The Trampling Herd
by
[Carrick & Evans, $3.00]
THE cattle industry is our most romantic enterprise. Its theatre is continental in size, stretching over the greater part of the territory between the Pacific coastal ranges and the Mississippi Valley. It was established decades before Jamestown and Plymouth. The Spaniards, who introduced both cattle and horses to this continent, Andalusian and Arabian, taught cowpunching to the Mexicans, the Mexicans taught the Southerners who settled Texas, and they in turn carried knowledge of its practices to all the country north of the Rio Grande. As Mr. Wellman well observes, ‘Today the ways of living, the ideas, and even the talk of the range country still are predominantly Southern.’
Mr. Wellman has written what is so far as I know the first connected account of the North American cattle range from the days of Cortez’s ancient brand of three Christian crosses to the dude ranches of today. His book is not only a history but also an encyclopædia of the cattle industry. He tells what the waddies wore, ate, danced, and sang; why they adopted the frivolous-looking high-heeled boots; what went into such trail-herd dishes as son-of-a-gun and ‘Charlie Taylor.’ He describes the life of the great trails, the much-sung Chisholm and the muchtraveled Western, up which, after the Civil War, the cattlemen streamed to fill the interior of a continent with cows to replace the slaughtered buffalo. He relates the rise of the great ranches, the upspringing of the Jayhawker cattle-shipping towns where the trail ended and a moral holiday began: Abilene, Ellsworth, Newton, and finally Dodge City, ‘the uncurried, humorouslyunregenerate, hecoon of cowboy capitals.’
Certainly no aspect of our national history is more popular than the story of the cattle range. More than anything else it stands for the West in the popular imagination. Out of it grew a way of life which has affected our national folkways and speech. Mr. Wellman points out how the phrase ‘ in spite of hell and high water’ is a legacy from the cattle-trail days when ‘the cowboys drove their horn-spiked masses of longhorns through high water at every river and continuous hell between.’ As a past cowpuncher and present newspaper man, he is admirably qualified to write this warm and vivid account of our oldest industry. It will be read with respect by the old-time leathery-necked cattlemen who, whenever they get a chance, desert their mahogany and ride out to a trail herd to squat on their hunkers in the dust and eat first-class son-of-a-gun out of a tin plate.
HORACE REYNOLDS
