A week or so ago, I finished my second reading of The Log of a Cowboy, A Narrative of the Old Trail Days, by Andy Adams. I enjoyed it so well, both times, that I thought I’d write a review. Maybe somebody else will be inspired to read and enjoy it like I did.

First off, I will mention that this is a fictional novel. I had to keep reminding myself of that throughout the book, because it feels like an authentic documentary. The author, Andy Adams, indeed lived the life about which he wrote, but the story is, in fact, a novel. Adams undoubtedly brought together a series of events he actually  experienced or had intimate knowledge of and linked them together, creating a fictional story that gives the reader the experience of reading the actual journal of a cowboy on a cattle drive of epic proportions in the year 1882. It is noteworthy that the copyright date on the novel is 1903 (by Andy Adams).

Adam’s story documents the life and times of Tom Quirk (a fictional character), as he leaves home in south Texas and grows to manhood as a cowboy. He tells of his quick transition from the life of a store-keeper’s apprentice to his life on the range as follows: “My mercantile career had ended [after two full days], and forthwith I took to the range as a preacher’s son takes to vice. By the time I was twenty there was no better cowhand in the entire country.”

Quirk is hired by Jim Flood, on the recommendation of one of his older brothers, to help take a herd of over 3,100 cows and steers from Old Mexico to the Blackfoot Indian Reservation in northwest Montana to fulfill a government contract, a full five-month drive.  Quirk takes us along for the ride, from gathering the cattle bought from a rancher in Mexico, with young Quirk acting as interpreter, to delivery of the cattle at their destination in Montana.

They cross dangerous rivers and dry plains, deal with hostile Indians and outlaw herd-cutters. Quirk discusses the fine details about the necessary paperwork each foreman  for a herd needed to prove his authority and pay expenses.  Quirk tells all about his fellow cowboys, their personality characteristics, and in particular, the cowboy humor and pranks they played upon each other. He discusses cattle management and the various styles of different bosses and cowboys. He tells of stampedes and storms, long days and cold nights. While much of this information could seem dull and mundane, it is all told in the language, inflection, and perspective of the cowboy, which kept my attention throughout the story.

For example, the following excerpts relates Quirk’s discovery and disbursement of sixteen turkey eggs, a delicacy for a cowboy on a drive:

“The rest of us had no lack of occupation, as a result of a chance find of mine that morning. Honeyman had stood my guard the night before, and in return, I had got up when he was called to help rustle the horses. We had every horse under hand before the sun peeped over the eastern horizon, and when returning to camp with the remuda, as I rode through a bunch of sumach bush, I found a wild turkey’s nest with sixteen fresh eggs in it. Honeyman rode up, when I dismounted, and putting them in my hat, handed them up to Billy until I could mount, for they were beauties and as precious to us as gold. There was an egg for each man with one left over, and McCann threw a heap of swagger in to the inquiry, “Gentlemen, how will you have your eggs this morning?” just as though it was an everyday affair. They were issued to us fried, and I naturally felt that the odd egg,  by rights, ought to fall to me, but the opposing majority was formidable, – fourteen to one, – so I yielded. A number of ways were suggested to allot the odd egg, but the gambling fever in us being rabid, raffling or playing cards for it seemed to be the proper caper.”

It was decided that a card game would determine who got the extra egg, the chips being dried beans issued equally to each participant. The details of this game and the wild tales told by the participants as they whiled away the night, switching places as each took his turn on night guard or simply ran out of beans, was the setting for an entire humorous chapter.

Later in the drive, a mishap occurred in which the left rear wheel of the chuck wagon hit a rock and was “dished,”  demolishing it beyond repair. Quirk’s description of the temporary repair bespeaks the author’s (Adams) personal knowledge and experience of such occurrences on the trail:

When we reached the scene, McCann had recovered the felloe, but every spoke in the hub was hopelessly ruined. Flood took in the situation at a glance. He ordered the wagon unloaded and the reach lengthened, took the axe, and, with the The Rebel, went back about a mile to a thicket of lodge poles which we had passed higher up the creek. While the rest of us unloaded the wagon, McCann, who was swearing by both note and rhyme, unearthed his saddle from amongst the other plunder and cinched it on his nigh wheeler. We had the wagon unloaded and had reloaded some of the heaviest plunder in the front end of the wagon box, by the time our foreman and Priest returned, dragging from their pommels a thirty-foot pole as perfect as the mast of a yacht. We knocked off all the spokes not already broken at the hub of the ruined wheel, and after jacking up the hind axle, attached the “crutch.” By cutting a half notch in the larger end of the pole, so that it fitted over the front axle, lashing it there securely, and allowing the other end to trail behind on the ground, we devised a support on which the hub of the broken wheel rested, almost at its normal height. There was sufficient spring to the pole to obviate any jolt or jar, while the rearrangement we had effected in distributing the load would relieve it of any serious burden. We took a rope from the coupling pole of the wagon and loosely noosed it over the crutch, which allowed leeway in turning, but prevented the hub from slipping off the support on a short turn to the left. Then we lashed the tire and felloe to the front end of the wagon, and with the loss of but a couple of hours our commissary was again on the move.

All-in-all, the book held my attention and interest throughout the story…during both readings. I found myself smiling and even chuckling out loud as I read certain passages. Adam’s descriptions of dangerous and difficult river crossings, quick sands, and stampedes were so vivid that I could easily imagine myself working alongside Tom Quirk and his companions and hearing their cowboy banter.

While I am a great fan of Louis L’Amour westerns, if you really want to know what life was like on the cattle drive during the heyday of the post-civil war cattle drives from Texas, this is the book you want to read.

Click on the image to link to the book on Amazon.com.

 I just finished reading for the second time one of the most enjoyable books I have ever found about the life of a cowboy back in “the good ol’ days”. Dakota Cowboy, My Life in the Old Days, by Ike blasingame, is a non-fiction documentary of Ike’s own life as a bronc buster and rough-string rider for the Matador Land and Cattle Company from 1904 to around 1912. The setting is in South Dakota, where Matador and several other major cattle concerns had set up huge ranching operations on lands leased from the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Indian Reservations, through cooperation between the Indian Tribes and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Ike takes us through all aspects of ranch operations, the lives of cowboys, their bosses, their horses, the land, and the cattle that gave them their livelihood.

I found myself completely engrossed in Blasingame’s way of describing and explaining things from a cowboy’s perspective, providing a window to the past, framed in cowboy common sense and frankness, that is largely closed nowadays, in our time of extreme opinions and political correctness. I learned the origins of some of the idiomatic expressions we use today, but think little of.

For instance, we’ve all heard the expression, “That really chaps my hide!” Take a minute and read Ike’s delivery of how a cowboy’s hide got “chapped”.

“Cowboys made a worthy attempt to be manly, to act in accordance with what was right, no matter their surroundings – mud, wind, rain, heat, or fine summer sunshine. There was little rough talk, other than simple swearing which seemed more a part of that way of life than disrespect and offensiveness. Obscenity was frowned upon. Any indecent act was met with stern disapproval. Improper talk about women or lewd jokes had little part in the regular everyday busy life these men lived. And the man who persisted in overstepping these rules was punished, not by arrest or by going to jail, but by the cowboys’ law which governed such breaches of decency and order.

If a man didn’t believe his ideas and deportment could be changed, it took but one or two trips to a good-sized bedroll over which he found himself stretched so that the seat of his britches were good and tight. A pair of heavy leather chaps held by the belt and wielded by a big-fisted cowpuncher in a way which brought the bottom of the leggings smartly down across the offender’s posterior a dozen times usually corrected any such false ideas. To be offensive enough to be “chapped” was a painful experience that no one relished.”

Reading about the sheer size of many of the old ranches was fascinating to me. For instance, according to Blasingame, Matador’s range lease on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations comprised about forty-eight square miles. In addition, outside the reservation Matador and several other large operations shared, by gentleman’s agreement, the free range to the west of the reservation boundaries.  Matador also held a sizable range lease north of the Canadian border. In its heyday, the Matador ran nearly sixty thousand head of cattle.

Despite the size of the Matador cattle operation, Blasingame keeps things simple by taking us with him through his daily tasks of breaking broncs, hunting wolves, managing and rounding up cattle, and moving them across the Missouri river to Evarts, South Dakota for shipment to market by train. He describes operations of the range wagons (the true home of the cowboy), the various levels of management and the divisions of their respective duties, as well as the daily chores expected of each cowboy.

I particularly enjoyed Blasingame’s chapter on horses. He talked about the “rough string” and why these horses were under his particular care. He spoke affectionately about those horses that worked as hard as he did, and somewhat critically of those that had to be “watched” all the time, so as to head them off when they got ornery. It was interesting to me how Blasingame would give each horse its due credit and praise for the work it could perform well, despite its ill temper or how difficult it was to ride. Take this excerpt from the chapter on The Rough Broncs:

“Spokane had a reputation as a hard-bucking horse. He was a slim blood-bay, weighing 1050 pounds. He had good shoulders, high hips, and was probably a good deal thoroughbred. He had been handled some and didn’t fight saddling; in fact, if a man could ride him until he had his buck over with, he worked willingly. But there was the pinch! Spokane saved himself for furious, hell-to-set pitching after a rider mounted. It was sport for him, and he had thrown more cowboys than had ever ridden him farther than three jumps. Spokane’s reputation followed him when Dode shipped him to South Dakota and came north himself as manager. Dode liked the horse.

“I want to see what our South Dakota bronc rider can make of him,” he said, preparing to leave Texas, and from the time that Spokane snorted down the chute, filled his belly and ran free a few weeks on rich grass, he was primed to jar the gutfat off the best of riders. He was one of the really snaky ones to come to the Dakota outfit.

Brown knew that Dode had brought Spokane along for me to ride, and he was present the day Dode pointed to the horse and said, “If a man can stay on him, that bronc has the makings of a top cow horse.”

Since I could ride my horses wherever I wanted to while training them, Brown saddled up, too, and went around with me considerable, looking at the new range and getting acquainted with it. He got quite friendly, and jogging along he continually preached “hell-roaring Spokane” to me. He declared the horse was one of the worst buckers ever when he cut loose with all he had, and hinted that even Dode was skeptical about my being able to rode him. The more Brown talked about Spokane, the more I wanted to get a rope on the salty cuss and see for myself how tough he really was. I had found few horses that were hard for me to handle – still, I also knew that “for every man, there’s a horse he cannot ride.”

In Dakota Cowboy ,Ike Blasingame paints a truly vivid picture in words of the life of the cowboy in the Dakotas during the era of the great cattle empires. But not only that, he provides a much greater backdrop against which the picture is viewed than most stories of the “old west.” Blasingame expands his treatise to include a broad range of ranching topics, from cattle management, to horses,  the weather and seasons, to the interaction among the various ranching empires, and even their inter-relationships between the federal government and the Native American peoples from whom these ranching empires leased their range. As informative and factual as these details were, however, they never overcame his descriptions of the cowboys he knew and the stories from their daily lives on the range. More than once I found myself chuckling out loud as I read Blasingame’s relation of one story or another of some cowboy prank or his way of describing some noteworthy occurrence he recalled.

As a reader and student of old west literature,  Blasingame gave me a clearer  and broader understanding of the life of a cowboy than any other source I have found. It was a fascinating read for me, both times. One of the best and most enjoyable books about “the good ol’ days” I have ever encountered.

I highly recommend it.

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