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Journal of the Southwest Wild Cow Tales by Ben K. Green Review by: Don D. Walker Arizona and the West, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring, 1971), pp. 98-100 Published by: Journal of the Southwest Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40167963 . Accessed: 16/06/2014 21:29 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Journal of the Southwest is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Arizona and the West. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.44.78.76 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 21:29:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Wild Cow Talesby Ben K. Green

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Page 1: Wild Cow Talesby Ben K. Green

Journal of the Southwest

Wild Cow Tales by Ben K. GreenReview by: Don D. WalkerArizona and the West, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring, 1971), pp. 98-100Published by: Journal of the SouthwestStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40167963 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 21:29

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Journal of the Southwest is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Arizona andthe West.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.76 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 21:29:20 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Wild Cow Talesby Ben K. Green

98 ARIZONA and the WEST

writing as by the search for factual substance. Too, he was capable of doing an intensive bit of cogitation. This latter art has not always been utilized by his- torians. Many of the Texan's conclusions were reached from the secluded domain of the rocking chair. His writings reflect hours upon hours of sitting and thinking.

Running through all of his pieces is a note of deep concern for the teaching of history. Webb took seriously the role of the professor in a public university, and he conceived this role to include a far-reaching service within the ranks of his discipline. He revealed this not only in the training of teachers, but in many of his speeches and articles he also undertook to reveal the broader implications of his subject to widely dispersed audiences. Perhaps Webb never cogitated long on what kind of a historian he was, and maybe he lost little sleep over whether or not he was a geographical determinist in the classical sense. To him geography was as factual as the far reaches of the land and the horizon.

I once asked Walter Webb about his researches for the essay and speeches on the modern South. He had read this paper and given off-hand speeches from it many times. I was working on the same subject, and confronted many problems in research. He replied that his paper was the result of having spent several

evenings with the Statistical Abstract of the United States Census in his lap. What he said in fact was perhaps narrow - too narrow in scope - but the way he said it, and the "twist" he gave it was the significant thing.

Webb's presidential address before the American Historical Association was in low-key, but thoughtful and serious in intent. He spoke for hundreds of his colleagues who have been made self-conscious, if not made to feel inferior, by this seemingly haughty organization. Webb undertook to call attention to the wide scope of American history, and the fact that the laborers in its vineyard were of many stages of sophistication, and motivated by many forces.

These essays are the distillates of a thoughtful man who dedicated his life to a science and an art of sifting the native ore which lay close at hand. Webb was one of the finest examples, in the field of writing American history, of a man who made significant use of provincial place and materials in adding new dimensions to historical meaning. Behind a forceful personality he did all of it provocatively, and much of it he did exceedingly well.

Thomas D. Clark

The reviewer is Emeritus Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington, and a leading authority on the history and interpretation of the American frontier.

WILD COW TALES. By Ben K. Green. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1969. 306 pp. $5.95.

When Horse Tradin was published in 1967, readers of Western Americana discovered a new talent in the art of telling about men and horses. The author, Ben K. Green, claimed no literary intentions. Indeed, he said pretty much what

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Page 3: Wild Cow Talesby Ben K. Green

REVIEWS 99

hundreds of others like him have said: "Nothing has been added or left out in order to varnish them [his tales of horse trades] for modern reading." Believers in the "authentic West" have always been spooky about any sort of literary varnish. Nevertheless, without perhaps using varnish, Ben Green showed a

special way of convincing and delighting his readers. Wild Cow Tales now adds to Ben Green's reputation. These thirteen stories

"full of rope burns and brush scratches" have both authenticity and what so many books about the West lack - a simple literary manner that gives excitement, the real feel of those burns and scratches, and the whole zest and comedy of much Western experience.

The authenticity is evident on every page. Ben Green knows his cows well. He says in his Introduction : "I started out being a cowboy when I crawled out of the cradle." When he details the work of getting old moss horns out of the

mesquite thickets, he gives the reality of a tough country, ornery animals, and the human ingenuity and courage necessary to cope with them. Yet however much Ben Green remembers, he is never guilty of what I would call the auto-

biographical pedantry that so often clogs the accounts of "how it really was." So many books about the cattle trade are mere dusty boneyards of facts little and big and in-between - with about as much sense of design and proportion as a boneyard.

I hope Ben Green is not embarrassed if I speak of his literary manner. I know he doesn't claim to be a writer in the sense that McMurtry is a writer.

Nevertheless, intentionally or not, he has considerable literary skill - that natural

power of the imagination by which remembered facts are revitalized, perhaps rearranged slightly, so that we believe as readers not because the writer says I was there so I must know but because in the telling he has re-created the very experience itself.

To provide one small illustration, in the tale called "Picturesque Steers," Ben runs out of grub and rides into Fluvanna. He ties his horse to a mesquite tree and decides to take in the whole town. But let him tell about it:

I started in by eatin' some cookies and a can of peaches and the other kinds of sweet stuff that a cowboy don't get campin' out, and visitin' with the storekeeper. He was kinda polite but he sorta figured it part of his business to find out who I was and what I was doing and didn't consider it a matter of buttin' in. When I told him where I was camped and about the cattle, he held a rather poker-like face and didn't show any particular interest in what I had told him.

I bought a small batch of grub about what I could put in a toe sack and tie on the back of my saddle. I knew he wouldn't have a dehorning saw so I asked to

buy just a regular carpenter's hand saw. He said, "You got a hammer and some nails?" and I answered, "No, but I'm not goin' to need any."

He said, "Well, I thought you might from what I hear'd about them steers. I

supposed you might be aimin' to build you a house to winter in." I said, "Don't let that bother you none." As long as I had trapped and fought

bad cattle, I didn't aim to let no remarks of a mild-mannered, quiet-livin' country storekeeper unnerve me, so for a quick answer I said, "I'm goin' to saw every one of that bunch of steers feet off to the quick and they'll be so tender that they drive

easy."

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Page 4: Wild Cow Talesby Ben K. Green

i oo ARIZONA and the WEST

Now maybe it happened exactly this way. Maybe Ben Green has imagined a touch here and there. Personally I don't care. For me this has the comic reality a reader always hopes for.

Don D. Walker

The reviewer is a member of the English faculty at the University of Utah, and a specialist on the history of the cattle industry in the Southwest.

FRENCHMEN AND FRENCH WAYS IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. Edited by John Francis McDermott. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969. 304 pp. $10.95.

This book consists of thirteen papers presented at the 1967 Conference on the French in the Mississippi Valley, held at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and in St. Louis. They deal with little known aspects of the

history and the cultural activities of the French in the colony of Louisiana and its environs.

Two of these papers, "Some Eighteenth-Century French Views," by Pierre H. Boule; and "An Unpublished Memoir of Spanish Louisiana," by Rene J. Le Gardeur, Jr., and Henry C. Pitot, offer valuable opinion and information con-

cerning Louisiana in two stages of its history. The first paper shows that, con-

trary to general opinion, Voltaire, Abbe Prevost, Charlevoix, and other writers entertained a favorable opinion of the colony. The other paper examines a memoir, probably written by James Pitot, an ancestor of Henry C. Pitot, which traces with considerable insight, the political, commercial, and geographical conditions of Louisiana in the last decade of the Spanish regime. It seems to me that these two papers would have presented excellent introductory material for other essays had they been placed together at the beginning, or near the

beginning, of the book. Since they are scattered, however, their effectiveness is

impaired. Four other essays relate to phases in the history of the colony. They, too,

are scattered in their arrangement overlooking historical progression or chron- ology. In "Iberville at the Birdfoot Subdelta," Richebourg Gaillard McWilliams reviews Iberville's journals closely. McWilliams proves that the founder of Louisiana was able to complete the discovery of the Mississippi in 1700 because the palisade lying three and three-quarters miles off the East Pass was not the dangerous entanglement of logs and uprooted trees that others had believed it to be, and as it appears to be from a distance, but a big field of soft mud lumps which allowed him to get by in his ship with little trouble.

"Jerome Phelypeaux, Comte de Pontchartrain, and the Establishment of Louisiana, 1696-1715," by John C. Rule, is a very scholarly essay which tells

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