Customer Reviews

Burs Under the Saddle: A Second Look at Books and Histories of the West

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This 600-page reference examines 424 well-known or standard Western historical books. It will especially appeal to readers already familiaar with the works of Burns, Cunningham, Lake, Myers, Sandoz, Vestal, and others, most of which remain in print and are often cited by later writers. Though popular, these books contain many geographic and chronological errors, highly improbable horseback journeys, and totally impossible feats of marksmanship. In his critiques, Adams is sometimes gentle, sometimes harsh, and often humorous, but he is particularly perceptive in his analysis of "one of the most prolific sources of misinformation, the old-timer(who)depends on a faulty memory, hearsay, or the tall tales he has heard around the campfire. If he places his completed effort in the hands of an editor, the latter is frequently utterly ignorant of the West." I recently read such a memoir, written when the author was 78. The editor - if there was one - did nothing to resolve numerous internal inconsistencies or even check the dates, some of which were obviously wrong! The Adams reader should note this book was published in 1964; thus it cannot address books published after that date, though the books cited continue to appear in footnotes and bibliographies in later books. Also, though the author credits other scholars by name and frequently cites primary sources such as birth records, court testimony, and census data, he does not document most of his assertions of fact. (That many footnotes might double the size of the book!) Of course the reader can do his own research, and in a few cases the author's data have been superseded by more modern scholarship. But that in no way invalidates his criticism of "the constant rewriting of inaccurate history" herein. Ramon Adams wrote several Western histories of his own. He died in 1976.