The Cowboy; Six-Shooters, Songs, and Sex ed. by Charles W. Harris, Buck Rainey (review)

150 Western American Literature The author will be criticized by some for giving more publicity to marvelous places which might be better left unknown. Anyone who writes about the wilderness has to face this question. The answer is that scarcely a square foot of the earth’s surface survives anywhere which can truly be called unknown; the real threat comes, not from recreational use (within reasonable limits), but from the destructive demands of the ever-expanding industrial machine. Unless the higher value of human recreation is recog­ nized, “the land of clear light” will become, like most other places, a land of smog, noise, and confusion. EDWARD ABBEY, Moab, Utah The Cowboy; Six-Shooters, Songs, and Sex. Edited by Charles W. Harris and Buck Rainey. (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976. 167 pages, $9.95.) The Cowboy: Six-Shooters, Songs, and Sex is a collection of eight essays, all useful but of uneven quality. The purpose of the book, which first appeared as a special issue of the Red River Valley Historical Review, is to discuss elements in the character of the American cowboy that have received scant attention. Two essays, Guy Logsdon’s “The Cowboy’s Bawdy Music” and Clifford P. Westermeier’s “The Cowboy and Sex” would seem to do exactly that. But they do not. The former merely maintains that cowboys did sing bawdy songs. Professor Logsdon evaluates various collec­ tions of cowboy songs and ballads, but hardly any space is devoted to what the essay ostensibly concerns. Over the years, Professor Westermeier has done much fine research and writing and his essay begins well. In mid-essay, however, the mention of Rudolph Nureyev, Yves Saint-Laurent, and Burt Reynolds posing nude is something from which the article never fully recovers. But this is probably too harsh since the footnotes alone are a valuable source of information. Philip Jordan’s “The Pistol Packin’ Cowboy” is an intelligent, welldocumented account of the cowboys’ use, misuse and non-use of firearms, and Lawrence R. Borne writes informatively about the cowboy and dude ranching. “The Reel Cowboy” is the longest essay in the collection and I wish Buck Rainey had extended portions of it. It is packed with names, titles, movie history and analysis, and the tone is conversational and pleasant. To Professor Rainey’s credit, he mentions Jack Holt, but the statements Holt was one of the first to make adult Westerns. Oddly, he has been practically ignored by Western film historians, even though Reviews 151 he was almost exclusively a Western star for a decade. But, in his day, he romped through wild western adventures and achieved greater fame and fortune than his son Tim was ever able to accom­ plish, even though Tim is justly hailed as one of the better actors who made Westerns. leave a reader wanting even more. Perhaps the best selection is William W. Savage, Jr.’s “The Cowboy Myth” which sees the possibility of the cowboy becoming an authentic mythic figure. He believes this will only happen if the creative community can rescue and revive the figure before it becomes debased beyond recovery. The collection could have profited from stronger editorial guidance, but even if it does not quite accomplish what it set out to do, the book is pleasant and readable. RICHARD D. KELLER, Emporia Kansas State College Folklore of Canada. By Edith Fowke. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. 349 pages, index, $10.00.) Edith Fowke’s Folklore of Canada was intended to be “a representative cross-section of the various kinds of folklore in Canada.” The book achieves its purpose very well. The material was obviously collected “from authentic sources representing genuine folk traditions.” The publishers state that no book with as wide a range has been published in Canada before. Here is a worthy effort by a scholar who knows folklore. Folklore in Canada is organized according to ethnic origins; the four sections of the book are entitled “The Native Peoples,” “Canadiens,” “Anglo-Canadians,” and “Canadian Mosaic.” The last section is material gathered from several smaller ethnic groups. The introductions to the sections and the background discussions are both revealing and interesting. The section of native Indian folklore...