Spring 1988 - El Palacio

Range campfire scene in the
Seven Rivers, New Mexico, area,
ca. 1890. Stories were frequently
told and songs sung around evening campfires like this one.
Courtesy Museum of New Mexico,
Neg. No. 132452.
32
Spring 1988
WORDS, WORK, AND VALUESA LOOK AT NEW MEXICO'S
COWBOY LITERATURE
By James S. Griffith
New Mexico is cow country-at least parts of it
are. Some of it is also sheep country, wilderness
country, farming country, tourist country, atomic
bomb country. But in the northeastern, eastern,
and southern parts of the state the cattle industry
has a history more than a hundred years old. Cows
need people to take care of them, and that's where
cowboys come in. Cowboys- in one sense, they are
the prime figures of one of our most important
national myths, symbols of independence, the
triumph of good over evil, and the like. In another
equally real sense, they're the labor force of the cattle industry. It is not easy to separate the two sets of
meaning, which have coexisted for almost a century. But cowboys are real people, with a set of very
special cultural traditions that they share with
ranchers and others who occupy the world of cattle
raising. One of those traditions involves words and
the way they are put together.
And we might as well start off with words, the
raw material of any literature. For openers, cattle
folks have a special vocabulary to describe their
work. "Cavvy" "remuda," "dally" -none of these
gets much play in Boston, but all are part of the living vocabulary of the American cowboy. All were
borrowed from the Mexican vaqueros who taught
American cowboys many of their skills. "Cavvy" is a
mangling of caballada,or horse herd. "Remuda" is
another word for the same thing-a herd of remounts. And "dally" is truly wild-it is a shortened
form of the command dale vuelta or "give it a turn";'
and refers to the technique of wrapping your catch
rope a couple of times around the saddle horn
after you have roped a critter.
These loan words-and there are a lot moreare not the sum total of specialized cowboy vocab-
ulary, however. "Sull" is a verb meaning "to become
sullen or stubborn." A steer (or a person) that
doesn't want to be led is said to "sull up." And just
as nouns are made into verbs in cattle country,
so things are defined by extension and association.
Eggs can become "hen fruit." Quilts (also called
"soogans") can, by extension of the notion that
some of them may be stuffed with down, be called
"goose hair." A "slick-eared calf' refers to an animal
that has no earmarks-that has never been branded.
By extension, a "slick-eared heifer" could refer to
an unmarried young woman. And so on.'
In fact, cattle culture seems to have the built-in
option of being pretty prodigal with words. (Consider the following quotes from classic cowboy
poems:
I went a-gallyflutin' like a crazy lightnin' streak,
Just a-whizzing and a-dlartinl:
first this way and
then that
The darn contrivatnce wsohbling like the flying of a
2
l)at.
r,1.
Andl I hugged her all the tighter fi)r
her trustifyin'
play
Nell (you
what, the jos of Ileaven ain't a cussed
circ illstance
i the huggamnania pleasures
a high-ituned
Of
Sdance.i
When the stratnger hit the saddle , Old I)unn quit
the earth,
And travelled riglt straight up fuir
all that he was
wo(rthI.
A-pitching and a-squealing, a-having wall-eyed
fits,
H is hind feet perpendicular, his front ones in the
bits.
I have called these cowboy poems. But any
po)em tbecomes a song when it is set to music, and
El Palacio
33
all of these are well-known songs as well as
recitations.
Or the response I got when I asked the late Van
Holyoak, a cowboy from Clay Springs, Arizona
(where the soil is so poor that you have to fertilize it
before you can raise hell), how he was: "I never felt
better," he replied, "and, by God, it's about time
I did." It is almost as though, leading a spare, hard
life with few surpluses, the old-time cowboy made
as free as he could with the one commodity he
possessed in abundance-words.
This fascination with wordplay surfaces elsewhere in the culture as well, notably in the sort of
acrostic parlor game cowboys play with brands. A
brand is simply a mark of ownership applied to an
animal by burning. In the hands of the American
cowboy, brands have become a complex code, with
"lazy" letters (lying on their backs), "crazy" letters
(written backwards and upside-down), and a host of
other named symbols. And brands can become
jokes, as witness the legendary 2 c P, known all
over the West ?
All this playfulness, this fascination with
words, with their shape and their meaning, has
become a part of cowboy literature. One of the
great exponents of this particular art was New Mexico's own Eugene Manlove Rhodes, who spent the
1880s and 1890s wrangling horses, cowboying, and
mining in and around theJornada del Muerto.
Following his marriage in 1906, he moved back to
New York State and lived twenty years on his wife's
farm among what he called "God's frozen people."
He wrote novels and short stories, most of them for
the Saturday Evening Post, from the early 1900s until
his death in 1934. Most of them resonate with the
exile's passion for his country- the area from
Socorro down to El Paso and from Tularosa west to
Deming. Some of Rhodes' dialogue comes off a bit
too clever, and his women tend towards the unbelievable. His male characters are men he knew,
however, often disguised thinly or not at all. Their
skills, actions, and motivations are those of the New
Mexico frontier where he came into his manhood,
and which he celebrated until the end of his days.6
thinking. They sing to themselves and to each other.
Men are recognized by their friends through their
personal songs. In "Good Men and True'," a snatch
of "The Streets of Laredo" is the prearranged
signal for action? In the short story "Hit the Line
Hard," Neighbor Jones tells a young Easterner the
difference among songs for pacing, trotting, and
galloping on a horse'. And in "The Proud Sheriff,"
Tip Chandler sings loudly to cover the noise of a
jail escape. Andy Hinkle, newly returned from a
trip back East, remarks:
One thing about Rhodes' characters that has
always interested me is that most of them sing.
Snatches of song-well-known cowboy songs, old
ballads, popular songs, nonsense ditties, and probably a few songs of Rhodes' own writing-appear
in most of the stories. People sing while they are
riding alone, while they are working, while they are
published. Privately printed in Estancia, New Mexico, in 1908, it contained twenty-four songs and
poems, several of which were of Thorpe's own com-
34
Spring 1988
"When I was a boy, everybody sang. Not good,
hardly ever. But they sang. The children sang at
play, the women sang in the kitchen, the young
people sang at night, the men sang at the plow.
They sang when they were alone and when they
were with somebody. Back East, they can't sing at
all. Nobody sings. It ain't right."
"Room for two opinions about that" said Buck,
with a dark glance at the artistic Tip?
PasoPor Aqui is perhaps the best known of
Rhodes' stories.'0 It is frequently assigned in
English courses that deal with Southwestern
literature. For the purposes of this article, I would
add the first and fourth chapters of Stepsons of Light,
in which he carefully and lovingly describes the
working of an old-time roundup in the country
around Engle." Cowboy literature, after all, is about
cowboys-the labor force of the cattle industry.
And this book presents a rare, detailed, and wonderfully accurate description of the cowboy's work
in that part of New Mexico in the 1890s. But browse
at will through Rhodes' writings; they all share the
same virtues and faults, and all present wonderful
vignettes of southern New Mexico at the turn of the
century.
Rhodes was not the only writer of his generation to write about New Mexico's cowboys or add to
their lore. N. Howard "Jack" Thorpe was the son of
a New York attorney who moved to New Mexico
following his father's business failure. In 1889, he
took off with his banjo-mandolin on a solo ride in
eastern New Mexico and west Texas, looking for
cowboy songs. The result of the trip was Songs of the
Cowboys, the first collection of cowboy songs ever
'
position.12
Among the latter was one which he had written
after a tragic incident on a cattle drive in 1898. Entitled "LittleJoe the Wrangler," it has gone on to
become a classic in its own right and is one of the
few relics of the old trail-driving days which is still
found in the repertoire of cowboys. It tells the story
of a stray kid who turned up in camp on a trail
drive and was given the most unskilled job available-that of horse wrangler. He is generally liked
by the cowboys and dies while trying to turn the
herd of cattle during a stampede. A tragic song, but
one that points up a moral which is repeated time
and again in cowboy literature. The respected individuals in the cattle-raising West were those who,
once they had committed themselves to a line of action, followed their commitment without hesitation
to its logical conclusion. Few achieved a ripe,
peaceful old age.
Thorpe later wrote an expanded version of
Songs of the Cowboys and some Western fiction.' His
book of autobiographical reminiscences, Pardnerto
the Wind, was published posthumously.'" Like the
writings of his friend Rhodes, it presents a loving
and accurate portrayal of cowboy life in southern
New Mexico in the old days. Like Rhodes' writing, it
is about more than cowboying-tales of Billy the
Kid and other New Mexico outlaws come into it, as
well as yarns on a host of other subjects. But the
work, life, and values of the southern New Mexico
cowboy lie at the heart of both men's writing.
Among my favorite chapters are "Banjo in the Cow
Camps," a description of Thorpe's 1889 songhunting expedition, and the ones dealing with
horses and cattle. They ring true and have a
wonderful presence about them.
A few years after Thorpe published his first
Songs of the Cowboys, a Texan named John A. Lomax
came out with what is now the classic collection of
cowboy songs and poems-Cowboy Songs and Other
FrontierBallads.' First published in 1910 and later
revised, it contained several poems from Thorpe's
book. Lomax visited New Mexico during the course
of his long career as a pioneer folksong collector. In
his autobiography, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, he
describes a visit to the Diamond A Ranch near
Silver City, then owned by Senator George Hearst,
father of William Randolph Hearst.' 6 Here he collected several cowboy songs, and made an impression that caused him to be remembered for
many years.
One other set of reminiscences of early days in
New Mexico should be noted, this time from the
east central part of the state.John H. "Jack" Culley,
an English graduate of Harrow and Oxford followed
"
Eugene Manlove Rhodes, cowboy
author. From The Little World
Waddles by Eugene Manlove
Rhodes. Chico, Calif.: William
Hutchinson, 1946.
El Palacio
35
The back of this photo tells us
that cowboy author S. Omar
Barker, at Tecolotino, New Mexico, exclaims, "Excelsior! 13,311
feet. Now-For a Heroic Pose.' '
Courtesy Museum of New Mexico,
Neg. No.127447.
his dreams to New Mexico in the late 1880s. From
1893 to 1897 he was range manager for the famous
Bell Ranch, and he later operated his own cattle
outfit in the area around Wagon Mound. Out of
these experiences came the book Cattle, Horses and
Men. 7
Like Thorpe and Rhodes, Culley writes about
New Mexico gunmen (such as BlackJack Ketchum
and Clay Allison, who lived in that part of the
state), but like them he is at his most compelling
when he describes cattle and horses and the men
who worked with them. Favorite horses are a constant theme all through cowboy literature, and New
Mexico literature is no exception. Thorpe wrote a
poem, "Chopo," about one favorite horse and
published it in his original collection. This set a
pattern that has been followed by cowboy poets
ever since. Some of Rhodes' most memorable passages deal with the favorite horses of his characters.
Their names-Twilight, Sleepycat, Wisenose, Alibi,
Terrapin-give a special flavor to the stories and
often reflect the action, as horses are borrowed and
renamed for special occasions. It is easy to get the
impression that while outlaws were exciting and
people-especially outsiders-wanted to hear
about them, the matters of real interest to these
older New Mexico writers were the everyday
realities: cattle, work, and the horses that made
work possible. In fact, both Thorpe and Rhodes
were remembered by old-timers more as excellent
36
Spring 1988
horsemen than as all-round cowboys... a fine but
real distinction.
Northeastern New Mexico was home for many
years to New Mexico's best-known cowboy poetS. Omar Barker. According to legend, Barker was
born Omar S. Barker but had his name legally
changed so that he would be justified in running
the SOB brand. Now there's dedication! More than
that, it is a wonderful example of the way in which
cowboy literature, brands, and the whole cowboy
world view tie together. Barker's first book of
cowboy poetry was published in 1928; his last in
1964.18 He died in 1985.
For years, cowboys have paid him the ultimate
compliment by memorizing his poems and using
them as recitations. Many of his rhymes depict real
experiences, and ones that are common to ranch
people all over the West. They strike a chord of
understanding and memory and are therefore
"picked up" and learned. There is still a strong
poetry tradition all over ranch country. Cowboys
write poems, usually in rhymed verse, about their
experiences, their horses, and stories they have
heard. And they recite them as well. Sometimes the
recitations are at gatherings-campfires, bars,
bunkhouses, motel rooms on the rodeo circuit, or
wherever cowboys get together. Sometimes the
reciting takes place during the long, solitary hours
of relaxed alertness that are such an important part
of cow work. But cowboy poetry is alive and well in
New Mexico and all over the West.
And Barker's poems live in this context. Ragged,
thumbed-over copies of his books can be found in
many ranch homes, and a lot of cow folks know his
name and his poems. That's a different kind of
fame than most poets expect or get in twentiethcentury America, but this is cow country, and the
rules are a little different, a bit old-fashioned.
For the rest of our sampling of literature by
and about New Mexico cowboys, we have to go back
south again. Right down into Rhodes country, as a
matter of fact. Frank Dines (descendant of one of
Rhodes' friends and characters) has written two
slim books of reminiscences. One of them, Bear,
Lion and Deer Where the Wild Mustangs Roamed, 9 is a
fine set of stories, framed around a hunting trip.
The stories are about the land and the Dines family's
experiences with and in that land, and are set down
pretty much as they would be told in the evening
after supper was cleaned up and folks were sitting
around for a while before bedding down.
Cowboys in typical clothing and
gear of the period at the TL Ranch
headquarters, Prairie Cattle Co.,
Ltd., ca. 1893. Note that the man
on the white horse is carrying a
six-gun, a chuck wagon is behind
the men, a horse remuda is in the
distance. Courtesy Museum of
New Mexico, Neg. No. 55156.
Land and Cattle concerns another long-time
ranching family from the same Hillsboro area?. It
is a bit different from Dines' effort, though, in that
it consists of transcripts of interviews with Hillsboro rancherJoe Pankey, beautifully illustrated
with photographs taken by Jack Parsons. The whole
book was put together by an ex-president of the
Sierra Club as a gesture of respect to an occasional
adversary. It is worth getting, poring over, and
reading carefully. Like Dines' book, it is based on
almost a century of local tradition and family
experience.
Our last book takes up a bit north, to what
John Sinclair calls Cowboy Riding Country-around
Roswell, Socorro, and that part of the state.?' His
book is part history, part reminiscence. It contains
a lot of stories that grab me, stories that give a clear
picture not only of a way of life and a kind of work,
but of a shared set of values that were instrumental
to our nation's expansion to the Pacific coast. Hard
work, independence, and a willingness to stand on
principles and take whatever consequences might
come along as a result-these are best exemplified
in Sinclair's last vignette ofJohn Prather standing
off the U.S. Military's attempt at taking his ranch for
a testing site and finally winning the right to stayand die-in his own time.
So there's a sampling of New Mexico cowboy
literature. I have just been talking about the tip of
the iceberg. The real cowboy literary tradition is an
oral one, and only a few of the folks who have participated in that rich tradition of the spoken word
have had the skill and inclination to set their words
down on paper for the rest of us. But those who
have done so have enriched us considerably. They
have shared with us some specialized skills and
knowledge, a way of life, a world view, and a set of
values that are definitely of one specific place and
time-cattle-raising New Mexico in the last hundred years. In the last analysis they are worth
reading, for they tell us a good deal about how we
came to be where we are.
NOTES
1. Ramon E Adams, Western Words, A Dictionaryof the
American West (Norman: The University of Oklahoma
Press, 1968) is the best place to start an investigation
of special cowboy lingo.
2. "The Gol-Darned Wheel," author unknown. From
Hal Cannon, ed., Cowboy Poetry:A Gathering(Layton,
Utah: Peregrine Smith, 1985), 10.
3. James Barton Adams, "The Cowboy's Dance Song"
(also known as "The High-Toned Dance"). From Cannon, 30.
4. "The Zebra Dun" (also known as "The Educated
Feller"), author unknown. From N. Howard (Jack)
Thorpe, comp., Songs of the Cowboys (Lincoln: The
University of Nebraska Press, 1984 reprint of the 1921
edition), 171.
5. The best discussion I know of how to read cattle
El Palacio
37
I
I
$
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
brands is in chapter 3 of Manfred R. Wolfenstine,
The Manual of Brands and Marks (Norman: The
University of Oklahoma Press, 1970).
Lawrence Clark Powell, Southwest Classics (Pasadena:
Ward Ritchie Press, 1975), contains a short biography
of Rhodes and a literary appraisal of his work.
Eugene Manlove Rhodes, "Good Men and True:' In
The Best Novels and Stories of Eugene Manlove Rhodes
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949).
Eugene Manlove Rhodes, "Hit the Line Hard'"In The
Best Novels and Stories of Eugene Manlove Rhodes
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949).
Eugene Manlove Rhodes, The Proud Sheriff(Norman:
The University of Oklahoma Press, 1968 reprint of
1935 original). Most of the action in this book takes
place in and around Hillsboro. The passage I quoted
is on page 138.
Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Paso Por Aqui (Norman: The
University of Oklahoma Press, 1973 reprint of 1926
original).
Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Stepsons of Light (Norman:
The University of Oklahoma Press, 1969 reprint of
1921 original). An excellent selection of Rhodes'
shorter writings is contained in The Rhodes Reader:
Stories of Virgins, Villains and Varmints, selected by
W.H. Hutchison (Norman: The University of
Oklahoma Press, 1975).
N. Howard (Jack) Thorpe, Songs of the Cowboys, ed.
Austin and Alta Fife (New York: Clarkson N. Potter,
Inc., 1966).
Thorpe, 1984.
N. Howard (Jack) Thorpe, in collaboration with Neil
M. Clark, Pardnerof the Wind (Lincoln: The University
of Nebraska Press, 1977 reprint of 1941 original).
John A. Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other FrontierBallads
(New York: The Macmillan Co., 1910, and subsequent
editions).
John A. Lomax, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (New
York: The Macmillan Co., 1947), 64-68.
John H. (Jack) Culley, Cattle, Horses and Men of the
Western Range (Tucson: The University of Arizona
Press, 1984 reissue of 1940 original).
S. Omar Barker, Buckaroo Ballads (Santa Fe: Santa Fe,
New Mexico Publishing Co., 1928); Songs of the Saddlemen (Denver: Sage Books, 1954); and Rawhide
Rhymes (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co.,
1968).
Cowboys relaxing in camp after a
day of moving cattle. © 1981 Barbara Van Cleve.
19. Frank Dines, Bear,Lion and Deer Where the Wild
Mustangs Roamed (Frank Dines, P.O. Box 453,
Hillsboro, New Mexico, 1983).
20. Jack Parsons and Michael Earney, Land and Cattle.
Conversations withJoe Pankey, A New Mexico Rancher
(Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press,
1978).
21. John L. Sinclair, Cowboy Riding Country (Albuquerque:
The University of New Mexico Press, 1982).
A BEGINNER'S BRAND VOCABULARY
"flying" A
'
A
"dragging" A
. "walking" A
, "rocking" A
/
"crazy" A
>
"lazy" A
P
"tumbling" A
bar
/
slash
,.
"AL connected"
Thus,'/Ocan be read as "crazy A slash 0" and'
as "rocking A I, connected." It gets much, much
more complicated than this, of course, and arguing
over how to read a particular brand could be a
form of entertainment in itself. (There are also picture brands), as in ,, (anchor), 4
(rocking
chair), and
(fishhook). A good source for
brands, from which this list has been adapted, is
Manfred R. Wolfenstine's The Manual of Brands and
Marks. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press,
1981, 2nd printing.
James Griffith, Director of the Southwest Folklore
Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson, is a noted
author and folklorist.
El Palacio
39