The Log of a Cowboy (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

by Andy Adams, Donald Reeves (Introduction)

Overview

Told with campfire-story spirit, The Log of a Cowboy is of the best tales of the cowboy life ever written.  Drawing from his own life as a cattle driver, Andy Adams recounts the adventures of America’s frontier.  Through such memorable characters as Bill Blades and Bull Durham, we become witness to gunfights, buffalo stampedes, and cattle drives from Texas to Montana.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781411428553
Publisher:	Union Square & Co.
Publication date:	09/01/2009
Series:	Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Read
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	565 KB
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

Andy Adams was born in Indiana to pioneer parents.  For ten years, he drove cattle in Texas before turning to gold mining in Colorado and Nevada.  He eventually settled in Colorado Springs, where he wrote such books as A Texas Matchmaker, Cattle Brands, and The Rand on the Beaver.

Read an Excerpt

Stampedes, river crossings, and cattle thieves provide action while horse races, fiddling contests, and practical jokes bring the characters to life in The Log of a Cowboy by Andy Adams.  This fictional, first-person narrative provides readers with a vivid account of the excitement, drudgery, and pride experienced by thousands of young trail-drive cowboys in the 1870s and 1880s.  For many men, such drives were a once-in-a-lifetime experience yielding personal stories that were told and retold for generations.  First published in 1903, this unorthodox Western novel has been praised as a masterpiece on the nineteenth-century cattle industry. The plot revolves around the journey itself, much like a heroic quest. The adventures involve natural perils and the cowboys’ struggles to control their bovine charges. So realistic is its portrayal, Adams’ fictional tale is often mistaken as an actual journal of a cowboy on the Western Cattle Trail. Even Charlie Russell, one of the West’s favorite artists and chroniclers, accepted the book as Adams’ autobiography and called it the best trail story he had ever read.  
         

Born in 1859, the youngest son in an Indiana farming family, Adams was well acquainted with the care and feeding of oxen and draft horses. By his sixteenth year he ran away from this life, drifting to Arkansas and then to San Antonio, Texas, where he landed a job shipping horses for livestock brokers Smith and Redmon.

From 1882 until 1889, Adams drove horses, and occasionally cattle, north across Oklahoma Territory from the Red River to Caldwell, Kansas. Although he never drove cattle along the Western Cattle Trail outside Oklahoma Territory, he did experience, first hand, the rugged outdoor life of a drover. Delivering horses throughout his travels in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, Adams gleaned other experiences from those adventures that broadened his understanding of the time and place.     

The writing career of Andy Adams arose from his frustration with the literature and stage plays of the 1890s. Flamboyant and unrealistic dime novels were popular and widely read, created by Eastern writers with no first-hand knowledge of cattlemen or even cattle.  Adams became determined to pen more accurate depictions of American cowboys based upon those whom he had known on the Great Plains.

According to his biographer, Wilson M. Hudson, Adams stated in a letter two years before his death in 1934, “I have always contended that fiction can be written as convincingly as fact.”1 After the success of The Log of a Cowboy he wrote three more novels (Texas Matchmaker, The Outlet, and Reed Anthony, Cowman), as well as a collection of stories called Cattle Brands, all by 1907. It is these five books for which he is remembered.             

 

In a letter to noted historian Walter Prescott Webb, Adams makes reference to Owen Wister’s best-selling novel published one year before The Log of a Cowboy, “In a popular book like The Virginian the reader never catches a glimpse of the cattle.” 2 It aggravated Adams that late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fictional Western heroes were cow-less cowboys riding the range righting wrongs through gunplay or other imaginative feats of daring. Adams’ novel is not a moral drama of good versus evil. Conspicuously absent is the typical love interest or damsel in distress. 

In The Log of a Cowboy, Adams counters the trend of cow-less cowboys as he reveals the reality and mechanics of a typical Western cattle-drive through the eyes of his main character, Thomas Moore Quirk. He narrates the story as if it were an actual log or journal recording his experiences on this grand adventure. The stage is set when the Quirk family moves from Georgia after the Civil War and homesteads in Texas along the San Antonio River.

In the spring of 1882, Tom Quirk, now in his mid-twenties, signs on for a cattle drive from the southern tip of Texas, at the mouth of the Rio Grande River, to Fort Benton, Montana, seventy miles from the Canadian border. An entrepreneurial cattleman, Don Lovell, obtains a U.S. Government contract to deliver cattle to the Blackfoot Reservation. Some cattle were for breeding stock, the rest would provide “a million pounds of beef” to the tribe that was now restricted from following the buffalo herds. 

The vast ranches of northern Mexico were the source of the cattle, driven toward the border by the American cowboy’s Hispanic counterpart, the vaquero, a term derived from the Spanish word vaca, meaning “cow.” Lovell obtained his herd via colorful international business negotiations involving Spanish interpreters and a fine meal in Brownsville during which the gentlemen concluded their negotiations.

Adams’ depictions of swimming the cattle across the Rio Grande and the final counting of the herd provide unique insight into the cattle industry of the borderlands. The Texas cowboys used a tally string with ten loose buttons of braided rawhide, moving a button as each one hundred head of cattle streamed by their vantage point. The vaqueros “used ten small pebbles, shifting a pebble from one hand to the other on hundreds.”

Prior to delivery, the Mexican Longhorn cattle, carrying brands from previous owners, had been given a single road brand, the “Circle Dot,” on the left hip. This large brand distinguished the herd of 3,100 cattle, just purchased by Don Lovell, from other livestock ranging along the long cattle trail. The drive takes place between April and September. It is managed by a crew of fifteen men averaging fifteen miles a day and covers more than two thousand miles (Adams claims almost three thousand).

The outfit is well represented with men raised in the Southern states, some having fought for the Confederacy. This is reflected in their dialog, and the reader should be aware that the author’s use of ethnic slurs represents commonly held racial prejudices of that era. The character Quirk names his favorite black horse “Nigger Boy,” comments on the “darky” cooks in other crews, and recites one stanza of a poem about children that would be unwelcome in our schools today. 

Otherwise, the prose is comfortable and engaging. It is the language of common workers as they go about their tasks, chiding each other about being late for night guard or their partner’s shortcomings. The book is also sprinkled with words from south of the border such as: remuda for the string of extra saddle horses, fresh meat being carne fresco, or segundo as in second in charge of the crew. At one place along the trip the cook is said to be out of extra supplies “as a pelon.” Understanding pelon as “bald,” Adams may have meant the chuck box was bare as a bald man’s head.

There is an interesting turn of phrase on many a page. One drover searching for his cattle, which had stampeded and “drifted” in the night toward the Circle Dot herd, asks Quirk’s crew, “did you catch my drift.”  Today this phrase is slang for comprehending a nuance of conversation. On another occasion, Quirk’s foreman admonished the trail crew to carry on without him for a few hours by saying, “An outfit that can’t run itself without a boss ought to stay home and do the milking.”       

Adams was adamant that the most important element of the cowboy’s life was his work.  Hudson also noted that Adams considered his characters just ordinary men. But shortly after settling into a soft chair and quickly finding yourself at chapter 2, it will be obvious that while this story is not about superheroes, it is about highly skilled men nonetheless. They were men raised as horsemen, with years of experience outsmarting cattle and good with a catch rope. Their horsemanship was essential to both survival and productivity among the crew. As Jim Flood, the foreman in the story, admonished each member of his trail crew, “A man afoot is useless.”

The frequent challenge of bogged cattle is another aspect of nineteenth-century cowboy life that Adams discusses in this volume. He carefully describes the efforts necessary to free Circle Dot cattle from “quicksand” along the riverbeds. The cattle did not sink quickly out of sight as in the movies, yet the viscous sand took hold of Longhorn and horse alike. Livestock were freed by tediously digging out one leg at a time and using ropes to pull them from danger.   

After a dangerous, nighttime stampede that drove the men through thorny mesquite thickets in the dark, the character Joe Stallings remarks, “I’ve worn leggins for the last ten years ... and for about ten seconds in forcing that mesquite thicket was the only time I ever drew interest on my investment. They’re a heap like a six-shooter—wear them all your life and never have any use for them.” The heavy leather chaps, often left in the wagon, were hot and seldom needed when moving cattle through open country, and by the 1880s, the cowboy’s pistol was rarely drawn in anger.   

Andy Adams developed this novel from a collection of short stories about cowboy life  hewrote in 1901, two years before the novel was published. When the earlier manuscript, Adams’ first attempt as a writer, was rejected because of doubts about its marketability, Adams wove many of those same stories into the narrative format, occasionally working a miscellaneous tale into the crew’s evening campfire activities. The material for these stories came from the hours he sat listening to the reminiscences of cattlemen in the 1880s.

“The campfire is to all outdoor life what the evening fireside is to domestic life,” Adams states. His stories provide the reader a welcome break from the drudgery of the trail, just as they would the crew. One of the most interesting stories relates how a cowpuncher, seeking work around Christmastime, stops at a cow camp in the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma Territory and demonstrates how to make doughnuts, which he calls “bear sign.” The unusual pastry causes quite a stir as he attempts to fill a barrel full of doughnuts to prove his usefulness to the camp cook. Cowboys from many nearby ranches hear about the delicious treat and begin to arrive, consuming them as fast as they are made.

In his description of life in Dodge City, Adams refers to exploits by several historic lawmen and famous cowmen including a loud protest against rail yardage charges by “Shanghai” Pierce, one of the most colorful cattlemen in Texas, a conversation Adams claims to have overheard personally in the 1880s. During his stay in Caldwell, Kansas, the writer also came to know Charlie Siringo, who in 1885 wrote A Texas Cowboy based upon his personal experiences. At this time Siringo was the proprietor of an ice-cream parlor, also known around Caldwell for its oyster bar. 

Adams’ geographical descriptions make the reader feel like he or she is along with the crew observing each passing landmark. And yet, this fictional cattle drive is a blend of historic and fictional features. Adams places the Quirk family ranch near a Cibollo Ford on the San Antonio River; however, the historic Cibilo Crossing in that region is on Cibolo Creek, halfway between Goliad and San Antonio, just above the creek’s confluence with the San Antonio River. Fictional geographical features on the Western Cattle Trail also includes: Indian Lakes, Big Boggy Creek, Forty Island Ford, and Frenchman’s Ford.

Adams told noted author J. Frank Dobie in 1927 such details “need never worry one when writing fiction.”3  Dobie went on to correspond regularly with Andy Adams and championed his work among other authors on the West. While teaching English literature for two years in the 1920s at Oklahoma Agricultural & Mechanical University, Dobie made The Log of the Cowboy required reading for his students. He carried on this practice at the University of Texas where he taught, on and off, for more than two decades. Distinguished novelist Eugene Manlove Rhodes and the influential Walter Prescott Webb wrote about the importance of this work by Andy Adams. Even today this novel is widely read at many universities as part of the coursework on Western history, giving students a better understanding of the everyday life of an American cowboy in the 1880s. 

At the end of Adams’ trail drive story no hero rides off into the sunset or settles down with the girl. Instead, the boys “bring in the herd.” With the delivery of the cattle to the Indian Agent, the author emphasizes the satisfaction the crew derives from a job well done. It was more than a paycheck for these cowboys. However, there is some remorse as the boss sold off the remaining trail equipment and the remuda of horses. Tom Quirk reflects, “But at no time in my life, before or since, have I felt so keenly the parting between man and horse as I did that September evening in Montana.”  But then a glass is raised as they celebrate their accomplishment, like a championship sports team or an expedition of explorers successful in their quest. Don Lovell, the owner of the herd, sums it up with the toast, “This outfit has made one of the longest cattle drives on record, and the best is none too good for them.”

With thousands of books on the American West already available and hundreds of new works filling the shelves each year, a novel written over a century ago might seem a curious choice to the average reader.  Yet if only allowed one volume on the great cattle-drive era, most history buffs and scholars who cherish the literature of the West would undoubtedly choose The Log of the Cowboy for their bookshelf.

Donald W. Reeves holds the McCasland Chair of Cowboy Culture at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum where he has been on staff since 1979. He holds an M.A. in anthropology from the University of Oklahoma and writes frequently on cowboy culture and the American West.

 

1Andy Adams, “To Walter Ferguson,” [July 28, 1932] in Wilson M. Hudson, “Andy Adams: Storyteller and Novelist of the Great Plains” in Southwest Writers Series no. 4, Austin, Texas, Steck-Vaughn Company (1967), p. 1.

2 Andy Adams, “To Walter Prescott Webb,” [March 2, 1924] in Wilson M. Hudson, “Andy Adams: Storyteller and Novelist of the Great Plains” in Southwest Writers Series no. 4, Austin, Texas, Steck-Vaughn Company (1967), p. 41.

3Andy Adams, “To J. Frank Dobie ,” [February 28, 1927] in Wilson M. Hudson, Andy Adams: His Life and Writings (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1964),p.92.

Table of Contents

Introduction IX

I Up the Trail 3

II Receiving 9

III The Start 20

IV The Atascosa 27

V A Dry Drive 37

VI A Reminiscent Night 46

VII The Colorado 55

VIII On the Brazos and Wichita 66

IX Doan's Crossing 77

X "No Man's Land" 86

XI A Boggy Ford 100

XII The North Fork 112

XIII Dodge 119

XIV Slaughter's Bridge 133

XV The Beaver 147

XVI The Republican 152

XVII Ogalalla 163

XVIII The North Platte 174

XIX Forty Islands Ford 182

XX A Moonlight Drive 194

XXI The Yellowstone 206

XXII Our Last Campfire 219

XXIII Delivery 228

XXIV Back To Texas 239

Endnotes 245

Suggested Reading 247