Customer Reviews

The Log of a Cowboy: A Narrative of the Old Trail Days

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is a lot of fun to read, taking the reader back in time to a late-1800s cattle drive from Texas to Montana. The book is written well with spare prose, wit and exceptional details about a cowboy's often difficult and sometimes boring life on the trail. There's refreshingly little of the syrup found in so many western stories. It's written simply enough for pre-teens interested in the west, yet it will yield a lot of enjoyment for the seasoned reader.

Andy Adams was a prolific writer, and thanks to the University of Nebraska Press, some of this former cowboy's output is still in print. This true-to-life story of an 1882 cattle drive is his best known, and its retelling 100 years later in Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove" is evidence of its importance among early works of Western fiction.

Here the protagonist is a young cowboy much like the author, who trailed beef from Texas to Montana at a time just after the buffalo herds were being extinguished from the short grass prairies and homesteading had not yet fenced in the high plains. Oklahoma was still "Indian Territory," Little Big Horn was a recent memory, and Native Americans were in the last shameful stages of being forced off the open rangeland. The railroads were snaking across the land making frontier boom towns where law and order either prevailed (Dodge) or more often did not (Ogallala), and the vast cattle herds of Texas and Mexico finally had a market and access to it.

Adams was born into this world and as a young man cowboyed during the height of the cattle drive era. His book is an account of one trek, delivering 3,000 head of cattle to the Blackfoot Agency in northern Montana. For the protagonist, the initial excitement wears off once the daily routine is established, and besides the occasional stampede and wet weather, the highlights of the journey are brief visits to the cowtowns they pass along the way and the many river crossings, some of which pose enormous difficulties.

We get to know all the men in the outfit by name, and a few stand out, including Flood the foreman, McCann the cook, and the protagonist's trail mate The Rebel, who is older and wiser and something of a mentor. Other personalities emerge, primarily around the campfire on nights when the men get to swapping stories. And Adams passes on a lot of first-hand knowledge about trailing cattle, riding horses, and the day-to-day operation of a drive. Days and nights of the routine are punctuated by episodes of another kind: a rigged horse race, in which the cowboys lose several hundred dollars in wagers, two saloon shootings, the breakdown of the chuck wagon, pulling cattle out of a boggy river, meeting potentially hostile Indians, an encounter with cattle thieves, and a long drive across a waterless expanse of Wyoming.

Reproduced from the original edition published in 1903, the text has an old fashioned look and feel that suit the subject matter and the prose style well. There are also five illustrations. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed "Lonesome Dove." Adams captures the excitement and the reality of the old West before it was romanticized and mythologized by the movies and popular fiction. As companion volumes, I would recommend Ramon Adams' "Cowboy Lingo" and "Come an' Get It," which provide much informative background on open range cowboying. With a good road atlas at hand, you're also able to follow the track of the drive across six western states, from Brownsville to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.

I have found this to be one of the best western books ever written. Written 100 years ago it has the feel of life in the late 1800s not glossed or romanticized.

If you're interested in this book take a look also at the website westwardho dot us. Although they don't intend to print fiction, they are thinking about making an exception for this terrific title. Why?

The folks at westwardho say, "Log of a cowboy is so near to truth that it is hard to call it fiction. It certainly is more true to life than some of the news articles written in the recent past!"

I appreciate much of the modern miracles we take for granted - internet, mobile (cellular) phones, satellite TV and the ability to produce tremendous, special-effects driven movies. Still, I wonder if we are missing something in all our instant self-gratification lifestyle...

Don't get me wrong, I am not one to call the old days the good days. We not only have more luxury today, we also have more opportunity and greater political and intellectual freedom. I am merely trying to point out that many of us fail to seize opportunity and fail to recognize the value of our more primitive instincts.

Read THE LOG OF A COWBOY and see if you don't also wonder. Then also try finding a copy of Africa's equal, MEMORIES OF A GAME RANGER. If you also will peruse my ABOUT Me profile at Amazon's book reviews and you'll find a few more gems you probably never heard of but that you will thoroughly enjoy - Bill Anderson.

This book tells the story of a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana in 1882. It was written in 1903 by a former cowboy who gives us a clear and candid picture of the hardships of the cattle drive. The book provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses, the good points and bad points of the men we call Cowboys. In additon to telling the story of the hardships of the trail, the book gives us samples of the tales told around the campfire at the end of the long day. Recommended reading for anyone with an interest in the Old West; required reading for anyone who wants to write Westerns.

I have completely lost track of the number of editions and printings I have seen of this book, over the years, and a quick search with Google will produce a number of different free e-texts available on-line. However, almost every edition known to me is missing an introduction; there is therefore (1) no information about the author, and (2) no information as to whether what we have is a novel written in documentary style, or an actual nonfiction account of a typical trail drive in the early 1880s.

Well, folks, it's a novel, as the largely symbolic names for the characters might indicate: Priest, Flood, Officer, Strayhorn, Forrest, Blades, Wheat, Straw, etc., etc. I finally got around to reading it, and enjoyed it. Nothing spectacular or overdrawn--- it would not be surprising to discover that every incident is based on something that directly happened to the author or one of his cowboy sidekicks during his trail-herding days. All the classic situations are here, including visits to Dodge City and Oglalla, fiendishly difficult river crossings, stampedes, rustlers, con-men and segundos, chuck wagons and remudas, saloon gunfights and card-sharping. The number of 20th Century western authors who turned to this 1903 novel to obtain some authentic details to insert into their own trail-drive sequences is probably also close to uncountable.

This is an excellent book about the life of a cowboy. It is told by a man who tells the story of a cattle drive he was on in the early 1880's. From Southern Texas to Northern Montana, we get an inside look at all of the drudgery and excitement he experienced. We gets vivid descriptions of a stampede, trips into Dodge City and other frontier towns along the way, stories around the campfire, crossing rivers, deserts, as well as a gunfight. The power of this book is Andy Adams' ability to put us right along side him as all of the events are recreated. His enthusiasm for and knowledge of the job of a cowboy gives a Western enthusiast everything he or she'd want to know. I found myself captivated by nearly every chapter. I don't have any complaints about the book except that the attitudes of the 1880's don't always fit in neatly with the political correctness of the present. Read the book and you'll find out what I mean and you'll also enjoy a very good look at an important chapter of American history.

Kind of an American epic, getting the herd from the Rio Grande to Montana. Before I read it, I knew it was fiction, but after I read it I was very surprised to be reminded of that. Partly that is due to the spare style. If I was still in school I would want to write an essay comparing it to the Odyssey and Huck Finn.

Jack Schaeffer and Elmore Leonard whetted my appetite for Westerns of high calibre, though I'll admit to suffering withdrawal symptoms subsequent to the death of the former and Mr Leonard's relinquishment of themes Arizonan.

Whilst I look forward with keen anticipation to the eventual publication of Elmore Leonard's erstwhile uncollected Western stories, in recent years my disappointment with the present dearth of quality Westerns has been alleviated somewhat by three books of tremendous vitality that share a very similar, almost primitive, first person narrative voice.

TRUE GRIT by Charles Portis, I've mentioned before and I'll enthuse about this book till I'm blue in the face. The other two books are stories by men who actually lived that long-vanished western life.

"Andy Adams' LOG OF A COWBOY says the blurb on the book jacket, "is the classic account of life on the great trail drives of the old American West . . . from the southwest tip of Texas up to the Canadian frontier in northerm Montana." That's U.S. 83 to twentieth century man - the Road to Nowhere, as it's ruefully known.

And the third book in this trilogy of true toughness is Leroy Judson Daniels TALES OF AN OLD HORSE TRADER (as told to Helen S. Herrick).

Again, I quote from the blurb: "When Daniels was born, the United States was younger than he is now. His life, lived mostly in Iowa between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers . . . spans the era of the nation's growth across the continent . . ."

Epic fare indeed -well, at least until Ol' Elmore climbs back in the saddle

I'd give The Log of a Cowboy 5 stars as an excellent story of life on the cattle drive trails. It's a great read...
But, the quality of this particular edition is very poor.
Blurry print, ink blotches, and even some unreadable sections, makes this edition a poor choice. It looks as though someone just ran the text through a poor quality copier.
Given a price of $38.00, I would certainly expect better.
Try any of the paperback editions, and avoid this one.

Andy Adams is one of the rare authentic 1800's trail riding cowboys who had the ability and desire to put his experiences in writing for us to read in future generations. He obviously realized that he had lived through a time period that would capture peoples imaginations for years to come, but that would soon disappear forever. What sets him apart from the others is his beautiful writing style, and flair for the dramatic. This story of a three thousand mile cattle drive from Texas to Montana is written in first person, and sounds for all the world like an autobiographical story. It is only the occasional reference to his main character, Tom Quirk, that reminds you that he is not describing actual events in a long cattle drive. But the details he includes, his knowledge of horses and longhorns, the stories told around the campfires, and his understanding of the sometimes bullish behavior of his cowboy companions, including their rigid adherence to the Cowboy code of the west, lets you know that he did experience this world in first person. He had ridden those trails for many years, and had seen the unfenced expanses of the American west in those glorious times. This is a book that deserves inclusion in any serious collection of Western history books.