Cowboy's Lament: A Life on the Open Range (review)

Readers of literature about cowboys and the history of the open-range cattle business during the Gilded Age can usually anticipate receiving detailed accounts about the actual work of cowboys—how to move cattle over the plains, how roundups are carried on, branding, cattle behavior in thirst and thunder storms, how to handle a stampede. We might expect information about the best horses, the kinds of saddles that work best in herding or roping cattle and horses, lariats, chaps, and other relevant gear. There are references to cows and roundups and horse herds in Frank Maynard's narrative, but no information about the work of ranching. The aspect of his life that Maynard thinks worthy of writing about is what he calls "adventure" (63). The "ordinary routine of range life" is not worth the written word (96). All of that life is "monotony" (114).

The model for this writing is the dime novel, which highlighted narratives of action and violence, especially those set in the West, beginning in 1877 with the publication of Deadwood Dick. There is a separate and distinctive adventure in almost every sentence or, in Maynard's case, at least in every paragraph. Most action in this personal account happens in the 1870s, when the plains were fairly open and wild, beyond the border of what Maynard calls "civilization" (122). "Two weeks was as long as I could stand in the settlements at one time," he tells us, before "the fever of unrest" overtakes him again and he relates another adventure about himself or the men he mentions (112, 76). Adventure offers drama about cowboys shooting it out in drunken brawls and poker games, encountering various Indian tribesmen, some friendly and others hostile, the white cowboy never knowing for sure which and always having to be on guard with plenty of guns and ammunition. There is constant gun violence. This is a story of a decade in Maynard's life as a modest dime novel hero. "I have chosen my lot and I shall live and die a wild, free rover of the prairie" until, that is, at the end of the decade, he encounters a pair of eyes "with luminous depth" in a young woman (100, 125). "I was haunted by those eyes" (125). And now "the crowning romance of [his] life" with the prospect of marriage replaces the other "romance of [his] life" that has been his story of the last ten years (125, 134).

This is the publication of a manuscript written in 1888 by a man who focuses on the decade in which he rode the plains as a cowboy. Maynard became somewhat famous by writing poetry, publishing a volume, Rhymes of the Range and Trail (1911), which is included in Cowboy's Lament along with some incidental poems and a number of his short prose pieces for local newspapers. The book also includes a lengthy "Glossary of Names" of the individuals mentioned in the text, anchoring the narrative in reality, as if the editor might suspect that a reader will think of it as pure fiction.