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.