Review of \u3ci\u3eClio\u27s Cowboys: Studies in the Historiography of the Cattle Trade\u3c/i\u3e By Don D. walker

Clio\u27s Cowboys is an important book, the first truly analytical historiography of the glory days of the cattle trade. It will probably also be controversial, because it chastises three generations of western historians for mindlessly repeating sweeping generalizations about cowboys and cattlemen, for relying on questionable sources, and, worst of all, for disembodying the most colorful of the nation\u27s epics with impersonalized economic and business histories. Don D. Walker says that historians-for all their pretense of accuracy-do no better in capturing the essence of the American cowboy than do novelists, whom they superciliously dismiss as naive. Suggestive examples of Walker\u27s heresy: Joseph G. McCoy\u27s Historic Sketches, which most historians have accepted almost as holy writ, is the polemical memoir of an embittered old man (p. 6); other standard sources such as J. L. Hill\u27s The End of the Cattle Trail and J. Marvin Hunter\u27s Trail Drivers of Texas are little better; Fred Shannon, Ramon Adams, Joe Frantz, and Julian Choate are shallow (p. 2) in their respective evaluations of sources such as these; Theodore Roosevelt, upon whom historians often rely, too often ... could not see the particular for the general, the person for the type (p. 40); Ernest Osgood, Edward Dale, Walter Prescott Webb, and Louis Pelzer penned nostalgia disguised as history and passed off under inaccurate titles; Frederick Jackson Turner\u27s assertions about frontier individualism have been unthinkingly repeated by historians without qualification, even though they are demonstrably false; Robert Dykstra erred by rejecting fiction as source material; Jimmy Skagg\u27s abstract economic drama [ultimately 1 may prove to be damaging to history (p. 191); William Savage\u27s call for better Western fiction may even aggravate the, weakness we are hoping to overcome (p. 112); and Evetts Haley\u27s biography of Charles Goodnight, while engaging, is inadequate, for the author was overwhelmed by his subject. Clio\u27s Cowboys is an extraordinarily candid appraisal of cowboy history that spares few. Walker chides historians for relying upon the likes of McCoy, Hill, and Hunter while ignoring sources such as Edward and Eleanor (Marx) Aveling\u27s obscure Working Class Movement in America (1891), which includes a chapter on the proletarian cowboy and his bourgeois oppressor, the rancher. Meanwhile, academicians have foisted off sentimental claptrap as serious history. Dale did it. So too did Rudolf (spelled Rudolph by Walker) Clemen

The Oklahoma Series: Volume 8

Reprint of a book containing historical information about ranching in Oklahoma during the cattle drive era, as well as maps showing the different cattle drive trails that ran from Texas through Oklahoma. Index begins on page 122

The Oklahoma Series: Volume 8

Reprint of a book containing historical information about ranching in Oklahoma during the cattle drive era, as well as maps showing the different cattle drive trails that ran from Texas through Oklahoma. Index begins on page 122