The Drifting Cowboy

It's easy to see why readers like Will James. His love of working cowboys, his respect for horses, and his devotion to the fraternity of men who worked cattle and horses on the open range give his stories an easy warmth - like a comfortable old boot. This book is a collection of his early stories first published in national magazines as his writing career suddenly took off in the 1920s. They are fictionalized autobiography, told in the first person by the drifting cowboy of the title, a young man named Bill, who is an accomplished bronc rider. The stories are told in a leisurely fashion, in the unpolished, ungrammatical jargon of someone sitting around a cow camp swapping yarns with the other boys. The pace seems very slow until you realize that James is trying to capture not the drama but the everydayness of cowboy life. Even while he idealizes his subject, he wants us to feel what it is really like - the grueling, dangerous work of herding cattle that are likely to stampede without warning; the fruitless search for work in lean times; the struggle to keep cattle fed and watered in the desert. Competing in a local rodeo, Bill and his friend Tommy have to outwit the promoters, who rig the results with unfair judges and by manipulating the draw, but what is interesting about this story is the actual experience of being a rodeo cowboy. Our heroes participate in several events (unlike today), and James conveys the mixture of excitement, nerves, disappointment, and triumph that his heroes feel. Most striking about the stories is James' capturing of the spirit of fraternity among cowboys, their generosity, and their gallantry. For all their toughness and fierce disregard for personal injury, there is a gentleness in them that makes these stories almost endearing. And in their tendency to "drift," there's a dedicated individualism that is tempered by loneliness and melancholy. Reading James, it's easy to see how he helped to create the myth of the cowboy in the American imagination. I'm happy to recommend this book. There are seven wonderful stories and 44 of his carefully detailed illustrations, most of them featuring horses with hooves flying and lean cowboys with big hats, who look a lot like James himself in his photographs.