Come a ti yi yoopee
Ti yi ya!"
O. Henry's ranch experiences in Texas were largely confined to a sheep ranch. The setting of his "Last of the Troubadours" is a sheep ranch. I nominate it as the best range story in American fiction.
"Cowboy Songs" and "Horses" are separate chapters following this. The literature cited in them is mostly range literature, although precious little in all the songs rises to the status of poetry. A considerable part of the literature listed under "Texas Rangers" and "The Bad Man Tradition" bears on range life.
ABBOTT, E. C., and SMITH, HELENA HUNTINGTON. We Pointed Them North, New York, 1939. Abbott, better known as Teddy Blue, used to give his address as Three Duce Ranch, Gilt Edge, Montana. Helena Huntington Smith, who actually wrote and arranged his reminiscences, instead of currying him down and putting a checkrein on him, spurred him in the flanks and told him to swaller his head. He did. This book is franker about the women a rollicky cowboy was likely to meet in town than all the other range books put together. The fact that Teddy Blue's wife was a half-breed Indian, daughter of Granville Stuart, and that Indian women do not object to the truth about sex life may account in part for his frankness. The book is mighty good reading. OP.
ADAMS, ANDY. The Log of a Cowboy (1903). In 1882, at the age of twenty-three, Andy Adams came to Texas from Indiana. For about ten years he traded horses and drove them up the trail. He knew cattle people and their ranges from Brownsville to Caldwell, Kansas. After mining for another decade, he began to write. If all other books on trail driving were destroyed, a reader could still get a just and authentic conception of trail men, trail work, range cattle, cow horses, and the cow country in general from The Log of a Cowboy. It is a novel without a plot, a woman, character development, or sustained dramatic incidents; yet it is the classic of the occupation. It is a simple, straightaway narrative that takes a trail herd from the Rio Grande to the Canadian line, the hands talking as naturally as cows chew cuds, every page illuminated by an easy intimacy with the life. Adams wrote six other books. The Outlet, A Texas Matchmaker, Cattle Brands, and Reed Anthony, Cowman all make good reading. Wells Brothers and The Ranch on the Beaver are stories for boys. I read them with pleasure long after I was grown. All but The Log of a Cowboy are OP, published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
ADAMS, RAMON F. Cowboy Lingo, Boston, 1936. A dictionary of cowboy words, figures of speech, picturesque phraseology, slang, etc., with explanations of many factors peculiar to range life. OP. Western Words, University of Oklahoma Press, 1944. A companion book. Come an' Get It, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1952. Informal exposition of chuck wagon cooks.
ALDRIDGE, REGINALD. Ranch Notes, London, 1884. Aldridge, an educated Englishman, got into the cattle business before, in the late eighties, it boomed itself flat. His book is not important, but it is maybe a shade better than Ranch Life in Southern Kansas and the Indian Territory by Benjamin S. Miller, New York, 1896. Aldridge and Miller were partners, and each writes kindly about the other.
ALLEN, JOHN HOUGHTON. Southwest, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1952. A chemical compound of highly impressionistic autobiographic nonfiction and highly romantic fiction and folk tales. The setting is a ranch of Mexican tradition in the lower border country of Texas, also saloons and bawdy houses of border towns. Vaqueros and their work in the brush are intensely vivid. The author has a passion for superlatives and for "a joyous cruelty, a good cruelty, a young cruelty."
ARNOLD, OREN, and HALE, J. P. Hot Irons, Macmillan, New York, 1940. Technique and lore of cattle brands. OP.
AUSTIN, MARY. The Flock, Boston, 1906, OP. Mary Austin saw the meanings of things; she was a creator. Very quietly she sublimated life into the literature of pictures and emotions.