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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A quintessential exploration of Western life and culture, 'A Texas Cow Boy (A Western Classic)' gathers stories that traverse the rugged landscapes and raw encounters of frontier existence. This anthology weaves narratives that capture the diverse voices of the wild frontier, from the poignant soliloquies of solitary cowboys to the panoramic vistas of untamed Texan geography. The collection is notable for its exploration of themes such as survival, freedom, and the relentless quest for identity amidst the backdrop of the American West. Each story contributes to a mosaic of the Western experience, making this anthology significant not only in its breadth of theme but also in its depth of human experience. Charles A. Siringo, along with Charlie Siringo, lends a remarkable editorial touch to this anthology, uniting voices that reflect the spirit of the West. They guide their authors in capturing the essence of the Western lifestyle, aligning with historical and cultural movements that celebrate both individual resilience and community values. The diverse authors illuminate varied facets of Western life, offering a window into a past that shapes contemporary cultural understandings. This anthology provides readers with a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the rich tapestry of Western lore. Through a variety of styles and voices, 'A Texas Cow Boy' facilitates an engaging exploration of not only the Western frontier but also the enduring human themes that resonate across time and place. For those seeking to understand the multifaceted dimensions of Western literature, this collection serves as an invaluable resource for both education and entertainment. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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A Texas Cow Boy (A Western Classic)
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the heart of A Texas Cow Boy is the stark negotiation between myth and labor, where open-range freedom is earned by relentless work, grit, and wit. Charles A. Siringo, remembered widely as Charlie Siringo, writes from the saddle rather than from a distant desk, translating the dust and daylight of the range into lived experience. The book’s power comes from its insistence that endurance, skill, and community mean more than spectacle. It invites readers to reconsider the cowboy not as a caricature but as a craftsman of the trail, shaped by weather, livestock, and the uneasy edges of a changing frontier.
As an autobiographical narrative first published in 1885, this work stands within the Western genre while retaining the candor of a primary document. Siringo situates his story across the cattle ranges of Texas and the broader American West in the latter nineteenth century, capturing a world still defined by open pasture and long trail drives. Written while that way of life persisted, the book preserves details that later fiction would romanticize or simplify. Its publication gives modern readers a contemporaneous voice from the era, offering context for the emergence of the cowboy as both working hand and enduring American symbol.
The premise is straightforward and compelling: a young Texan learns the craft of range work and spends years in the saddle, moving cattle, breaking horses, and surviving the hazards that accompany both tasks. Rather than a single arc, the narrative unfolds in episodes that mirror the seasons—gathering, driving, bedding down, and starting again. Readers encounter storms, long nights, and makeshift camps not as sensational set pieces, but as routine tests of attention and nerve. The experience is immersive, direct, and unadorned, a first-person account that privileges observation over ornament and situates risk within the ordinary rhythm of labor.
Siringo’s voice is plainspoken yet vivid, marked by humor, understatement, and a keen eye for the telling detail. His style favors quick sketches of people and places, the kind of portraits one might trade across a campfire, with stories that end not in flourish but in the quiet satisfaction of work well done. The mood alternates between high spirits and hard reality, attentive to both camaraderie and loneliness. Without affectation, the prose conveys physical sensation—the rub of leather, the ache of long miles—as well as the mental vigilance required to keep cattle calm and partners safe.
Core themes emerge steadily from the work: self-reliance nurtured by necessity, loyalty tested by weather and distance, and the thin line between freedom and exposure on the open range. The book traces a practical ethics built from cooperation, situational judgment, and earned respect, rather than formal rules. It also registers the cultural inheritance of the West, where techniques and terminology reflect a long exchange with Mexican vaquero traditions. Throughout, the narrative weighs youthful bravado against the demands of responsibility, showing how skill matures into judgment, and how a sense of place forms under skies that promise both opportunity and danger.
Beyond its storytelling, A Texas Cow Boy serves as documentation of a working system—the routines, tools, and tacit knowledge that sustained the cattle industry before barbed boundaries and changing markets reshaped it. As such, it has been valued by historians and readers seeking a participant’s perspective on the logistics and social fabric of trail life. The book offers a counterweight to later mythmaking by preserving the cadence of actual practice: early starts, long watches, and the collective discipline that moves animals safely over distance. Its observations help map how livelihood, landscape, and mobility intersected on the nineteenth-century frontier.
Today, readers may come to this classic for adventure, but they are likely to stay for its clarity about what endurance costs and what community requires. A Texas Cow Boy remains relevant for anyone interested in labor, identity, and the making of national myths, offering an unvarnished perspective that complements, and sometimes corrects, popular images of the West. It invites reflection on how stories become symbols, and how the day’s work underpins every legend. Approached as both literature and testimony, Siringo’s account promises an engaging, grounded passage into a world built on skill, patience, and the stubborn hope of open horizons.
Synopsis
A Texas Cow Boy presents Charles A. Siringo’s firsthand account of life on the open range in the decades after the Civil War. Framed as a straightforward memoir, it follows his progression from Texas boyhood to seasoned hand on cattle drives pushing longhorns north to railheads. Siringo records the routines, risks, and unwritten rules that defined cowboy work, using plain detail rather than embellishment. The narrative moves chronologically, emphasizing the practical realities of the trail, the organization of crews, and the social world of cow towns. Throughout, the book aims to document a vanishing era, preserving its language, customs, and daily practices for readers unfamiliar with the frontier.
The story begins with Siringo’s youth in coastal Texas, where riding and roping were everyday skills and Spanish vaquero traditions shaped technique and vocabulary. He explains how a boy entered the trade, from handling mustangs to acquiring necessary gear. Early scenes depict bronc breaking, rope work, and lessons from experienced hands, grounding the narrative in apprenticeship and observation. He sets out the expectations of a reliable cowhand—endurance, sobriety on the job, and loyalty to the outfit—while noting low wages and limited comforts. This opening establishes the practical foundation upon which the book builds, establishing the skills and values that underpin later episodes.
Siringo then details the organization of a cattle drive, describing roles such as trail boss, cook, wrangler, and point and swing riders. He outlines spring roundups, branding, and sorting before the herd moves north. Readers learn how remudas are managed, how the chuck wagon operates, and how shifts are assigned to maintain order day and night. Planning routes, provisioning, and negotiating water and grass become logistical challenges, handled by experience and established custom. The narrative emphasizes teamwork and clear lines of authority, showing how successful drives depend on steady judgment, reliable horses, and coordination, rather than sheer daring alone.
Once on the trail, the book recounts hazards that could undo months of work in a single night. Thunderstorms, lightning, and sudden winds could spark stampedes, demanding calm voices, steady riding, and songs to settle the herd. River crossings bring descriptions of quicksand, swollen currents, and the techniques used to keep cattle together. Siringo notes vigilance for rustlers and tensions in Indian Territory, while focusing on practical precautions rather than sensational incidents. He explains night guarding, horse-string management, and camp discipline, highlighting routines that reduce risk. These chapters capture the blend of patience, alertness, and skill that steady the long push northward.
At the railheads in Kansas and other cow towns, Siringo recounts turning herds over to buyers, settling accounts, and confronting temptations of town life. He sketches saloons, dance halls, card tables, and the presence of local lawmen, offering brief portraits of characters without lingering on notoriety. The contrast with the trail is clear: noise, cash, and crowds replace the slow discipline of open-country work. Paydays prompt celebrations as well as trouble, while codes of conduct among cowboys often keep the peace. The sections avoid moralizing, instead observing how hard-earned wages, long absences, and youthful energy shape the social life surrounding the cattle trade.
Between drives, Siringo describes ranch work that sustains the industry. He covers line riding in winter, guarding stock from storms and strays; spring and fall roundups; cutting out mavericks; and the everyday maintenance of gear and mounts. The chuck wagon’s role as moving kitchen and repair shop is detailed, with notes on rations, coffee, and camp routine. Songs, humor, and shared hardship build camaraderie, while Spanish terms and vaquero methods reflect the region’s cultural blend. Encounters with Native peoples and Mexican cowboys are presented matter-of-factly, with emphasis on practical exchanges and mutual skills rather than conflict or romance.
The narrative broadens to track changes reshaping the range. Siringo notes expanding herds, new ranch capital, and the spread of railroads that shorten drives and alter markets. He touches on quarantines related to Texas fever, the arrival of barbed wire, and disputes that arise as open range closes and grazing patterns shift. With fencing, water rights, and settlement advancing, the free-roaming longhorn era begins to contract. These observations situate personal experience within a larger economic transformation, emphasizing that the cowboy’s work is responsive to conditions beyond individual outfits—weather, investment, law, and infrastructure all press on the traditional rhythms of the trail.
As responsibilities grow and seasons accumulate, Siringo records injuries, narrow escapes, and the wearying cycles of labor that lead him to consider a new path. The narrative introduces transitions into business ventures in a cow-town setting, reflecting a move from saddle work to more settled pursuits. He describes maintaining ties to the trade while adapting to changing times, without dramatizing or idealizing the shift. The emphasis remains on cause and effect: skills learned on the range prove useful in negotiation, bookkeeping, and steady judgment. This section bridges the arc from youthful ambition toward a practical acceptance of industry and personal change.
The book closes by underscoring its purpose: to preserve a clear account of cowboy life during a distinctive period of American history. Siringo presents work, language, and custom as he knew them, prioritizing accuracy over legend. The overall message is that the cowboy’s craft rests on discipline, cooperation, and resilience, and that its realities differ from popular spectacle. By tracing a life from Texas boyhood through trail seasons and into a changing West, the memoir captures a culture at its peak and on the verge of transformation. It stands as a concise record of practices, perils, and character forged on the hurricane deck of a Spanish pony.
Historical Context
Set largely in the decade after the American Civil War and into the early 1880s, A Texas Cow Boy unfolds across the open ranges of South and West Texas, the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), New Mexico, Colorado, and the cattle towns of Kansas. It depicts the maturation of a ranching economy shaped by Spanish-Mexican vaquero traditions and by Anglo-American capital after 1865. Chuckwagons, mustangs, and mesquite pastures anchor a landscape only lightly governed, where U.S. Army forts guarded trails and railheads drew herds north. The book’s scenes of long drives, cow camps, stampedes, and saloons mirror the period’s mobility, peril, and improvisational law that characterized the Great Plains and Southwest frontier.
The post–Civil War cattle boom and the era of the long drives (approximately 1866–1886) form the decisive historical frame for Siringo’s narrative. After 1865, Texas possessed millions of half-wild longhorns, while northern cities and rail-linked stockyards created soaring demand. Entrepreneur Joseph G. McCoy established Abilene, Kansas, as the first great shipping point in 1867, catalyzing the Chisholm Trail from the Red River to Abilene. Other corridors soon followed: the Goodnight–Loving Trail (from 1866) toward Fort Sumner and Denver; the Great Western (Dodge City) Trail (prominent by the mid-1870s) to Dodge City and on to Ogallala, Nebraska. Between 1866 and 1885, more than five million Texas cattle and roughly a million horses were driven north. Typical herds numbered 2,000–3,000 head, managed by crews of 10–15 cowboys under a trail boss, with wages commonly $30–40 per month and higher pay for cooks and bosses. Charles Goodnight’s 1866 invention of the chuckwagon standardized trail logistics, while equipment such as the riata (la reata), chaparreras (chaps), and techniques for bronc busting reflected the deep vaquero heritage. The hazards were concrete: stampedes in thunderstorm “blue northers,” swollen river crossings on the Brazos, Red, Canadian, and Arkansas, quicksand, cattle fever quarantines, and sporadic confrontations in the Indian Territory. Cowtowns evolved in sequence—Abilene (1867–1871), Ellsworth and Newton (early 1870s), Wichita (1872–1874), and Dodge City (ascendant by 1876). The book’s sustained attention to trail discipline, night herding, horse string management, and the climactic arrival at railheads captures, in lived detail, the central economic and cultural system that defined the Western cattle frontier.
Railroad expansion is the indispensable backdrop to the cattle trade’s geography and timing. The Kansas Pacific line facilitated the Abilene market beginning in 1867, while the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad reached Dodge City by 1872, turning it into a premier shipping point. Chicago’s Union Stock Yards (opened 1865) and eastern packers set prices and schedules that reverberated down the trails. As settlement advanced along the rails, quarantine lines, freight rates, and town ordinances shifted the preferred railheads. Siringo’s depictions of the final push into rail towns, the frantic loading of cattle cars, and the sudden cash economy mirror the railroad’s decisive role in structuring cowboy work.
The Red River War (1874–1875) signaled the U.S. Army’s campaign to break the resistance of Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapaho bands on the Southern Plains. Key actions included the Second Battle of Adobe Walls (June 27, 1874) and Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie’s destruction of horse herds at Palo Duro Canyon (September 28, 1874), driving surviving groups toward reservations such as Fort Sill. The pacification of the Llano Estacado opened trail corridors and ranching in the Texas Panhandle. Siringo’s passages about armed escorts, Indian Territory crossings, and the nervous discipline of night guard reflect the lingering dangers and rapid military reshaping of the Plains during his working years.
Barbed wire and the battles over enclosure transformed the range in the early 1880s. Joseph Glidden’s 1874 patent inaugurated cheap fencing that spread across Texas and the Plains, provoking conflicts with trail users and smallholders. The Texas Fence-Cutting War (1883–1884) saw organized cutting of illegal or obstructive fences; in 1884 the Texas Legislature criminalized fence cutting and required gates on public roads. Drift fences, especially in the Panhandle, trapped cattle in winter storms, fueling public outrage. Siringo’s reminiscences of once-open trails, contested water, and shifting employment reflect the tension between the fading open range and the rise of capitalized, enclosed ranching regimes.
The near-extirpation of the American bison in the 1870s furnished both ecological vacancy and moral controversy. Commercial hide hunting, accelerated by the railroads and long-range rifles, eliminated the southern herd by roughly 1878 and the northern herd by 1883. Notable episodes include the Adobe Walls hunting camp and market hunting along the Santa Fe and Kansas Pacific lines. With the buffalo gone, grasslands became available for cattle on a vast scale, but the collapse devastated Plains tribes’ subsistence base. Siringo’s observations of hide hunters, empty ranges, and the sudden dominance of longhorns situate his cowboy career within the environmental and human dislocations that enabled the cattle boom.
Law-and-order regimes on the frontier were improvised and uneven. The Texas Rangers’ Frontier Battalion, organized in 1874 under John B. Jones, targeted raiding and stock theft, while county sheriffs and marshals policed cowtowns. Figures such as Bat Masterson in Ford County (sheriff, 1877–1879) and, earlier in Wichita and Dodge City, Wyatt Earp, symbolized attempts to regulate saloons, brothels, and gambling, culminating in standoffs like the Dodge City War of 1883. Concurrently, brand registries, trail contracts, and stock associations professionalized the trade. Siringo’s accounts of saloon brawls, rustlers, and the authority of the trail boss sketch the practical legalities that kept herds and wages intact amid chronic disorder.
Siringo’s book serves as a grounded social and political critique by documenting the material conditions that shaped labor, land, and power on the cattle frontier. His depictions of low wages, dangerous work, and precarious employment expose the asymmetry between cowboys and ranch capitalists, while the advance of railroads and fencing reveals how corporate and legislative decisions reordered public space. The narrative’s matter-of-fact treatment of Native dispossession, the eclipse of Tejano and vaquero autonomy, and the degradation of common pastures highlights the hidden costs of market expansion. By recording conflicts over quarantine lines, fences, and town ordinances, the book implicitly critiques how law served property and profit over customary range use.
A Texas Cow Boy (A Western Classic)
Preface
My excuse for writing this book is money—and lots of it.
I suppose the above would suffice, but as time is not very precious I will continue and tell how the idea of writing a book first got into my head:
While ranching on the Indian Territory line, close to Caldwell, Kansas, in the winter of '82 and '83, we boys—there being nine of us—made an iron-clad rule that whoever was heard swearing or caught picking grey backs off and throwing them on the floor without first killing them, should pay a fine of ten cents for each and every offense. The proceeds to be used for buying choice literature—something that would have a tendency to raise us above the average cow-puncher. Just twenty-four hours after making this rule we had three dollars in the pot—or at least in my pocket, I having been appointed treasurer.
As I was going to town that night to see my Sunday girl, I proposed to the boys that, while up there, I send the money off for a years subscription to some good newspaper. The question then came up, what paper shall it be? We finally agreed to leave it to a vote—each man to write the one of his choice on a slip of paper and drop it in a hat. There being two young Texans present who could neither read nor write, we let them speak their choice after the rest of us got our votes deposited. At the word given them to cut loose they both yelled "Police Gazette", and on asking why they voted for that wicked Sheet, they both replied as though with one voice: "Cause we can read the pictures." We found, on counting the votes that the Police Gazette had won, so it was subscribed for.
With the first copy that arrived was the beginning of a continued story, entitled "Potts turning Paris inside out." Mr. Potts, the hero, was an old stove-up New York preacher, who had made a raise of several hundred thousand dollars and was over in Paris blowing it in. I became interested in the story, and envied Mr. Potts very much. I wished for a few hundred thousand so I could do likewise; I lay awake one whole night trying to study up a plan by which I could make the desired amount. But, thinks I, what can an uneducated cow puncher do now-a-days to make such a vast sum? In trying to solve the question my mind darted back a few years, when, if I had taken time by the forelock, I might have now been wallowing in wealth with the rest of the big cattle kings—or to use a more appropriate name, cattle thieves. But alas! thought I, the days of honorable cattle stealing is past, and I must turn my mind into a healthier channel.
The next morning while awaiting breakfast I happened to pick up a small scrap of paper and read: "To the young man of high aims literature offers big inducements, providing he gets into an untrodden field."
That night I lay awake again, trying to locate some "cussed" untrodden field, where, as an author, I might soar on high—to the extent of a few hundred thousand at least.
At last, just as our pet rooster, "Deacon Bates" was crowing for day, I found a field that I had never heard of any one trampling over—a "nigger" love story. So that night I launched out on my new novel, the title of which was, "A pair of two-legged coons." My heroine, Miss Patsy Washington was one shade darker than the ace of spades, while her lover, Mr. Andrew Jackson, was three colors darker than herself. My plot was laid in African Bend on the Colorado river in Southern Texas.
Everything went on nicely, until about half way through the first chapter, when Mr. Jackson was convicted and sent to Huntsville for stealing a neighbors hog; and while I was trying to find a substitute for him, old Patsy flew the track and eloped with a Yankee carpet-bagger. That was more than I could endure, so picking up the manuscript I threw it into the fire. Thus ended my first attempt at Authorship.
I then began figuring up an easier field for my inexperienced pen, and finally hit upon the idea of writing a history of my own short, but rugged life, which dear reader you have before you. But whether it will bring me in "shekels" enough to capsize Paris remains yet to be "disskivered" as the Negro says.
Chapter I. My Boyhood Days
It was a bright morning, on the 7th day of February 1856, as near as I can remember, that your humble Servant came prancing into this wide and wicked world.
By glancing over the map you will find his birthplace, at the extreme southern part of the Lone Star State[1], on the Peninsula of Matagorda, a narrow strip of land bordered by the Gulf of Mexico on the south and Matagorda Bay on the north.
This Peninsula is from one to two miles wide and seventy five miles long. It connects the mainland at Caney and comes to a focus at Deskrows Point or "Salura Pass." About midway between the two was situated the "Dutch Settlement," and in the centre of that Settlement, which contained only a dozen houses, stood the little frame cottage that first gave me shelter.
My father who died when I was only a year old, came from the sunny clime of Italy, while my dear old mother drifted from the Boggs of good "ould" Ireland. Am I not a queer conglomerate—a sweet-scented mixture indeed!
Our nearest neighbor was a kind old soul by the name of John Williams, whose family consisted of his wife and eleven children.
In the fall of 1859 I took my first lessons in school, my teacher being a Mr. Hale from Illinois.
The school house, a little old frame building, stood off by itself, about a mile from the Settlement, and we little tow-heads, sister and I, had to hoof it up there every morning, through the grassburrs, barefooted; our little sunbrowned feet had never been incased in shoe-leather up to that time.
To avoid the grassburrs, sometimes on getting an early start we would go around by the Gulf beach which was quite a distance out of our way. In taking this route though, I would generally be late at school, for there were so many little things to detain me—such as trying to catch the shadow of a flying sea gull, or trying to lasso sand crabs on my stick horse.
Crowds of Cow Boys used to come over to the Peninsula from the mainland and sometimes have occasion to rope wild steers in my presence—hence me trying to imitate them.
I remember getting into a scrape once by taking the beach route to school; sister who was a year older than I, was walking along the water edge picking up pretty shells while I was riding along on my stick horse taking the kinks out of my rope—a piece of fishline—so as to be ready to take in the first crab that showed himself. Those crabs went in large droves and sometimes ventured quite a distance out from the Gulf, but on seeing a person would break for the water.
It was not long before I spied a large drove on ahead, pulling their freight for the water. I put spurs to my pony and dashed after them. I managed to get one old fat fellow headed off and turned towards the prairie. I threw at him several times but he would always go through the loop before I could pull it up. He finally struck a hole and disappeared.
I was determined to get him out and take another whirl at him, so dropping my horse and getting down on all fours I began digging the sand away with my hands, dog fashion.
About that time sister came up and told me to come on as I would be late at school, etc.
I think I told her to please go to Halifax, as I was going to rope that crab before I quit or "bust." At any rate she went off, leaving me digging with all my might.
Every now and then I would play dog by sticking my snoot down in the hole to smell. But I rammed it down once too often. Mr. Crab was nearer the surface than I thought for. He was laying for me. I gave a comanche yell, jumped ten feet in the air and lit out for home at a 2:40 gait. One of his claws was fastened to my upper lip while the other clamped my nose with an iron-like grip.
I met Mr. William Berge coming out to the beach after a load of wood, and he relieved me of my uncomfortable burden. He had to break the crabs claws off to get him loose.
I arrived at school just as Mr. Hale was ringing the bell after recess. He called me up and wanted to know what was the matter with my face, it was so bloody. Being a little George W., minus the hatchet, I told him the truth. Suffice to say he laid me across his knee and made me think a nest of bumble bees were having a dance in the seat of my breeches—or at least where the seat should have been. I never had a pair of pants on up to that time. Had worn nothing but a long white shirt made of a flour sack after some of the "big bugs" in Matagorda had eaten the flour out.
The fall of 1861 Mr. Hale broke up school and left for Yankeedom to join the blue coats. And from that time on I had a regular picnic, doing nothing and studying mischief. Billy Williams was my particular chum; we were constantly together doing some kind of devilment. The old women used to say we were the meanest little imps in the Settlement, and that we would be hung before we were twenty-one. Our three favorite passtimes were, riding the milk calves, coon hunting and sailing play-boats down on the bay shore.
Shortly after school broke up I wore my first pair of breeches. Uncle "Nick" and aunt "Mary," mothers' brother and sister, who lived in Galveston, sent us a trunk full of clothes and among them was a pair of white canvas breeches for me.
The first Sunday after the goods arrived mother made me scour myself all over and try my new pants on. They were large enough for two kids of my size, but mother said I could wear them that day if I would be a good boy, and that she would take a few tucks in them before the next Sunday. So after getting me fixed up she told me not to leave the yard or she would skin me alive, etc.
Of course I should have been proud of the new addition to my wardrobe and like a good little boy obeyed my mother; but I wasn't a good little boy and besides the glory of wearing white pants was insignificant compared to that of an exciting coon hunt with dogs through brush, bramble and rushes. You see I had promised Billy the evening before to go coon hunting with him that day.
