ay to some extent account for a certain generous
amplitude of character inherent in their most representative
reminiscences. Sympathy for the life biases my judgment; that judgment,
nevertheless, is that some of the strongest and raciest autobiographic
writing produced by America has been by range men.

{illust. caption = Tom Lea, in _The Longhorns_ by J. Frank Dobie (1941)}

This is not to say that these chronicles are of a high literary order.
Their writers have generally lacked the maturity of mind, the reflective
wisdom, and the power of observation found in personal narratives of the
highest order. No man who camped with a chuck wagon has written anything
remotely comparable to Charles M. Doughty's _Arabia Deserta_, a
chronicle at once personal and impersonal, restrainedly subjective and
widely objective, of his life with nomadic Bedouins. Perspective is a
concomitant of civilization. The chronicles of the range that show
perspective have come mostly from educated New Englanders, Englishmen,
and Scots. The great majority of the chronicles are limited in subject
matter to physical activities. They make few concessions to "the desire
of the moth for the star"; they hardly enter the complexities of life,
including those of sex. In one section of the West at one time the
outstanding differences among range men were between owners of sheep and
owners of cattle, the ambition of both being to hog the whole country.
On another area of the range at another time, the outstanding difference
was between little ranchers, many of whom were stealing, and big
ranchers, plenty of whom had stolen. Such differences are not exponents
of the kind of individualism that burns itself into great human
documents.

Seldom deeper than the chronicles does range fiction go below physical
surface into reflection, broodings, hungers--the smolderings deep down
in a cowman oppressed by drought and mortgage sitting in a rocking chair
on a ranch gallery looking at the dust devils and hoping for a cloud;
the goings-on inside a silent cowboy riding away alone from an empty pen
to which he will never return; the streams of consciousness in a silent
man and a silent woman bedded together in a wind-lashed frame house away
out on the lone prairie. The wide range of human interests leaves ample
room for downright, straightaway narratives of the careers of strong
men. If the literature of the range ever matures, however, it will
include keener searchings f