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Written in 1930, Coronado's Children was one of J. Frank Dobie's
first books, and the one that helped gain him national prominence
as a folklorist. In it, he recounts the tales and legends of those
hardy souls who searched for buried treasure in the Southwest
following in the footsteps of that earlier gold seeker, the
Spaniard Coronado.
"These people," Dobie writes in his introduction, "no matter
what language they speak, are truly Coronado's inheritors.... l
have called them Coronado's children. They follow Spanish trails,
buffalo trails, cow trails, they dig where there are no trails; but
oftener than they dig or prospect they just sit and tell stories of
lost mines, of buried bullion by the jack load..."
This is the tale-spinning Dobie at his best, dealing with
subjects as irresistible as ghost stories and haunted houses.
It is for good reason that J. Frank Dobie is known as the
Southwest's master storyteller. With his eye for color and detail,
his ear for the rhythm of language and song, and his heart open to
the simple truth of folk wisdom and ways, he movingly and
unpretentiously spins the tales of our collective heritages. This
he does in Tales of Old-Time Texas, a heartwarming array of
twenty-eight stories filled with vivid characters, exciting
historical episodes, and traditional themes. As Dobie himself says:
"Any tale belongs to whoever can best tell it." Here, then, is a
collection of the best Texas tales--by the Texan who can best tell
them.
Dobie's recollections include such classics in Lone Star State
lore as the tale of Jim Bowie's knife, the legend of the Texas
bluebonnet, the story of the Wild Woman of the Navidad, and the
account of the headless horseman of the mustangs. Other stories in
this outstanding collection regale us with odd and interesting
characters and events: the stranger of Sabine Pass, the Apache
secret of the Guadalupes, the planter who gambled away his bride,
and the Robinhooding of Sam Bass. These stories, and many more,
make Tales of Old-Time Texas a beloved classic certain to endure
for generations.
The Texas Longhorn made more history than any other breed of cattle
the world has known. These wiry, intractable beasts were themselves
pioneers in a harsh land, moving elementally with drouth, grass,
Arctic blizzards, and burning winds. Their story is the bedrock on
which the history of the cow country of America is founded. J.
Frank Dobie was a tale spinner who appreciated the proper place of
legend and folklore in history. In The Longhorns, he tells of the
Spanish conquistadors, who brought their cattle with them; of
ranching in the turbulent colonial times; of the cowboy, whose
abandon, energy, insolence, and pride epitomized the booming West.
He writes of terrifying stampedes, titantic bull fights on the
range, ghost steers, and encounters with Indians. A tireless
prospector of the history and legends of the Southwest, Dobie spent
most of his life preparing to write this book. He was born in the
Texas brush country where the Longhorns made their last stand; he
back-trailed them into Mexico; he pursued the vivid lore of Texas
cowboys and Mexican vaqueros. No historian or naturalist has ever
so related an animal to the land, its people, and its history.
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Cow People (Paperback)
J. Frank Dobie
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R482
R428
Discovery Miles 4 280
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Cow People records the fading memories of a bygone Texas, the
reminiscences of the cow people themselves. These are the Texans of
the don't-fence-me-in era, their faces pinched by years of
squinting into the desert glare, tanned by the sun and coarsened by
the dust of the Chisholm Trail. Their stories are often raucous but
just as often quiet as hot plains under a pale Texan sky. A native
Texan, J. Frank Dobie had an inborn knowledge of the men and
customs of the trail camps. Cattlemen were as various as the
country was big. Ab Blocker was a tall, quiet man who belonged
totally to the cattle and the silent plains. But big men often had
big lungs. "Shanghai Pierce was the loudest man in the country. He
would sit at one end of a day coach and in normal voice hold
conversation with some man at the other end of the coach, who of
course had to yell, while the train was clanking along. He knew
everybody, yelled at everybody he saw." Texas bred tall men and
taller stories. There was Findlay Simpson, who played havoc with
fact but whiled away the drivers' long, lonely evenings with his
tales. Old Findlay told of a country so wet that it bogged down the
shadow of a buzzard, and of cattle that went into hibernation
during rugged winters; he once spun yarns for three days straight,
outlasting his listeners in a marathon of endurance. All real cow
people-from the cattle drivers to the cattle owners-lived by a
simple code based on the individual's integrity. Bothering anyone
else's poke or business uninvited was strictly forbidden, and
enforcement of this unwritten law was as easy as pulling a trigger.
Honesty was taken for granted, and a cowman's name on a check made
it negotiable currency. Yet Texas had its "bad guys"-the crooks,
the thieves, even the tightwads. "A world big enough to hold a
rattlesnake and a purty woman is big enough for all kinds of
people," wrote Dobie. This is the world whose vast and various
population the reader will find in Cow People.
The Ben Lilly Legend brings back to life a great American
hunter--the greatest bear hunter in history after Davy Crockett, by
his own account and also by the record. J. Frank Dobie met Lilly
and was so struck by this extraordinary man that he collected
everything he could find about him.
Lilly was born in Alabama in 1856, followed the bear and the
panther westward through Mississippi and Louisiana to Texas,
leaving a trail of stories about his prowess as a hunter and his
goodness as a man. He was at one time "chief huntsman" to Teddy
Roosevelt, hunted in Texas and Mexico, and came to be known as the
master sign reader of the Rockies.
Here are all the stories Ben Lilly told and a great many more
Frank Dobie heard about him, put together in a fresh and
fascinating contribution to American folklore.
The cream of a large collection of Mexican lore has been
accumulated over many years, partly through contributions by lovers
of the gente all over the Southwest and partly through editor J.
Frank Dobie's ramblings in northern Mexico. Tales make up the
largest category; however, more realistic are the accounts of
Mexican customs and sayings. Another type of popular expression is
the corrido, or ballad, and the tall tale is well represented, too,
especially in connection with two mighty folk-heroes, Juan Oso and
Catorce.
I'll Tell You a Tale is a garland of some of Frank Dobie's best
writing, put together by Isabel Gaddis, one of his former students
at the University of Texas. The tales included are those the author
himself liked best, and he even rewrote some of them especially for
this anthology. Ben Carlton Mead has contributed 32 original line
drawings to illustrate the stories.
These tales spring from the soil and folklore of our land; but
more than this, they make the readers contemporary with the times,
filling us with the wonder of something past and yet still with us.
They are arranged topically into sections whose titles speak for
them: "The Longhorn Breed," "Mustangs and Mustangers," "The Saga of
the Saddle," "Characters and Happenings of Long Ago," "Animals of
the Wild," "In Realms of Gold," and "Ironies."
Includes Ranch Remedios, By Frost Woodhull; Northwestern Oklahoma
Folk Cures, By Walter R. Smith; Tales And Songs Of The
Texas-Mexicans, By Jovita Gonzalez; Legends Of Wichita County, By
Betty Smedley; Jointsnake And Hoop Snake, Gibbons Poteet; Strap
Buckner Of The Texas Frontier, By Florence Elberta Barns; Jesse
Holmes, The Fool-Killer, By Ernest E. Leisy; Finding Folk-Lorists,
Rebecca W. Smith; And Recent Research In Balladry And Folk Songs.
By L. W. Payne, Jr.
This is a new release of the original 1928 edition.
This is a new release of the original 1924 edition.
Contents Include Folk-Lore Of The Texas-Mexican Vaquero By Jovita
Gonzalez; Tales And Rhymes Of A Texas Household By Bertha McKee
Dobie; Lore Of The Llano Estacado By J. Evetts Haley; Names In The
Old Cheyenne And Arapahoe Territory By Della I. Young; Nicknames In
Texas Oil Fields By Hartman Dignowity; The Devil's Grotto By Mody
C. Boatright; Myths Of The Tejas Indians By Mattie Austin Hatcher;
A Note On Four Negro Words By Robert Adger Law; Ballads And Songs
Of The Frontier Folk By J. Frank Dobie; Songs The Cowboys Sing By
John R. Craddock; Songs Of The Open Range By Ina Sires; The Texas
Cowboy By Arbie Moore; Cowboy Songs Again By J. Evetts Haley; The
Ballad Of Davy Crockett By Julia Beazley; Annie Breen From Old
Kaintuck By George E. Hastings; Songs And Ballads-Grave And Gay By
L. W. Payne, Jr.
An Incomplete Guide To Books On Texas And The Southwest.
A TEXAS COWBOY CONTENTS J M ., . INTRODUCTION by J. Frank Dobie V j
x BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SIRINGO S WRITINGS xxxvii AUTHOR S PREFACE 3 1.
My Boyhood Days 7 2. My Introduction to the Late War 11 3. My First
Lesson In Cow Punching 18 4. My Second Experience in St. Louis 26
5. A New Experience 32 6. Adopted and Sent to School 37 7. Back at
Last to the Lone Star State 41 8. Learning To Rope Wild Steers 45
9. Owning My First Cattle 51 10. A Start up the Ghisholm Trail 58 1
1 . Buys a Boat and Becomes a Sailor 63 12. Back to My Favorite
Occupation, That of a Wild and Woolly Cow Boy 69 13. Mother and I
Meet at Last 74 14. On a Tare in Wichita, Kansas 80 15. A Lonely
Trip down the Cimeron 88 16. My First Experience Roping a Buffalo
94 17. An Exciting Trip after Thieves 99 18. Seven Weeks among
Indians 103 19. A Lonely Ride of Eleven Hundred Miles 111 20.
Another Start up the Chisholm Trail 117 21. A Trip Which Terminated
in the Capture of quot Billy the Kid quot 124 22. Billy the Kid s
Capture 1 36 AUG 171950 Grande On a Mule 141 24. Wsty ftjul by
Unknown Parties 146 25. LbftVoft the Staked Plains 151 26. A Trip
down the Reo Pecos 160 27. A True Sketch of quot Billy the Kid s
quot Life 168 28. Wrestling With a Dose of Small Pox on the Llano
Esticado 178 29. In Love with a Mexican Girl 187 30. A Sudden Leap
from Cow Boy to Merchant 193 ILLUSTRATION Frontispiece of First
Edition facing page xii Second Frontispiece of First Edition xiii
Title Page of First Edition xl Fly Sheet of First Edition Q
INTRODUCTION CHARLIE SIRINGO, WRITER AND MAN By J. FRANK DOBIE c,
HARLES A. SIRINGO was born in Matagorda County, Texas, February 7,
1855, and he died in Hollywood, California, October 19, 1928.
AngeloSiringo, the census report of 1860 has the name he was known
to thousands simply as Charlie Siringo. For the first eleven years
of his life he was his quot folk s contrary son. quot For the next
fifteen years or so he was a cowboy then, for two decades, a
detective. Thereafter his life, lived mostly in New Mexico and
California, was meager and splattered, some of it spent in writing,
perhaps more of it spent in contesting a power that suppressed what
he had written. Carrying them in a satchel, he peddled his own
privately printed books. He wrote his first book when he was less
than thirty years old but was considering himself quot an old
stove-up cowpuncher. quot It is the story of his life on the range.
During the last twenty years or so of his life he repeatedly
rewrote the story, with the additions made by time but without
those extensions in meaning that an expanding intellect gives to a
subject on which it prolongs con sideration. His second book,
however, is independent of the first, beginning with his employment
as a private detective in Chicago in 1886. Two years before this a
blind phrenologist who came to Caldwell, Kansas, had felt his quot
mule head quot and assured him that he was quot cut out for a
detective. quot His titles in order of pub lication are A Texas
Cowboy 1885, A Cowboy Detective, Two Evil Isms Pinkertonism and
Anarchism 1915, ix A Lone Star Cowboy 1919, Billy the Kid 1920,
Riata and Spurs 1927. Siringo had five themes his experience on the
range Billy the Kid, whom he chased as a cowboy Pinkerton s
National Detective Agency, for which he worked for twenty-two years
tough men and tough experiences that he met as a de tective and
then more tough men. He had aninclination to write about women but
suppressed it. Whatever he might have said on the subject would not
have been news. His collection of cowboy songs is hardly to be
rated as a book. The first book of any significance pertaining to
the range, His toric Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and
Southwest, by Joseph G. McCoy, appeared in 1874. In point of time,
Siringo s A Texas Cowboy y or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck
of a Spanish Pony was the second range book of any significance to
appear...
This is a new release of the original 1924 edition.
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