MISTER, You Got Yourself a Horse: Tales of Old-Time Horse Trading ed. by Roger L. Welsch (review)

290 Western American Literature MISTER, You Got Yourself a Horse: Tales of Old-Time Horse Trading. Edited, with an introduction, by Roger L. Welsch. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. 207 pages, $14.95.) Working with material from the oral tradition can pose a double-bind for the folklorist. In pure and unvarnished form, songs and stories can be, particularly over a gap of generations, somewhat obscure to the modem reader despite their universal human qualities. Rewriting, on the other hand, can popularize the folk narrative to the point where it loses authenticity and becomes something known as “fakelore.” Roger Welsch has handled this problem rather neatly by presenting these stories collected during the WPA years in their original form and by providing access through a lucid introduction and notes attached to each tale. In this form, the book can be equally enjoyable and informative to the professional folklorist, the horse-lover and to the general reading public. As he observes in the introduction, the tales often lack the build-up and punchlines of the professional writer or raconteur, but they display a wealth of sly nuance and fetching detail that more than compensates for this. The tales collected from Lew Croughan which, more than those of any other teller, characterize this book, are gems of humor and wry under­ statement, displaying American folk-humor at its best. The jargon of horse-trading and early twentieth-century horselore is fascinating, yielding formulas for Plugging a Whistler, Paralyzing a Switcher, Gingering, Bishoping and The Straw and Stringhalt Trick. With its wellarranged and nicely-explained tales and the genuine essence and tang of horse-knowledge and rural character, this book will be equally at home on the shelves of a university library or in an apple-crate bookshelf nailed to the wall of a ranch bunkhouse. C. L. RAWLINS, Cora, Wyoming Going to Extremes. By Joe McGinniss. (New York: New American Library, 1980. 285 pages, $6.95.) When setting out to write a full-length book these days, a journalist may choose between several personae. He can be heroic, like Bernstein and Woodward in All the President’s Men. He can be funny, like Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Sabbag in Snowblind. He can be intro­ spective, like Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard. Or he can be an uninvolved observer, like McPhee in Coming into the Country. Joe McGinniss was apparently not sure which prototype would fit him best in Going to Extremes, so he is in turn the hero who braves the terrible ...