Cowboy

by Ross Santee

"I always wnted to be a cow-puncher," says Shorty Caraway. "As a little kid back on the farm in east Texas I couldn't think of nothin' else." Shorty's father took some persuading, but in the end he staked his fourteen-year-old son to a white pony, a second-hand saddle, and "forty dollars to go with the two I had, an' he said that ought to run me until I got a job." What happened from that day until Shorty was taken on as a regular hand is told in the pages of Ross Santee's Cowboy, first published in 1982.

Genres: Westerns

257 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1977

About the author

While Zane Grey became known for his romantic representations of life in the West, scholars have praised writer and illustrator Ross Santee for his realistic portrayals. Santee was born and raised in Iowa, trained to be a cartoonist at the Chicago Art Institute, and then moved to New York City. Though he sold a few drawings, he became discouraged and went to live with his sister in Gila County, Arizona, in 1915 when he was twenty-seven years old.

Santee himself became a cowboy, working on ranches and participating in cattle roundups and drives. In 1919, he began to return periodically to the East to continue his drawing career, while still working seasonally as a cowboy. A magazine editor convinced him to start writing, and he was regularly producing both stories and illustrations by the time the ranches he had been working for closed in the mid-1920s. Though he lived in Delaware after marrying in 1926, he continued to visit the Southwest regularly and lived there for the final two years of his life in the 1960s.
Critics have found Santee's stories and drawings to "faithfully describe the real West with candor, truth, and feeling" and to give accurate representations of the Arizona countryside and people who lived there, including cowboys and ranchers, miners, and Native Americans. Santee started his cowboy career as a horse wrangler, and he describes the duties and lifestyle of that job in a piece called "The Horse-Wrangler," published in his first book Men and Horses, a 1926 collection of stories and drawings.

He discourages readers from idealizing the wrangler's life in the story's first paragraph, stating that "there is no romance in shoeing horses and being pitched over a corral fence." He goes on to describe the drudgery of their daily routine and the lack of respect given to the wranglers, including anecdotes and illustrations of scenes. Other stories in the collection similarly relate tales of hard work and loneliness among men working with animals in the rough Arizona countryside.

Characters from the stories in Men and Horses appear in Santee's later works, including the 1928 Cowboy, often considered to be his autobiography, but really the life story of a fictional East Texas boy who becomes an Arizona cowboy. J. Frank Dobie wrote in his copy of Cowboy, "I guess this is the best story of the making of a cowboy yet written... It's all so true and natural and genuine."

From: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/educator/mo...

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 3 out of 5]

July 20, 520pm ~~ I found this book out in my Haven't Read These Yet bookcase a while back and brought it in to the desk to be handier. It is the second Ross Santee title for me now, and I liked it better than Men And Horses, which only got one star.

This is a story of a boy who just HAS to be a cowboy. He and a friend tried running away to go find themselves a cattle ranch to work on, but they did not have much luck. A meeting with a sheriff ended that adventure fairly quickly, but it proved to the narrator's father that he was determined to be a cowboy no matter what.

So when our narrator turned fourteen, Dad gave him forty dollars, a saddle to go with his horse, and wished him luck. And that was all just in the first two chapters. The rest of the book tells what happened from that point to the time our hero gets his first full time cowboy job. Because you don't just automatically become a cowboy the day you appear on a ranch and declare yourself available for work, you know.

It was a good story, authentic in the sense that Santee had been a cowboy himself, although he had not started off as young a button as our hero did. By the way, the book is dedicated "For Shorty Caraway ~ top hand" so it is easy to imagine that Santee listened to plenty of Shorty's stories at some point and made them into this book.

There are also illustrations by the author, who in his day was an artist as well as an author. I was not impressed with very many of the drawings, to tell the truth. They mostly seemed like ink blots to me, and I spent a little time more than once trying to see what exactly I was supposed to be seeing. I was wondering how the front cover of my edition could be so detailed and yet the inside illustrations had no real faces or even clear horse heads in them, and that is when I noticed that the front cover was from a painting by N.C. Wyeth, it was not by Santee at all. Ah-ha.

This book was originally published in 1928, during the era that Will James was doing the same type of work. Only doing it better, in my opinion. My mom has Santee's Apache Land in her bookcases, but I have had enough of this author now. I can't help it, I prefer Will James when it comes to such stories.

[Ambrosia Lovie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is currently out of print, and there's no good reason for it. It's a fine, wonderfully written, well controled narrative about a teenager growing up in a man's world of cowboying in New Mexico and Arizona of the early 20th century. The narrator is all of 14 years old when he leaves home in East Texas, confronting a world of misadventure and discouragement as he looks for work, drifting from ranch to ranch, learning how to break horses, and taking whatever job he can find.

Along the way he meets and befriends a good many men who do the real job of cowboying for ranch owners. One of them is a foreman, Mack, who takes the boy under his wing. A top hand, he is the actual cowboy of the book's title. The boy's admiration for him is heart-felt, and the scenes between them are touching. Meanwhile, we learn a lot about what it takes to become any kind of hand at all, as the boy struggles against all odds to give it his best. A realistic portrayal of cowboy life, without a single villain, stage holdup, or shoot-out on the main street of town. Readers will also enjoy Walt Coburn's "Stirrup High" and Ralph Moody's "The Home Ranch," both of which ARE in print.

[Antelope Wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all-time favorites. It's hard to find, so if you run across a copy, don't pass it up.
A teen leaves his East Texas home and heads west to be a cowpuncher. He wanders across southern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona, meeting many a cowboy, and learning to becoming a cowboy himself. The day-to-day details of the cowboy life rang so true I sometimes forgot I was reading fiction. The author's illustrations were great, as well.

[Robert Caraway · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all time favorite books. But then again, I might be a bit biased given it was written about my grandfather. :)