"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