Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp

SONGS OF THE CATTLE
TRAIL AND COW CAMP

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK �� BOSTON �� CHICAGO �� DALLAS
ATLANTA �� SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
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MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO

SONGS OF THE CATTLE
TRAIL AND COW CAMP

COLLECTED BY
JOHN A. LOMAX, B.A., M.A.

Executive Secretary Ex-Students' Association,
the University of Texas.

For three years Sheldon Fellow from Harvard University
for the Collection of American Ballads; Ex-President
American Folk-Lore Society. Collector of
"Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier
Ballads"; joint author with Dr.
H. Y. Benedict of "The
Book of Texas."

WITH A FOREWORD BY
WILLIAM LYON PHELPS

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1919

All rights reserved

COPYRIGHT, 1919
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1919.

"THAT THESE DEAR FRIENDS I LEAVE BEHIND
MAY KEEP KIND HEARTS' REMEMBRANCE OF THE LOVE WE HAD."
Solon.

In affectionate gratitude to a group of men, my intimate friends during
College days (brought under one roof by a "Fraternity"), whom I still
love not less but more,

Will Prather, Hammett Hardy, Penn Hargrove and Harry Steger, of
precious and joyous memory;

Norman Crozier, not yet quite emerged from Presbyterianism;

Eugene Barker, cynical, solid, unafraid;

"Cap'en" Duval, a gentleman of Virginia, sah;

Ed Miller, red-headed and royal-hearted;

Bates MacFarland, calm and competent without camouflage;

Jimmie Haven, who has put 'em over every good day since;

Charley Johnson, "the Swede"--the fattest, richest and dearest of the
bunch;

Edgar Witt, whose loyal devotion and pertinacious energy built the
"Frat" house;

Roy Bedichek, too big for any job he has yet tackled;

"Curley" Duncan, who possesses all the virtues of the old time
cattleman and none of the vices of the new;

Rom Rhome, the quiet and canny counter of coin;

Gavin Hunt, student and lover of all things beautiful;

Dick Kimball, the soldier; every inch of him a handsome man;

Alex and Bruce and Dave and George and "Freshman" Mathis and
Clarence, the six Freshmen we "took in"; while Ike MacFarland,
Alfred Pierce Ward, and Guy and Charlie Witt were still in the
process of assimilation,--

To this group of God's good fellows, I dedicate this little book.

No loopholes now are framing
Lean faces, grim and brown,
No more keen eyes are aiming
To bring the redskin down;
But every wind careening
Seems here to breathe a song--
A song of brave careering,
A saga of the strong.

FOREWORD

In collecting, arranging, editing, and preserving the "Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp," my friend John Lomax has performed a real service to American literature and to America. No verse is closer to the soil than this; none more realistic in the best sense of that much-abused word; none more truly interprets and expresses a part of our national life. To understand and appreciate these lyrics one should hear Mr. Lomax talk about them and sing them; for they were made for the voice to pronounce and for the ears to hear, rather than for the lamplit silence of the library. They are as oral as the chants of Vachel Lindsay; and when one has the pleasure of listening to Mr. Lomax--who loves these verses and the men who first sang them--one reconstructs in imagination the appropriate figures and romantic setting.
For nothing is so romantic as life itself. None of our illusions about life is so romantic as the truth. Hence the purest realism appeals to the mature imagination more powerfully than any impossible prettiness can do. The more we know of individual and universal life, the more we are excited and stimulated.
And the collection of these poems is an addition to American Scholarship as well as to American Literature. It was a wise policy of the Faculty of Harvard University to grant Mr. Lomax a traveling fellowship, that he might have the necessary leisure to discover and to collect these verses; it is really "original research," as interesting and surely as valuable as much that passes under that name; for it helps every one of us to understand our own country.

WM. LYON PHELPS.

Yale University,
July 27, 1919.

INTRODUCTION

"Look down, look down, that weary road,
'Tis the road that the sun goes down."

* * *

"'Twas way out West where the antelope roam,
And the coyote howls 'round the cowboy's home,
Where the mountains are covered with chaparral frail,
And the valleys are checkered with the cattle trail,
Where the miner digs for the golden veins,
And the cowboy rides o'er the silent plains,--"

The "Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp" does not purport to be an anthology of Western verse. As its title indicates, the contents of the book are limited to attempts, more or less poetic, in translating scenes connected with the life of a cowboy. The volume is in reality a by-product of my earlier collection, "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads." In the former book I put together what seemed to me to be the best of the songs created and sung by the cowboys as they went about their work. In making the collection, the cowboys often sang or sent to me songs which I recognized as having already been in print; although the singer usually said that some other cowboy had sung the