1943, and
includes numerous cartoons therein printed. There was an earlier and
less extensive collection. Modest Jim Williams has been progressively
dissatisfied with all his cartoon books--and with cartoons not in books.
I like them and in my Introduction say why.

WISTER, OWEN. _The Virginian_, 1902. Wister was an outsider looking in.
His hero, "The Virginian," is a cowboy without cows--like the cowboys
of Eugene Manlove Rhodes; but this hero does not even smell of cows,
whereas Rhodes's men do. Nevertheless, the novel authentically realizes
the code of the range, and it makes such absorbing reading that in fifty
years (1902-52) it sold over 1,600,000 copies, not counting foreign
translations and paper reprints.

Wister was an urbane Harvard man, of clubs and travels. In 1952 the
University of Wyoming celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the
publication of _The Virginian_. To mark the event, Frances K. W. Stokes
wrote _My Father Owen Wister_, a biographical pamphlet including "ten
letters written to his mother during his trip to Wyoming in 1885"--a
trip that prepared him to write the novel. The pamphlet is published at
Laramie, Wyoming, name of publisher not printed on it.

WRIGHT, PETER. _A Three-Foot Stool_, New York and London, 1909. Like
several other Englishmen who went west, Wright had the perspective that
enabled him to comprehend some aspects of ranch life more fully than
many range men who knew nothing but their own environment and times.
He compares the cowboy to the cowherd described by Queen Elizabeth's
Spenser. Into exposition of ranching on the Gila, he interweaves talk
on Arabian afreets, Stevenson's philosophy of adventure, and German
imperialism.

WRIGHT, ROBERT M. _Dodge City, Cowboy Capital_, Wichita, Kansas, 1913;
reprinted. Good on the most cowboyish of all the cow towns.

PAMPHLETS

Pamphlets are an important source of knowledge in all fields. No
first-class library is without them. Most of them become difficult
to obtain, and some bring higher prices than whole sets of books. Of
numerous pamphlets pertaining to the range, only a few are listed here.
_History of the Chisum War, or Life of Ike Fridge_, by Ike Fridge,
Electra, Texas (undated), is as compact as jerked beef and as laconic
as conversation in alkali dust. James F. Hinkle, in his _Early Days of
a Cowboy on the Pecos_, Roswell, New Mexico, 1937, says: "One noticeable
characteristic of the cowpunchers was that they did not ta