Australian ranching is not foreign to American ranching. The best book on the subject that I have found is Pastures New, by R. V. Billis and A. S. Kenyon, London, 1930.
BARNARD, EVAN G. ("Parson"). A Rider of the Cherokee Strip, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1936. Savory with little incidents and cowboy humor. OP.
BARNES, WILL C. Tales from the X-Bar Horse Camp, Chicago, 1920. OP. Good simple narratives. Apaches and Longhorns, Los Angeles, 1941. Autobiography. OP. Western Grazing Grounds and Forest Ranges, Chicago, 1913. OP. Governmentally factual. Barnes was in the U.S. Forest Service and was informed.
BARROWS, JOHN R. Ubet, Caldwell, Idaho, 1934. Excellent on Northwest; autobiographical. OP.
BECHDOLT, FREDERICK R. Tales of the Old Timers, New York, 1924. Vivid, economical stories of "The Warriors of the Pecos" (Billy the Kid and the troubles on John Chisum's ranch-empire), of Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch in their Wyoming hide-outs, of the way frontier Texans fought Mexicans and Comanches over the open ranges. Research clogs the style of many historians; perhaps it is just as well that Bechdolt did not search more extensively into the arcana of footnotes. OP.
BOATRIGHT, MODY C. Tall Tales from Texas Cow Camps, Dallas, 1934. The tales are tall all right and true to cows that never saw a milk bucket. OP. Reprinted 1946 by Haldeman-Julius, Girard, Kansas.
BOREIN, EDWARD. Etchings of the West, edited by Edward S. Spaulding, Santa Barbara, California, 1950. OP. A very handsome folio; primarily a reproduction of sketches, many of which are on range subjects. Ed Borein tells more in them than hundreds of windbags have told in tens of thousands of pages. They are beautiful and authentic, even if they are what post-impressionists call "documentary." Believers in the True Faith say now that Leonardo da Vinci is documentary in his painting of the Lord's Supper. Ed Borein was a great friend of Charlie Russell's but not an imitator. Etchings of the West will soon be among the rarities of Western books.
BOWER, B. M. Chip of the Flying U, New York, 1904. Charles Russell illustrated this and three other Bower novels. Contrary to his denial, he is supposed to have been the prototype for Chip. A long time ago I read Chit of the Flying U and The Lure of the Dim Trails and thought them as good as Eugene Manlove Rhodes's stories. That they have faded almost completely out of memory is a commentary on my memory; just the same, a character as well named as Chip should, if he have substance beyond his name, leave an impression even on weak memories. B. M. Bower was a woman, Bower being the name of her first husband. A Montana cowpuncher named "Fiddle Back" Sinclair was her second, and Robert Ellsworth Cowan became the third. Under the name of Bud Cowan he published a book of reminiscences entitled Range Rider (Garden City, N. Y., 1930). B. M. Bower wrote a slight introduction to it; neither he nor she says anything about being married to the other. In the best of her fiction she is truer to life than he is in a good part of his nonfiction. Her chaste English is partly explained in an autobiographic note contributed to Adventure magazine, December 10, 1924. Her restless father had moved the family from Minnesota to Montana. There, she wrote, he "taught me music and how to draw plans of houses (he was an architect among other things) and to read Paradise Lost and Dante and H. Rider Haggard and the Bible and the Constitution—and my taste has been extremely catholic ever since."
BRANCH, E. DOUGLAS. The Cowboy and His Interpreters, New York, 1926. Useful bibliography on range matters, and excellent criticism of two kinds of fiction writers. OP.
BRATT, JOHN. Trails of Yesterday, Chicago, 1921. John Bratt, twenty-two years old, came to America from England in 1864, went west, and by 1870 was ranching on the Platte. He became a big operator, but his reminiscences, beautifully printed, are stronger on camp cooks and other hired hands than on cattle "kings." Nobody ever heard a cowman call himself or another cowman a king. "Cattle king" is journalese.