Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest, with a Few Observations

by J. Frank Dobie

HOLDEN, W. C. Rollie Burns, Dallas, 1932. Biography of a Plains cowman. OP. The Spur Ranch, Boston, 1934. History of a great Texas ranch. OP.

HORN, TOM. Life of Tom Horn... Written by Himself, together with His Letters and Statements by His Friends, A Vindication. Published (for John C. Coble) by the Louthan Book Company, Denver, 1904. Who wrote the book has been somewhat in debate. John C. Coble's name is signed to the preface attributing full authorship to Horn. Of Pennsylvania background, wealthy and educated, he had employed Horn as a stock detective on his Wyoming ranch. He had the means and ability to see the book through the press. A letter from his wife to me, from Cheyenne, June 21,1926, says that Horn wrote the book. Charles H. Coe, who succeeded Horn as stock detective in Wyoming, says in Juggling a Rope (Pendleton, Oregon, 1927, P. 108), that Horn wrote it. I have a copy, bought from Fred Rosenstock of the Bargain Book Store in Denver, who got it from Hattie Horner Louthan, of Denver also. For years she taught English in the University of Denver, College of Commerce, and is the author of more than one textbook. The Louthan Book Company of Denver was owned by her family. This copy of Tom Horn contains her bookplate. On top of the first page of the preface is written in pencil: "I wrote this—`Ghost wrote.' H. H. L." Then, penciled at the top of the first page of "Closing Word," is "I wrote this."

Glendolene Myrtle Kimmell was a schoolteacher in the country where Tom Horn operated. As her picture shows, she was lush and beautiful. Pages 287-309 print "Miss Kimmell's Statement." She did her best to keep Tom Horn from hanging. She frankly admired him and, it seems to me, loved him. Jay Monaghan, The Legend of Tom Horn, Last of the Bad Men, Indianapolis and New York, 1946, says (p. 267), without discussion or proof, that after Horn was hanged and buried Miss Kimmell was "writing a long manuscript about a Sir Galahad horseman who was `crushed between the grinding stones of two civilizations,' but she never found a publisher who thought her book would sell. It was entitled The True Life of Tom Horn."

The main debate has been over Horn himself. The books about him are not highly important, but they contribute to a spectacular and highly controversial phase of range history, the so-called Johnson County War of Wyoming. Mercer's Banditti of the Plains, Mokler's History of Natrona County, Wyoming, Canton's Frontier Trails, and David's Malcolm Campbell, Sheriff (all listed in this chapter) are primary sources on the subject.

HOUGH, EMERSON. The Story of the Cowboy, New York, 1897. Exposition not nearly so good as Philip Ashton Rollins' The Cowboy. North of 36, New York, 1923. Historical novel of the Chisholm Trail. The best character in it is Old Alamo, lead steer. A young woman owner of the herd trails with it. The success of the romance caused Emerson Hough to advise his friend Andy Adams to put a woman in a novel about trail driving—so Andy Adams told me. Adams replied that a woman with a trail herd would be as useless as a fifth wheel on a wagon and that he would not violate reality by having her. For a devastation of Hough's use of history in North of 36 see the Appendix in Stuart Henry's Conquering Our Great American Plains. Yet the novel does have the right temper.

HOYT, HENRY F. A Frontier Doctor, Boston, 1929. Texas Panhandle and New Mexico during Billy the Kid days. Reminiscences.

HUNT, FRAZIER. Cat Mossman: Last of the Great Cowmen, illustrated by Ross Santee, Hastings House, New York, 1951. Few full-length biographies of big operators among cowmen have been written. This reveals not only Cap Mossman's operations on enormous ranges, but the man.

HUNTER, J. MARVIN (compiler). The Trail Drivers of Texas, two volumes, Bandera, Texas, 1920, 1923. Reprinted in one volume, 1925. All OP. George W. Saunders, founder of the Old Time Trail Drivers Association and for many years president, prevailed on hundreds of old-time range and trail men to write autobiographic sketches. He used to refer to Volume II as the "second edition"; just the same, he was not ignorant, 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.