeter's chapter on "The Buffalo Range" in _Prairie Trails and Cow Towns_ lists twenty-five sources of information.

The bibliography that supersedes all other bibliographies is in the book that supersedes all other books on the subject--Frank Gilbert Roe's _The North American Buffalo_. More about it in the list that follows.

Nearly all men who got out on the plains were "wrathy to kill" buffaloes above all else. The Indians killed in great numbers but seldom wastefully. The Spaniards were restrained by Indian hostility. Mountain men, emigrants crossing the plains, Santa Fe traders, railroad builders, Indian fighters, settlers on the edge of the plains, European sportsmen, all slaughtered and slew. Some observed, but the average American hunter's observations on game animals are about as illuminating as the trophy-stuffed den of a rich oilman or the lockers of a packing house. Lawrence of Arabia won his name through knowledge and understanding of Arabian life and through power to lead and to write. Buffalo Bill won his name through power to exterminate buffaloes. He was a buffalo man in the way that Hitler was a Polish Jew man.

{illust. caption = Harold D. Bugbee: Buffaloes

It is a pleasure to note the writings of sportsmen with inquiring minds and of scientists and artists who hunted. Three examples are: _The English Sportsman in the Western Prairies_, by the Hon. Grantley F. Berkeley, London, 1861; _Travels in the Interior of North America, 1833-1834_, by Maximilian, Prince of Wied (original edition, 1843), included in that "incomparable storehouse of buffalo lore from early eye-witnesses," _Early Western Travels_, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites; George Catlin's _Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians_, London, 1841.

Three aspects of the buffalo stand out: the natural history of the great American animal; the interrelationship between Indian and buffalo; the white hunter--and exterminator.

ALLEN, J. A. _The American Bison, Living and Extinct_, Cambridge, Mass., 1876. Reprinted in 9th Annual Report of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey, Washington, 1877. Basic and rich work, much of it appropriated by Hornaday.

BRANCH, E. DOUGLAS. _The Hunting of the Buffalo_, New York, 1925. Interpretative as well as factual. OP.

COOK, JOHN R. _The Border and the Buffalo_. Topeka, Kansas, 1907. Personal narrative.

DIXON, OLIVE. _Billy Dixon_, Guthrie, Oklahoma, 1914; reprinted, Dallas, 1927. Bully autobiography; excellent on the buffalo hunter as a type. OP.

DODGE, R. I. _The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants_, New York, 1877. One of the best chapters of this source book is on the buffalo.

GARRETSON, MARTIN S. _The American Bison_, New York Zoological Society, New York, 1938. Not thorough, but informing. Limited bibliography. OP.

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD (1849-1938) may be classed next to J. A. Allen and W. T. Hornaday as historian of the buffalo. His primary sources were the buffaloed plains and the Plains Indians, whom he knew intimately. "In Buffalo Days" is a long and excellent essay by him in _American Big-Game Hunting_, edited by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, New York, 1893. He has another long essay, "The Bison," in _Musk-Ox, Bison, Sheep and Goat_ by Caspar Whitney, George Bird Grinnell, and Owen Wister, New York, 1904. His noble and beautifully simple _When Buffalo Ran_, New Haven, 1920, is specific on work from a buffalo horse. Again in his noble two-volume work on _The Cheyenne Indians_ (1923) Grinnell is rich not only on the animal but on the Plains Indian relationship to it. All OP.

HALEY, J. EVETTS. _Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman_, 1936. Goodnight killed and also helped save the buffalo. Haley has preserved his observations.

HORNADAY, W. T. _Extermination of the American Bison_ (Smithsonian Reports for 1887, published in 1889, Part II). Hornaday was a good zoologist but inferior in research.

INMAN, HENRY. _Buffalo Jones Forty Years of Adventure_, Topeka, Kansas, 1899. A book rich in observations as well as experience, though Jones was a poser. OP.

LAKE, STUART N. _Wyatt Earp_, Boston, 1931. Early chapters excellent on buffalo hunting.

MCCREIGHT, M. I. _Buffalo Bone Days_, Sykesville, Pa., 1939. OP. A pamphlet strong on buffalo bones, for fertilizer.

PALLISER, JOHN (and others). _Journals, Detailed Reports, and Observations, relative to Palliser's Exploration of British North America, 1857-1860_, London, 1863. According to Frank Gilbert Roe, "a mine of inestimable information" on the buffalo.

_Panhandle-Plains Historical Review_, Canyon, Texas. Articles and reminiscences, _passim_.

PARKMAN, FRANCIS. _The Oregon Trail_, 1847. Available in various editions, this book contains superb descriptions of buffaloes and prairies.

POE, SOPHIE A. _Buckboard Days_ (edited by Eugene Cunningham), Caldwell, Idaho, 1936. Early chapters. OP.

ROE, FRANK GILBERT. _The North American Buffalo_, University of Toronto Press, 1951. A monumental work comprising and critically reviewing virtually all that has been written on the subject and supplanting much of it. No other scholar dealing with the buffalo has gone so fully into the subject or viewed it from so many angles, brought out so many aspects of natural history and human history. In a field where ignorance has often prevailed, Roe has to be iconoclastic in order to be constructive. If his words are sometimes sharp, his mind is sharper. The one indispensable book on the subject.

RYE, EDGAR. _The Quirt and the Spur_, Chicago, 1909. Rye was in the Fort Griffin, Texas, country when buffalo hunters dominated it. OP.

SCHULTZ, JAMES WILLARD. _Apauk, Caller of Buffalo_, New York, 1916. OP. Whether fiction or nonfiction, as claimed by the author, this book realizes the relationships between Plains Indian and buffalo.

WEEKES, MARY. _The Last Buffalo Hunter_ (as told by Norbert Welsh), New York, 1939. OP. The old days recalled with upspringing sympathy. Canada--but buffaloes and buffalo hunters were pretty much the same everywhere.

West Texas Historical Association (Abilene, Texas) _Year Books_. Reminiscences and articles, _passim_.

WILLIAMS, O. W. A privately printed letter of eight unnumbered pages, dated from Fort Stockton, Texas, June 30, 1930, containing the best description of a buffalo stampede that I have encountered. It is reproduced in Dobie's _On the Open Range_.

28. Bears and Bear Hunters

THE BEAR, whether black or grizzly, is a great American citizen. Think of how many children have been put to sleep with bear stories! Facts about the animal are fascinating; the effect he has had on the minds of human beings associated with him transcends naturalistic facts. The tree on which Daniel Boone carved the naked fact that here he "Killed A. Bar In the YEAR 1760" will never die. Davy Crockett killed 105 bars in one season, and his reputation as a bar hunter, plus ability to tell about his exploits, sent him to Congress. He had no other reason for going. The grizzly was the hero of western tribes of Indians from Alaska on down into the Sierra Madre. Among western white men who met him, occasionally in death, the grizzly inspired a mighty saga, the cantos of which lie dispersed in homely chronicles and unrecorded memories as well as in certain vivid narratives by Ernest Thompson Seton, Hittell's John Capen Adams, John G. Neihardt, and others.

For all that, neither the black bear nor the grizzly has been amply conceived of as an American character. The conception must include a vast amount of folklore. In a chapter on "Bars and Bar Hunters" in _On the Open Range_ and in "Juan Oso" and "Under the Sign of Ursa Major," chapters of _Tongues of the Monte_, I have indicated the nature of this dispersed epic in folk tales.

In many of the books listed under "Nature; Wild Life; Naturalists" and "Mountain Men" the bear "walks like a man."

ALTER, J. CECIL. _James Bridger_, Salt Lake City, 1922 reprinted by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Contains several versions of the famous Hugh Glass bear story.

HITTELL, THEODORE H. _The Adventures of John Capen Adams_, 1860; reprinted 1911, New York. OP. Perhaps no man has lived who knew grizzlies better than Adams. A rare personal narrative.

MILLER, JOAQUIN. _True Bear Stories_, Chicago, 1900. OP. Truth questionable in places; interest guaranteed.

MILLER, LEWIS B. _Saddles and Lariats_, Boston, 1909. OP. The chapter "In a Grizzly's Jaws" is a wonderful bear story.

MILLS, ENOS A. _The Grizzly, Our Greatest Wild Animal_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1919. Some naturalists have accused Mills of having too much imagination. He saw much and wrote vividly.

NEIHARDT, JOHN G. _The Song of Hugh Glass_, New York, 1915. An epic in vigorous verse of the West's most famous man-and-bear story. This imagination-rousing story has been told over and over, by J. Cecil Alter in _James Bridger_, by Stanley Vestal in _Mountain Men_, and by other writers.

ROOSEVELT, THEODORE. _Hunting Adventures_ in the {illust. caption = Charles M. Russell, in _Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage_ by Carrie Adell Strahorn (1915 ) _West_ (1885) and _The Wilderness Hunter_ (1893)--books reprinted in parts or wholly under varying titles. Several narratives of hunts intermixed with baldfaced facts.

SETON, ERNEST THOMPSON. _The Biography of a Grizzly_, 1900; now published by Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York. _Monarch, the Big Bear of Tallac_, 1904. Graphic narratives.

SKINNER, M. P. _Bears in the Yellowstone_, Chicago, 1925. OP. A naturalist's rounded knowledge, pleasantly told.

STEVENS, MONTAGUE. _Meet Mr. Grizzly_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1943. Montague Stevens graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1881 and came to New Mexico to ranch. As respects deductions on observed data, his book is about the most mature yet published by a ranchman. Goodnight experienced more, had a more ample nature, but he lacked the perspective, the mental training, to know what to make of his observations. Another English rancher, R. B. Townshend, had perspective and charm but was not a scientific observer. So far as sense of smell goes, _Meet Mr. Grizzly_ is as good as W. H. Hudson's _A Hind in Richmond Park_. On the nature and habits of grizzly bears, it is better than _The Grizzly_ by Enos Mills.

WRIGHT, WILLIAM H. _The Grizzly Bear: The Narrative of a Hunter-Naturalist, Historical, Scientific and Adventurous_, New York, 1928. OP. This is not only the richest and justest book published on the grizzly; it is among the best books of the language on specific mammals. Wright had a passion for bears, for their preservation, and for arousing informed sympathy in other people. Yet he did not descend to propaganda. _His The Black Bear_, London, n.d., is good but no peer to his work on the grizzly. Also OP.

29. Coyotes, Lobos, and Panthers

I SEPARATE COYOTES, lobos, and panthers from the mass of animals because they, along with bears, have made such an imprint on human imagination. White-tailed deer are far more common and more widely dispersed. Men, women also, by the tens of thousands go out with rifles every fall in efforts to get near them; but the night-piercing howl and the cunning ways of the coyote, the panther's track and the rumor of his scream have inspired more folk tales than all the deer.

Lore and facts about these animals are dispersed in many books not classifiable under natural history. Lewis and Clark and nearly all the other chroniclers of Trans-Mississippi America set down much on wild life. James Pike's _Scout and Ranger_ details the manner in which, he says, a panther covered him up alive, duplicating a fanciful and delightful tale in Gerstaecker's _Wild Sports in the Far West_. James B. O'Neil concludes _They Die but Once_ with some "Bedtime Stories" that--almost necessarily--bring in a man-hungry panther.

COYOTES AND LOBOS

The two full-length books on Brother Coyote listed below specify most of the printed literature on the animal. (He is "Brother" in Mexican tales and I feel much more brotherly toward him than I feel toward character assassins in political power.) It would require another book to catalogue in detail all the writings that include folk tales about Don Coyote. Ethnologists and scientific folklorists recognize what they call "the Coyote Circle" in the folklore of many tribes of Indians. Morris Edward Opler in _Myths and Legends of the Lipan Apache Indians_, 1940, and in _Myths and Tales of the Chiricahua Apache Indians_, 1942 (both issued by the American Folklore Society, New York) treats fully of this cycle. Numerous tales that belong to the cycle are included by J. Gilbert McAllister, an anthropologist who writes as a humanist, in his extended collection, "Kiowa-Apache Tales," in _The Sky Is My Tipi_, edited by Mody C. Boatright for the Texas Folklore Society (Publication XXII), Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1949.

Literary retellers of Indian coyote folk tales have been many. The majority of retellers from western Indians include Coyote. One of the very best is Frank B. Linderman, in _Indian Why Stories_ and _Indian Old-Man Stories_. These titles are substantive: _Old Man Coyote_ by Clara Kern Bayliss (New York, 1908, OP), _Coyote Stories_ by Mourning Dove (Caldwell, Idaho, 1934, OP); _Don Coyote_ by Leigh Peck (Boston, 1941) gets farther away from the Indian, is more juvenile. The _Journal of American Folklore_ and numerous Mexican books have published hundreds of coyote folk tales from Mexico. Among the most pleasingly told are _Picture Tales frown Mexico_ by Dan Storm, 1941 (Lippincott, Philadelphia). The first two writers listed below bring in folklore.

CUSHING, FRANK HAMILTON. _Zuni Breadstuff_, Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York, 1920. This extraordinary book, one of the most extraordinary ever written on a particular people, is not made up of coyote lore alone. In it the coyote becomes a character of dignity and destiny, and the telling is epic in dignity as well as in prolongation. Frank Hamilton Cushing was a genius; his sympathy, insight, knowledge, and mastery of the art of writing enabled him to reveal the spirit of the Zuni Indians as almost no other writer has revealed the spirit of any other tribe. Their attitude toward Coyote is beautifully developed. Cushing's _Zuni Folk Tales_ (Knopf, New York, 1901, 1931) is climactic on "tellings" about Coyote.

DOBIE, J. FRANK. _The Voice of the Coyote_, Little, Brown, Boston, 1949. Not only the coyote but his effect on human imagination and ecological relationships. Natural history and folklore; many tales from factual trappers as well as from Mexican and Indian folk. This is a strange book in some ways. If the author had quit at the end of the first chapter, which is on coyote voicings and their meaning to varied listeners, he would still have said something. The book includes some, but by no means all, of the material on the subject in _Coyote Wisdom_ (Publication XIV of the Texas Folklore Society, 1938) edited by J. Frank Dobie and now distributed by Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas.

GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Wolves and Wolf Nature, in _Trail and Camp-Fire_, New York, 1897. This long chapter is richer in facts about the coyote than anything published prior to _The Voice of the Coyote_, which borrows from it extensively.

LOFBERG, LILA, and MALCOLMSON, DAVID. _Sierra Outpost_, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1941. An extraordinary detailment of the friendship between two people, isolated by snow high in the California Sierras, and three coyotes. Written with fine sympathy, minute in observations.

MATHEWS, JOHN JOSEPH. _Talking to the Moon_, University of Chicago Press, 1945. A wise and spiritual interpretation of the black-jack country of eastern Oklahoma, close to the Osages, in which John Joseph Mathews lives. Not primarily about coyotes, the book illuminates them more than numerous books on particular animals illuminate their subjects.

MURIE, ADOLPH. _Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone_, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C., 1940. An example of strict science informed by civilized humanity. _The Wolves of Mount McKinley_, United States Government Printing Of ice, Washington, D. C., 1944. Murie's combination of prolonged patience, science, and sympathy behind the observations has never been common. His ecological point of view is steady. Highly interesting reading.

YOUNG, STANLEY PAUL (with Edward A. Goldman). _The Wolves of North America_, American Wildlife Institute, Washington, D. C., 1944. Full information, full bibliography, without narrative power. _Sketches of American Wildlife_, Monumental Press, Baltimore, 1946. This slight book contains pleasant chapters on the Puma, Wolf, Coyote, Antelope and other animals characteristic of the West. (With Hartley H. T. Jackson) _The Clever Coyote_, Stackpole, Harrisburg, Pa., and Wildlife Management Institute, Washington, D. C., 1951. Emphasis upon the economic status and control of the species, an extended classification of subspecies, and a full bibliography make this book and Dobie's _The Voice of the Coyote_ complemental to each other rather than duplicative.

PANTHERS

Anybody who so wishes may call them mountain lions. Where there were Negro mammies, white children were likely to be haunted in the night by fear of ghosts. Otherwise, for some children of the South and West, no imagined terror of the night equaled the panther's scream. The Anglo-American lore pertaining to the panther is replete with stories of attacks on human beings. Indian and Spanish lore, clear down to where W. H. Hudson of the pampas heard it, views the animal as _un amigo de los cristianos_--a friend of man. The panther is another animal as interesting for what people associated with him have taken to be facts as for the facts themselves.

BARKER, ELLIOTT S. _When the Dogs Barked `Treed'_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1946. Mainly on mountain lions, but firsthand observations on other predatory animals also. Before he became state game warden, the author was for years with the United States Forest Service.

HIBBEN, FRANK C. _Hunting American Lions_, New York, 1948; reprinted by University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. Mr. Hibben considers hunting panthers and bears a terribly dangerous business that only intrepid heroes like him-self would undertake. Sometimes in this book, but more awesomely in _Hunting American Bears_, he manages to out-zane Zane Grey, who had to warn his boy scout readers and puerile-minded readers of added years that _Roping Lions in the Grand Canyon_ is true in contrast to the fictional _Young Lion Hunter_, which uses some of the same material.

HUDSON, W. H. _The Naturalist in La Plata_, New York, 1892. A chapter in this book entitled "The Puma, or Lion of America" provoked an attack from Theodore Roosevelt (in _Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter_); but it remains the most delightful narrative-essay yet written on the subject.

YOUNG, STANLEY PAUL, and GOLDMAN, EDWARD A. _The Puma, Mysterious American Cat_, American Wildlife Institute, Washington, D. C., 1946. Scientific, liberal with information of human interest, bibliography. We get an analysis of the panther's scream but it does not curdle the blood.

{illust}

30. Birds and Wild Flowers

NEARLY EVERYBODY ENJOYS to an extent the singing of birds and the colors of flowers; to the majority, however, the enjoyment is casual, generalized, vague, in the same category as that derived from a short spell of prattling by a healthy baby. Individuals who study birds and native flora experience an almost daily refreshment of the spirit and growth of the intellect. For them the world is an unending Garden of Delight and a hundred-yard walk down a creek that runs through town or pasture is an exploration. Hardly anything beyond good books, good pictures and music, and good talk is so contributory to the enrichment of life as a sympathetic knowledge of the birds, wild flowers, and other native fauna and flora around us.

The books listed are dominantly scientific. Some include keys to identification. Once a person has learned to use the key for identifying botanical or ornithological species, he can spend the remainder of his life adding to his stature.

BIRDS

BAILEY, FLORENCE MERRIAM. _Birds of New Mexico_, 1928. OP. Said by those who know to be at the top of all state bird books. Much on habits.

BEDICHEK, ROY. _Adventures with a Texas Naturalist_ (1947) and _Karankaway Country_ (1950), Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y. These are books of essays on various aspects of nature, but nowhere else can one find an equal amount of penetrating observation on chimney swifts, Inca doves, swallows, golden eagles, mockingbirds, herons, prairie chickens, whooping cranes, swifts, scissortails, and some other birds. As Bedichek writes of them they become integrated with all life.

BRANDT, HERBERT. _Arizona and Its Bird Life_, Bird Research Foundation, Cleveland, 1951. This beautiful, richly illustrated volume of 525 pages lives up to its title; the birds belong to the Arizona country, and with them we get pines, mesquites, cottonwoods, John Slaughter's ranch, the northward-flowing San Pedro, and many other features of the land. Herbert Brandt's _Texas Bird Adventures_, illustrated by George Miksch Sutton (Cleveland, 1940), is more on the Big Bend country and ranch country to the north than on birds, though birds are here.

DAWSON, WILLIAM LEON. _The Birds of California_, San Diego, etc., California, 1923. OP. Four magnificent volumes, full in illustrations, special observations on birds, and scientific data.

DOBIE, J. FRANK, who is no more of an ornithologist than he is a geologist, specialized on an especially characteristic bird of the Southwest and gathered its history, habits, and folklore into a long article: "The Roadrunner in Fact and Folklore," in _In the Shadow of History_, Publication XV of the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1939. OP. "Bob More: Man and Bird Man," _Southwest Review_, Dallas, Vol. XXVII, No. 1 (Autumn, 1941).

NICE, MARGARET MORSE. _The Birds of Oklahoma_, Norman, 1931. OP. United States Biological Survey publication.

OBERHOLSER, HARRY CHURCH. The Birds of Texas in manuscript form. "A stupendous work, the greatest of its genre, by the nation's outstanding ornithologist, who has been fifty years making it." The quotation is condensed from an essay by Roy Bedichek in the _Southwest Review_, Dallas, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1 (Winter, 1953). Maybe some day some man or woman with means will see the light of civilized patriotism and underwrite the publication of these great volumes. Patriotism that does not act to promote the beautiful, the true, and the good had better pipe down.

PETERSON, ROGER TORY. _A Field Guide to Western Birds_ (1941) and _A Field Guide to the Birds_ (birds of the eastern United States, revised 1947), Houghton Mifflin, Boston. These are standard guides for identification. The range, habits, and characteristics of each bird are summarized.

SIMMONS, GEORGE FINLEY. _Birds of the Austin Region_, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1925. A very thorough work, including migratory as well as nesting species.

SUTTON, GEORGE MIKSCH. _Mexican Birds_, illustrated with water-color and pen-and-ink drawings by the author, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1951. The main part of this handsome book is a personal narrative--pleasant to read even by one who is not a bird man--of discovery in Mexico. To it is appended a resume of Mexican bird life for the use of other seekers. Sutton's _Birds in the Wilderness: Adventures of an Ornithologist_ (Macmillan, New York, 1936) contains essays on pet roadrunners, screech owls, and other congenial folk of the Big Bend of Texas. _The Birds of Brewster County, Texas_, in collaboration with Josselyn Van Tyne, is a publication of the Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1937.

_Wild Turkey_. Literature on this national bird is enormous. Among books I name first _The Wild Turkey and Its Hunting_, by Edward A. McIlhenny, New York, 1914. OP. McIlhenny was a singular man. His family settled on Avery Island, Louisiana, in 1832; he made it into a famous refuge for wild fowls. The memories of individuals of a family long established on a country estate go back several lifetimes. In two books of Negro folklore and in _The Alligator's Life History_, McIlhenny wrote as an inheritor. Initially, he was a hunter-naturalist, but scientific enough to publish in the _Auk_ and the _Journal of Heredity_. Age, desire for knowledge, and practice in the art of living dimmed his lust for hunting and sharpened his interest in natural history. His book on the wild turkey, an extension into publishable form of a manuscript from a civilized Alabama hunter, is delightful and illuminative reading.

_The Wild Turkey of Virginia_, by Henry S. Mosby and Charles O. Handley, published by the Commission of Game and Inland Fisheries of Virginia, Richmond, 1943, is written from the point of view of wild life management. It contains an extensive bibliography. Less technical is _The American Wild Turkey_, by Henry E. Davis, Small Arms Technical Company, Georgetown, South Carolina, 1949. No strain, or subspecies, of the wild turkey is foreign to any other, but human blends in J. Stokley Ligon, naturalist, are unique. The title of his much-in-little book is _History and Management of Merriam's Wild Turkey_, New Mexico Game and Fish Commission, through the University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1946.

WILD FLOWERS AND GRASSES

The scientific literature on botany of western America is extensive. The list that follows is for laymen as much as for botanists.

BENSON, LYMAN, and DARROW, ROBERT A. _A Manual of Southwestern Desert Trees and Shrubs_, Biological Science Bulletin No. 6, University of Arizona, Tucson, 1944. A thorough work of 411 pages, richly illustrated, with general information added to scientific description.

CARR, WILLIAM HENRY. _Desert Parade: A Guide to Southwestern Desert Plants and Wildlife_, Viking, New York, 1947.

CLEMENTS, FREDERIC E. and EDITH S. _Rocky Mountain Flowers_, H. W. Wilson, New York, 1928. Scientific description, with glossary of terms and key for identification.

COULTER, JOHN M. _Botany of Western Texas_, United States Department of Agriculture, Washington, 1891-94. OP. Nothing has appeared during the past sixty years to take the place of this master opus.

GEISER, SAMUEL WOOD. _Horticulture and Horticulturists in Early Texas_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1945. Historical-scientific, more technical than the author's _Naturalists of the Frontier_.

JAEGER, EDMUND C. _Desert Wild Flowers_, Stanford University Press, California, 1940, revised 1947. Scientific but designed for use by any intelligent inquirer.

LUNDELL, CYRUS L., and collaborators. _Flora of Texas_, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1942-. A "monumental" work, highly technical, being published part by part.

MCKELVEY, SUSAN DELANO. _Yuccas of the Southwestern United States_, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1938. Definitive work in two volumes.

_Range Plant Handbook_, prepared by the Forest Service of the United States Department of Agriculture. United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1937. A veritable encyclopedia, illustrated.

SCHULZ, ELLEN D. _Texas Wild Flowers_, Chicago, 1928. Good as a botanical guide and also for human uses; includes lore on many plants. OP. _Cactus Culture_, Orange Judd, New York, 1932. Now in revised edition.

SILVIUS, W. A. _Texas Grasses_, published by the author, San Antonio, 1933. A monument, of 782 illustrated pages, to a lifetime's disinterested following of knowledge "like a star."

STEVENS, WILLIAM CHASE. _Kansas Wild Flowers_, University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, 1948. This is more than a state book, and the integration of knowledge, wisdom, and appreciation of flower life with botanical science makes it appeal to layman as well as to botanist. 463 pages, 774 illustrations. Applicable to the whole plains area.

STOCKWELL, WILLIAM PALMER, and BREAZEALE, LUCRETIA. _Arizona Cacti_, Biological Science Bulletin No. 1, University of Arizona, Tucson, 1933. Beautifully illustrated.

THORNBER, JOHN JAMES, and BONKER, FRANCES. _The Fantastic Clan: The Cactus Family_, New York, 1932. OP.

THORP, BENJAMIN CARROLL. _Texas Range Grasses_, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1952. A survey of 168 species of grasses, their adaptability to soils and regions, and their values for grazing. Beautifully illustrated and printed, but no index.

WHITEHOUSE, EULA. _Texas Wild Flowers in Natural Colors_, 1936; republished 1948 in Dallas. OP. Toward 200 flowers are pictured in colors, each in conjunction with descriptive material. The finding lists are designed to enable novices to identify flowers. A charming book.

{illust. caption = Paisano (roadrunner) means fellow-countryman}

31. Negro Folk Songs and Tales

WEST OF A WAVERING line along the western edge of the central parts of Texas and Oklahoma the Negro is not an important social or cultural element of the Southwest, just as the modern Indian hardly enters into Texas life at all and the Mexican recedes to the east. Negro folk songs and tales of the Southwest have in treatment been blended with those of the South. Dorothy Scarborough's _On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs_ (1925, OP) derives mainly from Texas, but in making up the body of a Negro song, Miss Scarborough says, "You may find one bone in Texas, one in Virginia and one in Mississippi." Leadbelly, a guitar player equally at home in the penitentiaries of Texas and Louisiana, furnished John A. and Alan Lomax with _Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly_, New York, 1936 (OP). The Lomax anthologies, _American Ballads and Folk Songs_, 1934, and _Our Singing Country_, 1941 (Macmillan, New York) and Carl Sandburg's _American Songbag_ (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1927) all give the Negro of the Southwest full representation.

Three books of loveliness by R. Emmett Kennedy, _Black Cameos_ (1924), _Mellows_ (1925), and _More Mellows_ (1931) represent Louisiana Negroes. All are OP. An excellent all-American collection is James Weldon Johnson's _Book of American Negro Spirituals_, Viking, New York, 1940. Bibliographies and lists of other books will be found in _The Negro and His Songs_ (1925, OP) and _Negro Workaday Songs_, by Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1926, and in _American Negro Folk-Songs_, by Newman I. White, Cambridge, 1928.

A succinct guide to Negro lore is _American Folk Song and Folk Lore: A Regional Bibliography_, by Alan Lomax and Sidney R. Crowell, New York, 1942. OP.

Narrowing the field down to Texas, J. Mason Brewer's "Juneteenth," in _Tone the Bell Easy_, Publication X of the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1932, is outstanding as a collection of tales. In volume after volume the Texas Folklore Society has published collections of Negro songs and tales A. W. Eddins, Martha Emmons, Gates Thomas, and H. B. Parks being principal contributors.

32. Fiction--Including Folk Tales

FROM THE DAYS of the first innocent sensations in Beadle's Dime Novel series, on through Zane Grey's mass production and up to any present-day newsstand's crowded shelf of _Ace High_ and _Flaming Guns_ magazines, the Southwest, along with all the rest of the West, has been represented in a fictional output quantitatively stupendous. Most of it has betrayed rather than revealed life, though not with the contemptible contempt for both audience and subject that characterizes most of Hollywood's pictures on the same times, people, and places. Certain historical aspects of the fictional betrayal of the West may be found in E. Douglas Branch's _The Cowboy and His Interpreters_, in _The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels_, by Albert Johannsen in two magnificent volumes, and in Jay Monaghan's _The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline_ Buntline having been perhaps the most prolific of all Wild West fictionists.

Some "Westerns" have a kind of validity. If a serious reader went through the hundreds of titles produced by William McLeod Raine, Dane Coolidge, Eugene Cunningham,. B. M. Bower, the late Ernest Haycox, and other manufacturers of range novels who have known their West at firsthand, he would find, spottedly, a surprising amount of truth about land and men, a fluency in genuine cowboy lingo, and a respect for the code of conduct. Yet even these novels have added to the difficulty that serious writing in the Western field has in getting a hearing on literary, rather than merely Western, grounds. Any writer of Westerns must, like all other creators, be judged on his own intellectual development. "The Western and Ernest Haycox," by James Fargo, in _Prairie Schooner_, XXVI (Summer, 1952) has something on this subject.

Actualities in the Southwest seem to have stifled fictional creation. No historical novel dealing with Texas history has achieved the drama of the fall of the Alamo or the drawing of the black beans, has presented a character with half the reality of Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, or Sallie Skull, or has captured the flavor inherent in the talk on many a ranch gallery.

Historical fiction dealing with early day Texas is, however, distinctly maturing. As a dramatization of Jim Bowie and the bowie knife, _The Iron Mistress_, by Paul Wellman (Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1951), is the best novel published so far dealing with a figure of the Texas revolution. In _Divine Average_ (Little, Brown, Boston, 1952), Elithe Hamilton Kirkland weaves from her seasoned knowledge of life and from "realities of those violent years in Texas history between 1838 and 1858" a story of human destiny. She reveals the essential nature of Range Templeton more distinctly, more mordantly, than history has revealed the essential nature of Sam Houston or any of his contemporaries. The wife and daughter of Range Templeton are the most plausible women in any historical novel of Texas that I have read. The created world here is more real than the actual.

Among the early tale-tellers of the Southwest are Jeremiah Clemens, who wrote _Mustang Gray_, Mollie E. Moore Davis, of plantation tradition, Mayne Reid, who dared convey real information in his romances, Charles W. Webber, a naturalist, and T. B. Thorpe, creator of "The Big Bear of Arkansas."

Fiction that appeared before World War I can hardly be called modern. No fiction is likely to appear, however, that will do better by certain types of western character and certain stages of development in western society than that produced by Bret Harte, with his gamblers; stage drivers, and mining camps; O. Henry with his "Heart of the West" types; Alfred Henry Lewis with his "Wolfville" anecdotes and characters; Owen Wister, whose _Virginian_ remains the classic of cowboy novels without cows; and Andy Adams, whose _Log of a Cowboy_ will be read as long as people want a narrative of cowboys sweating with herds.

The authors listed below are in alphabetical order. Those who seem to me to have a chance to survive are not exactly in that order.

FRANK APPLEGATE (died 1932) wrote only two books, _Native Tales of New Mexico_ and _Indian Stories from the Pueblos_, but as a delighted and delightful teller of folk tales his place is secure.

MARY AUSTIN seems to be settling down as primarily an expositor. Her novels are no longer read, but the simple tales in _One-Smoke Stories_ (her last book, 1934) and in some nonfiction collections, notably _Lost Borders_ and _The Flock_, do not recede with time.

While the Southwest can hardly claim Willa Cather, of Nebraska, her _Death Comes for the Archbishop_ (1927), which is made out of New Mexican life, is not only the best-known novel concerned with the Southwest but one of the finest of America.

Despite the fact that it is not on the literary map, Will Levington Comfort's _Apache_ (1931) remains for me the most moving and incisive piece of writing on Indians of the Southwest that I have found.

If a teller of folk tales and plotless narratives belongs in this chapter, then J. Frank Dobie should be mentioned for the folk tales in _Coronado's Children, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver_, and _Tongues of the Monte_, also for some of his animal tales in _The Voice of the Coyote_, outlaw and maverick narratives in _The Longhorns_, and "The Pacing White Steed of the Prairies" and other horse stories in _The Mustangs_.

The characters in Harvey Fergusson's _Wolf Song_ (1927) are the Mountain Men of Kit Carson's time, and the city of their soul is rollicky Taos. It is a lusty, swift song of the pristine earth. Fergusson's _The Blood of the Conquerors_ (1931) tackles the juxtaposition of Spanish-Mexican and Anglo-American elements in New Mexico, of which state he is a native. _Grant of Kingdom_ (1850) is strong in wisdom life, vitality of character, and historical values.

FRED GIPSON'S _Hound-Dog Man_ and _The Home Place_ lack the critical attitude toward life present in great fiction but they are as honest and tonic as creek bottom soil and the people in them are genuine.

FRANK GOODWYN'S _The Magic of Limping John_ (New York, 1944, OP) is a coherence of Mexican characters, folk tales, beliefs, and ways in the ranch country of South Texas. There is something of magic in the telling, but Frank Goodwyn has not achieved objective control over imagination or sufficiently stressed the art of writing.

PAUL HORGAN of New Mexico has in _The Return of the Weed_ (short stories), _Far from Cibola_, and other fiction coped with modern life in the past-haunted New Mexico.

OLIVER LAFARGE'S _Laughing Boy_ (1929) grew out of the author's ethnological knowledge of the Navajo Indians. He achieves character.

TOM LEA'S _The Brave Bulls_ (1949) has, although it is a sublimation of the Mexican bullfighting world, Death and Fear of Death for its dominant theme. It may be compared in theme with Stephen Crane's _The Red Badge of Courage_. It is written with the utmost of economy, and is beautiful in its power. _The Wonderful Country_ (1952), a historical novel of the frontier, but emphatically not a "Western," recognizes more complexities of society. Its economy and directness parallel the style of Tom Lea's drawings and paintings, with which both books are illustrated.

_Sundown_, by John Joseph Mathews (1934), goes more profoundly than _Laughing Boy_ into the soul of a young Indian (an Osage) and his people. Its translation of the "long, long thoughts" of the boy and then of "shades of the prison house" closing down upon him is superb writing. The "shades of the prison house" come from oil, with all of the world's coarse thumbs that go with oil.

GEORGE SESSIONS PERRY'S _Hold Autumn in Your Hand_ (1941) incarnates a Texas farm hand too poor "to flag a gut-wagon," but with the good nature, dignity, and independence of the earth itself. _Walls Rise Up_ (1939) is a kind of _Crock of Gold_, both whimsical and earthy, laid on the Brazos River.

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER is as dedicated to artistic perfection as was A. E. Housman. Her output has, therefore, been limited: _Flowering Judas_ (1930, enlarged 1935); _Pale Horse, Pale Rider_ (1939), _The Leaning Tower_ (1944). Her stories penetrate psychology, especially the psychology of a Mexican hacienda, with rare finesse. Her small canvases sublimate the inner realities of men and women. She appeals only to cultivated taste, and to some tastes no other fiction writer in America today is her peer in subtlety.

EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES died in 1934. Most of his novels--distinguished by intricate plots and bright dialogue--had appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_. His finest story is "Paso Por Aqui," published in the volume entitled _Once in the Saddle_ (1927). Gene Rhodes, who has a canyon--on which he ranched--named for him in New Mexico, was an artist; at the same time, he was a man akin to his land and its men. He is the only writer of the range country who has been accorded a biography--_The Hired Man on Horseback_, by May D. Rhodes, his wife. See under "Range Life."

CONRAD RICHTER'S _The Sea of Grass_ (1937) is a kind of prose poem, beautiful and tragic. Lutie, wife of the owner of the grass, is perhaps the most successful creation of a ranch woman that fiction has so far achieved.

DOROTHY SCARBOROUGH'S _The Wind_ (1925) excited the wrath of chambers of commerce and other boosters in West Texas--a tribute to its realism.

_The Grapes of Wrath_, by John Steinbeck (1939), made Okies a word in the American language. Although dated by the Great Depression, its humanity and realism are beyond date. It is among the few good novels produced by America in the first half of the twentieth century.

JOHN W. THOMASON, after fighting as a marine in World War I, wrote _Fix Bayonets_ (1926), followed by _Jeb Stuart_ (1930). A native Texan, he followed the southern tradition rather than the western. _Lone Star Preacher_ (1941) is a strong and sympathetic characterization of Confederate fighting men woven into fictional form.

In _High John the Conqueror_ (Macmillan, 1948) John W. Wilson conveys real feeling for the tragic life of Negro sharecroppers in the Brazos bottoms. He represents the critical awareness of life that has come to modern fiction of the Southwest, in contrast to the sterile action, without creation of character, in most older fiction of the region.

33. Poetry and Drama

"KNOWLEDGE itself is power," Sir Francis Bacon wrote in classical Latin, and in abbreviated form the proverb became a familiar in households and universities alike. But knowledge of what? There is no power in knowledge of mediocre verse.

I had rather flunk my Wasserman test Than read a poem by Edgar A. Guest.

The power of great poetry lies not in knowledge of it but in assimilation of it. Most talk about poetry is vacuous. Poetry can pass no power into any human being unless it itself has power--power of beauty, truth, wit, humor, pathos, satire, worship, and other attributes, always through form. No poor poetry is worth reading. Taste for the best makes the other kind insipid.

Compared with America's best poetry, most poetry of the Southwest is as mediocre as American poetry in the mass is as compared with the great body of English poetry between Chaucer and Masefield. Yet mediocre poetry is not so bad as mediocre sculpture. The mediocre in poetry is merely fatuous; in sculpture, it is ugly. Generations to come will have to look at Coppini's monstrosity in front of the Alamo; it can't rot down or burn up. Volumes of worthless verse, most of it printed at the expense of the versifiers, hardly come to sight, and before long they disappear from existence except for copies religiously preserved in public libraries.

Weak fiction goes the same way. But a good deal of very bad prose in the nonfiction field has some value. In an otherwise dull book there may be a solitary anecdote, an isolated observation on a skunk, a single gesture of some human being otherwise highly unimportant, one salty phrase, a side glimpse into the human comedy. If poetry is not good, it is positively nothing.

The earliest poet of historical consequence the only form of his poetical consequence--of the Southwest was Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. He led the Texas cavalry at San Jacinto, became president of the Republic of Texas, organized the futile Santa Fe Expedition, gathered up six volumes of notes and letters for a history of Texas that might have been as raw-meat realistic as anything in Zola or Tolstoy. Then as a poet he reached his climax in "The Daughter of Mendoza"--a graceful but moonshiny imitation of Tom Moore and Lord Byron. Perhaps it is better for the weak to imitate than to try to be original.

It would not take one more than an hour to read aloud all the poetry of the Southwest that could stand rereading. At the top of all I should place Fay Yauger's "Planter's Charm," published in a volume of the same title. With it belongs "The Hired Man on Horseback," by Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a long poem of passionate fidelity to his own decent kind of men, with power to ennoble the reader, and with the form necessary to all beautiful composition. This is the sole and solitary piece of poetry to be found in all the myriads of rhymes classed as "cowboy poetry." I'd want Stanley Vestal's "Fandango," in a volume of the same title. Margaret Bell Houston's "Song from the Traffic," which takes one to the feathered mesquites and the bluebonnets, might come next. Begging pardon of the perpetually palpitating New Mexico lyricists, I would skip most of them, except for bits of Mary Austin, Witter Bynner, Haniel Long, and maybe somebody I don't know, and go to George Sterling's "Father Coyote"--in California. Probably I would come back to gallant Phil LeNoir's "Finger of Billy the Kid," written while he was dying of tuberculosis in New Mexico. I wouldn't leave without the swift, brilliantly economical stanzas that open the ballad of "Sam Bass," and a single line, "He came of a solitary race," in the ballad of "Jesse James."

Several other poets have, of course, achieved something for mortals to enjoy and be lifted by. Their work has been sifted into various anthologies. The best one is_ Signature of the Sun: Southwest Verse, 1900-1950_, selected and edited by Mabel Major and T. M. Pearce, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950. Two other anthologies are _Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp_, by John A. Lomax, 1919, reprinted in 1950 by Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York; _The Road to Texas_, by Whitney Montgomery, Kaleidograph, Dallas, 1940. Montgomery's Kaleidograph Press has published many volumes by southwestern poets. Somebody who has read them all and has read all the poets represented, without enough of distillation, in _Signature of the Sun_ could no doubt be juster on the subject than I am.

Like historical fiction, drama of the Southwest has been less dramatic than actuality and less realistic than real characters. Lynn Riggs of Oklahoma, author of _Green Grow the Lilacs_, has so far been the most successful dramatist.

34. Miscellaneous Interpreters and Institutions

ARTISTS

ART MAY BE SUBSTANTIVE, but more than being its own excuse for being, it lights up the land it depicts, shows people what is significant, cherishable in their own lives and environments. Thus Peter Hurd of New Mexico has revealed windmills, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri has elevated mules. Nature may not literally follow art, but human eyes follow art and literature in recognizing nature.

The history of art in the Southwest, if it is ever rightly written, will not bother with the Italian "Holy Families" imported by agent-guided millionaires trying to buy exclusiveness. It will begin with clay (Indian pottery), horse hair (vaquero weaving), hide (vaquero plaiting), and horn (backwoods carving). It will note Navajo sand painting and designs in blankets.

Charles M. Russell's art has been characterized in the chapter on "Range Life." He had to paint, and the Old West was his life. More versatile was his contemporary Frederic Remington, author of _Pony Tracks, Crooked Trails_, and other books, and prolific illustrator of Owen Wister, Theodore Roosevelt, Alfred Henry Lewis, and numerous other writers of the West. Not so well known as these two, but rising in estimation, was Charles Schreyvogle. He did not write; his best-known pictures are reproduced in a folio entitled _My Bunkie and Others_. Remington, Russell, and Schreyvogle all did superb sculptoring in bronze. One of the finest pieces of sculpture in the Southwest is "The Seven Mustangs" by A. Phimister Proctor, in front of the Texas Memorial Museum at Austin.

Among contemporary artists, Ross Santee and Will James (died, 1942) have illustrated their own cow country books, some of which are listed under "Range Life" and "Horses." William R. Leigh, author of _The Western Pony_, is a significant painter of the range. Edward Borein of Santa Barbara, California, has in scores of etchings and a limited amount of book illustrations "documented" many phases of western life. Buck Dunton of Taos illustrated also. His lithographs and paintings of wild animals, trappers, cowboys, and Indians seem secure.

I cannot name and evaluate modern artists of the Southwest. They are many, and the excellence of numbers of them is nationally recognized. Many articles have been written about the artists who during this century have lived around Taos and painted that region of the Southwest. Some of the better-known names are Ernest L. Blumenschein, Oscar Berninghaus, Ward Lockwood, B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ila McAfee, Barbara Latham Cook, Howard Cook. Artists thrive in Arizona, Oklahoma, and Texas as well as in New Mexico. Tom Lea, of El Paso, may be quitting painting and drawing to spend the remainder of his life in writing. Perhaps he himself does not know. Jerry Bywaters, who is at work on the history of art in the Southwest, has about quit producing to direct the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Alexandre Hogue gives his strength to teaching art in Tulsa University. Exhibitions, not commentators, are the revealers of art.

A few books, all expensive, reproduce the art of certain depicters of the West and Southwest. _Etchings of the West_, by Edward Borein, and _The West of Alfred Jacob Miller_ have been noted in other chapters (consult Index). Other recent art works are: _Peter Hurd: Portfolio of Landscapes and Portraits_, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1950; _Gallery of Western Paintings_, edited by Raymond Carlson, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1951 (unsatisfactory reproduction); _Frederic Remington, Artist of the Old West_, by Harold McCracken, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1947 (biography and check list with many reproductions); _Portrait of the Old West_, by Harold McCracken, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1952 (samplings of numerous artists).

In February, 1946, Robert Taft of the University of Kansas began publishing in the _Kansas Historical Quarterly_ chapters, richly illustrated in black and white, in "The Pictorial Record of the Old West." The book to be made from these chapters will have a historical validity missing in most picture books.

MAGAZINES

The leading literary magazine of the region is the _Southwest Review_, published quarterly at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. The _New Mexico Quarterly_, published by the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, the _Arizona Quarterly_, published by the University of Arizona at Tucson the _Colorado Quarterly_, published by the University of Colorado at Boulder, and _Prairie Schooner_, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, are excellent exponents of current writing in the Southwest and West. All these magazines are liberated from provincialism.

HISTORICAL SOCIETIES

Every state in the Southwest has a state historical organization that publishes. The oldest and most productive of these, outside of California, is the Texas State Historical Association, with headquarters at Austin.

HISTORIES

A majority of the state histories of the Southwest have been written with the hope of securing an adoption for school use. It would require a blacksnake whip to make most juve-niles, or adults either, read these productions, as devoid of picturesqueness, life-blood, and intellectual content as so many concrete slabs. No genuinely humanistic history of the Southwest has ever been printed. There are good factual histories--and a history not based on facts can't possibly be good--but the lack of synthesis, of intelligent evaluations, of imagination, of the seeing eye and portraying hand is too evident. The stuff out of which history is woven--diaries, personal narratives, county histories, chronicles of ranches and trails, etc.--has been better done than history itself.

FOLKLORE

Considered scientifically, folklore belongs to science and not to the humanities. When folk and fun are not scienced out of it, it is song and story and in literature is mingled with other ingredients of life and art, as exampled by the folklore in _Hamlet_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. In "Indian Culture," "Spanish-Mexican Strains," "Backwoods Life and Humor," "Cowboy Songs," "The Bad Man Tradition," "Bears," "Coyotes," "Negro Folk Songs and Tales," and other chapters of this _Guide_ numerous books charged with folklore have been listed.

The most active state society of its kind in America has been the Texas Folklore Society, with headquarters at the University of Texas, Austin.