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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Buried vaults stacked with gold bars, secret caches of coins and jewels plundered from the Spaniards and the Church, exposed veins of ore with nuggets the size of turkey eggs. Guarded by the bones of dead men, the legendary treasures of the Southwest still wait for those foolhardy or desperate enough to seek them.

Death is the cure for gold fever, and the lucky few who saw the riches and lived to tell of them spent the rest of their lives searching, haunted by faulty memories, changed landscapes, and quirks of fate. It is the stories of these men and the wealth they pursued that J. Frank Dobie tells in Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver.

In this masterful collection of tales, Dobie introduces us to Pedro Loco, General Mexhuira's ghost, the German, and a colorful group of oddfellows driven to roam the hills in an eternal quest for the hidden entrance, the blazed tree, the box canyon, for fabulous wealth glimpsed, lost, and never forgotten.

Are treasures really there? Searchers still seek them. But for the reader, the treasure is here-- Dobie's tales are pure gold.

STEPHEN F. AUSTIN wanted to exclude lawyers, along with roving frontiersmen, from his colonies in Texas, and hoped thus to promote a utopian society. The lawyers got in, however. Their wit, the anecdotes of which they were both subject and author, and the political stories they made traditional from the stump, have not been adequately set down.

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.

This is a new release of the original 1924 edition.

This is a new release of the original 1928 edition.

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.

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...

An Incomplete Guide To Books On Texas And The Southwest.