Customer Reviews

The Day the Cowboys Quit

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Kelton's novel has some of the ingredients of pulp western fiction - big ranchers against the little guys, justice at the end of a rope, an honorable hero wearing a sheriff's badge - but he brings a great deal of insight, experience, and historical background to the task of telling this story. It is enjoyable and full of well-drawn characters and unexpected turns of plot from beginning (a squabble over the brand on a cow) to the end (a gripping courtroom drama).

The title suggests that the book might be a more light-hearted story that focuses on the cowboy strike of 1883, but Kelton's aim is to explore the more complex psychology of the men who live by the Code of the West. The ill-fated strike is over before we are well into the book, and the author focuses on the unexpected and far-reaching results of its aftermath. Like many books about the West, this one is about loss and the passing of an era. The cowboy way of the open rangeland is quickly disappearing as settlers move in and towns spring up, the cattle business falls under the influence of venture capital from the East, and rough justice must give way to law and order.

Most enjoyable for this reader is the characterization of its main character, Hitch, a single cowboy in his thirties for whom circumstance, loyalty, and honor lead him out of a job he loves and into harm's way, until he reluctantly assumes a role of no small responsibility and risk in the new social order on the Texas plains. Not the fearless hero of standard cowboy fiction, Hitch has a good many conflicting feelings,he's more diplomatic than quick with a gun, and his actions require considerable courage.

Kelton's rural Texas background and knowledge of frontier history clearly come through in the many details that enrich the tale he tells. He notes a horse's dislike for flapping laundry on a clothesline. The cowboys drink more strong coffee than whiskey. He realistically describes a man's slow, painful recovery from being pistol-whipped. A man angrily observes the terror of a cowboy who wet his britches as he was being hanged for thievery. And there is much about managing cattle on the open range and the complicated, neverending process of ensuring their ownership.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the historical West, cowboys, roundups and branding, frontier social history, the landscape of the plains, frontier justice, the Code of the West, and the struggle for political power and shifting alliances in changing times. Kelton's book is well-written, with memorable characters, and a fair share of suspense.

"The Day the Cowboys Quit" goes down as a red letter day for western fans! This Spur Award winner by Elmer Kelton is one of his all-time best. His hero, Hugh Hitchcock, is caught between the cowboys he ramrods and the rancher he admires. But when the local cattle barons lay down their own brand of range law by refusing to permit working cowboys to own their own cattle, a strike ensues. The result is a gritty and honest story of real men in desperate times that ranks in the Top 10 westerns ever penned. If you like your westerns confrontational where justice is served in unpredictable fashion, you will love "The Day the Cowboys Quit!"

this book takes place on the plains of Texas. And shows a passage between the "good ol' days" and the new times ahead. Cowboys are pitted against ranch owners, who start to consider the cowboys more like machines then people. The ranchers post a series of "written rules", that in effect greatly angers the cowboys. Most of the Cowboys in response quit or leave their ranch, to join up in a stike. The stike fails to acomplish it immediate goals, but in the long run, creates a ripple that will change everything. This book was well written, and is able to capture the essence of being a cowboy. this book is based on an actual stike that took place in Texas at a similar time. But since the history books only show brief accounts of the strike, and only that of the ranchers view. The Author based the book "loosely" on the facts, so that he could create a more objective view. This is a fantasic book, I recomend you buy it

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Elmer Kelton is a heck of a writer and I can't wait to read more of his books. His main character, Hitchcock, seems very real and is a person I'd like to know. He is thoughtful, philosophical, wise, not terribly bright, yet can jump into action if needed. As others have pointed out, this is almost a primmer on labor-management negotiations. It shows the selfishness of strikes and how a few people can whip the masses into decisions. All the time, it never left the genre of cowboy novel. It was entertaining and brilliant. If the reader enjoys character studies, this is a great book. If the reader reads westerns for mindless violence, this is not your book. It reminded me a bit of "Shane" in dealing with a serious theme with a reluctant hero. I wish Shane and Hitchcock would come back. Highly recommended.

It's the rare western book that invites a Marxian analysis, but Elmer Kelton, who died recently, was the rare western writer.

"The Day the Cowboys Quit," takes place at the intersection of rugged American individualism and the collective efforts of the undercapitalized to improve their lot.

The book renders a cowboys' strike - a fascinating concept - that actually happened, on ranches in the Canadian River region of west Texas circa 1883.

By Kelton's lights, the strike occurred in the crucible of corporate encroachment upon the cattle industry that brought an end to the free range. Rationalization and greater efficiency in the beef business left the liberty loving cowboys with a beef of their own and they struck in response to it.

This novel is a beautifully paced, tightly constructed page-turner that manages to treat deeper afflictions in the American condition for those who want to see them, without boring those who just want a good western yarn.

Here's an exchange between the central protagonist, Hugh "Hitch" Hitchcock and the Kansas City corporate rancher Prosper Selkirk, who notes that:

"If I invest my entire fortune in a bad venture and lose it, nobody guarantees to take care of me the rest of my life. When a man gets on one of those bad horses he knows the risks: he implies his willingness to accept that risk when he agrees to the job."

[Hitch] "He accepts the job because he's partial to eatin'.'
"The same reason I take a risk and invest capital."
"There a difference between a man's limbs and his money."

A political writer might take pages to explain this naturally occurring friction so skillfully dispatched in a few terse exchanges by Kelton.

What do the "big ranchers" want? New rules forbidding the use of a company horse for personal affairs or keeping one's own mount without management's consent; the expulsion of "tramps and idlers" from the cowboy camp's traditional protective care; and the outlawing of a ranch hand's, "owning cattle in their own brand less than two fences away from the ranch where they worked, which in the Panhandle's open range country effectively canceled out their right to own cattle anywhere."

Each of these, if you're not familiar with late 19th-Century western ranch life (and who is?), comes with a back story Kelton fills in easy as an Arkansas maiden in an Dodge City cathouse.

"The Day the Cowboys Quit," treats the labor action with surprising sensitivity for a manuscript packaged as pulp fiction. Kelton had a deep comprehension of the strike psychology, of the ambiguity that plagues supporters and opponents alike.

He paints those too sure of themselves in a less flattering light than those with doubts. The pioneering, don't tread on me individuals opposing the strike are slaves to the American winner-take-all mentality and obsequious to those with more money simply because they have more money. They lack a dissident and skeptical spirit.

The strikers are scattershot in their efforts; too closely identified, and easily taken advantage of, by the cattle thieves and drifters littering the fast-closing frontier.

The author aptly develops the unspoken reasons behind labor actions that actually prop up the prosaic demands for higher wages and better working conditions.

And speaking of prosaic, Elmer Kelton has a fine ear for plain-spoken dialogue between down home folk while investing his narrator with an-all-too-familiar, but no less colorful klatch of colloquialisms that move his story along like bulls through a brier patch.

"The Day the Cowboys Quit," alternately delivers on resolutions that leave a reader satisfied, without tying every loose end so that the story finishes in an uneven fashion that comes mighty close to looking like life beyond books.

What a masterpiece of writing! The Day The Cowboys Quit is one of the best novels of the West I've ever read (and I've read a lot of them.) When the characters Hitch and Charlie Waide are introduced, you begin to get a feel for the time and the problems the cowboys faced. It is a multi-tiered novel with plots and subplots that interlace. And talk about getting the reader involved ... when Law was about to be lynched, I couldn't read the words fast enough. This was a book that was good at the beginning, held your interest in the middle, and came on strong at the end. If you only read one western novel this year--this is the one to get. Well done, Mr. Kelton!

If you want to know how it really was in the 1800s just read this book. Once I began I could not put it down. It makes you feel just as the folks did back then. You will realize folks never change. The selfishness of some individuals and the generosity of others really paints a picture of the era

This story about actual events in the Texas panhandle was very entertaining. It portrays the time very accurately with many varied characters. I thoroughly enjoyed it.