Primary Sources for Cowboy and Ranch Life

To go to the grit and gristle of range life, there's nothing like firsthand reports from working ranch people. If you have access to the Internet, go to American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940”. Many of the direct quotations from cowboys and cowgirls found in this book come from the transcripts of these interviews. The Handbook of Texas Online (provides a wealth of historical background on the Lone Star State.

Happily, many cowboys and ranchers left us excellent, authentic records of their lives and actions. Cowboy autobiographies can make wonderfully entertaining reading. The best of the genre offers unique glimpses into everyday cowboy life, which is why you find many of these books quoted repeatedly in Ride 'em Cowboy. Most of the books remain available in paperback editions from major publishers.

The first major look we get at the range cattle industry came from a cattle trader, not a cowboy. In 1874, Joseph G. McCoy published his Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest. In 1885, Charles A. Siringo (1855-1928) added the cowboy's perspective in A Texas Cow Boy or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony (Pelican Publishing). His tales of cowboy life charmed an eastern audience already enthralled with pulp fiction and romantic paintings and drawings of the Wild West. He recognized the changes afoot in the cattle industry and ventured a humorous view of the future of cowboying. Cattle are becoming so tame from being bred up with short horns that it requires but very little skill and knowledge to be a Cow-boy. I believe the day is not far distant when cow-boys will be armed with prod-poles to punch the cattle of their way--instead of firearms.”

In addition to working cowboys, some very famous and distinguished figures left descriptions of western ranch life. Probably the most famous northern plains rancher also served as president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919). In Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888, University of Nebraska Press), Roosevelt detailed his triumphs and troubles as a rancher during the 1880s in the North Dakota Badlands. He penned detailed descriptions, tinged with romance and bravado, of "bully" life on the range. He drew this apt portrait of cowboys.

They are smaller and less muscular than the wielders of ax and pick; but they are as hardy and self-reliant as any men who ever breathed--with bronzed, set faces, and keen eyes that look all the world straight in the face without flinching as they flash out from under the broad-brimmed hats. Peril and hardship, and years of long toil broken by weeks of brutal dissipation, draw haggard lines across their eager faces, but never dim their reckless eyes nor break their bearing of defiant self-confidence.”

Look for a wonderful collection gathered by Clifford Westermeier, Trailing the Cowboy: His Life and Lore as Told by Frontier Journalists. Published in 1955 by Caxton Printers of Caldwell, Idaho, the book is unfortunately long out-of-print. If you chance upon a copy at a used bookstore, snap it up for some excellent old-time journalism.

Many cowboy memoirs” are filled with exaggeration and tall tales. Although he wrote a novelized account, with The Log of a Cowboy (1903, Mariner Books), Andy Adams (1859-1935) left us a lively, accurate account of a cattle drive. Adams drew together various events and people into a single fictional drive, but in so doing he provided an unvarnished portrait of real cowboy life. As famous Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie noted, Adams left >a just and authentic conception of trail men, trail work, range cattle, cowboy horses, and the cow country in general.”

The "Roaring Twenties" brought rapid social changes, urbanization, and the proliferation of automobiles and other mechanical gadgets, to the nation. As the country rushed into an uncertain future, many people longed for the simplicity of bygone frontier days. Such rapid change also prompted many westerners to recall and record their experiences on the old open range. George W. Saunders (1854-1933) founded the Old Time Trail Drivers Association in 1915. He got hundreds of ranchmen and cowboys to write autobiographical sketches. J. Marvin Hunter, of Bandera, Texas, compiled these recollections into two volumes, The Trail Drivers of Texas (1920, 1923). Unfortunately, Hunter, who later published Frontier Times, cleaned up the language in the memoirs in order to make it more socially palatable and grammatical. As with all memoirs, we must take into consideration dimming memories and the propensity to romanticize and spin tall tales. Nevertheless, the collected memoirs remain a vital, compelling series of sketches of trail and ranch life. The University of Texas Press has published a one-volume reprint, with an introduction by B. Byron Price.

Along with the memoirs of Texas cowboys, we have excellent accounts of life on the northern plains, including Ed Lemmon, Boss Cowman: Recollections of Ed Lemmon, 1857-1946 (2002, University of Nebraska Press). Lemmon went from cowboying to become a successful rancher, so he offers a wide range of perspectives. Who really tells it like it was? John K. Rollinson's Pony Trails in Wyoming: Hoofprints of a Cowboy and U. S. Ranger (1988, University of Nebraska Press, out-of-print) offers an unvarnished portrait of late nineteenth-century cowboy life.

You'll also want to ride with Ike Blasingame, Dakota Cowboy: My Life in the Old Days (1964, University of Nebraska Press). He repeated a common complaint of the old-time cowmen, that any of those I knew and worked with on the old cattle ranges of the north have gone to the Happy Hunting Grounds.” A Texas cowboy, Blasingame worked in South Dakota on lands leased by the Matador Land and Cattle Company. The original Matador Ranch began in 1879 in the Texas Panhandle. By the 1920s, the ranch had expanded to include 1.5 million acres, owned or leased. Roundup Years: Old Muddy to Black Hills, edited by Bert L. Hall, is something of a South Dakota equivalent to the Trail Drivers of Texas. It includes brief memoirs, newspaper clips, poetry, old photographs and much more that helps the reader experience old-time ranch life.

The most famous literary collaboration in cowboy literature came during the late 1930s. For years, Edward Charles Teddy Blue” Abbott (1860-1939) failed to interest anyone in his memoir of range life. His unwillingness to add phony gunfights and other phony contrivances necessary for the shoot-'em-up market” contributed to his lack of success. However, in 1937, he met a young New York writer named Helena Huntington Smith at his ranch near Lewiston, Montana. They collaborated for two years to produce We Pointed Them North (2003, University of Oklahoma Press). The book is all Teddy Blue,” claimed Smith modestly. My part was to keep out of the way and not mess it by being literary.”

While men dominated the ranching frontier demographically, we are fortunate to have a number of women's perspectives as well. Colorado ranch life comes alive in A Tenderfoot Bride (1920, 1988, University of Nebraska Press) by Clarice E. Richards. In A Cowman's Wife (1934, 1993, Texas State Historical Association), Mary Kidder Rak tells about ranch life in southwestern Arizona. She also posed a basic question that has likely occurred to many ranch women. I cannot imagine that the clergyman believes that every man should be able to deliver a sermon, or that the hardware merchant expects everyone to know the price of nails. Then why should a cowman judge the rest of humanity upon the basis of a familiarity with the cattle industry? I find that my husband is by no means alone in doing so.” Another southwestern memoir appeared in 1941, No Life for a Lady, written by Agnes Morley Cleaveland (2003, University of Nebraska Press). J. Frank Dobie called this memoir of New Mexico ranching, the best book on range life from a woman's point of view ever published.”

The more modern era of ranching and cowboy life has not gone undocumented. In 1994, Margot Liberty (Helena Huntington Smith's daughter) and Barry Head teamed up with cowboy Ray Holmes to produce Working Cowboy (University of Oklahoma Press). Holmes worked mostly in early twentieth-century Wyoming. The book also includes sound, practical advice about how to perform cowboy and ranch work. Douglas Kent Hall's Working Cowboys (1984) offers good photographs, descriptions and quotations from New Mexico ranch folk. True, much about ranch life has changed, with new breeds of cattle and horses and new technologies at work. But if you compare Charlie Siringo's century-old memoir, Teddy Blue's Abbot's observations recorded some sixty years ago, and the more recent thoughts of Ray Holmes, you'll find strong continuities and refrains. Cowboys remain a breed apart, and their spirit, loyalty, and work ethic have stayed with them over the decades.