"Spanish thunderbolts," as Jack Thorp called the mustangs and
Spanish cow horses, graze, run, pitch, and go gentle ways as free as the
wind. "Five Hundred Mile Horse Race" is a great story. No other range
man excepting Ross Santee has put down so much everyday horse lore in
such a fresh way.

TWEEDIE, MAJOR GENERAL W. _The Arabian Horse: His Country and People_,
Edinburgh and London, 1894. One of the few horse books to be classified
as literature. Wise in the blend of horse, land, and people.

WENTWORTH, LADY. _The Authentic Arabian Horse and His Descendants_,
London, 1945. Rich in knowledge and both magnificent and munificent in
illustrations. Almost immediately after publication, this noble volume
entered the rare book class.

WYMAN, WALKER D. _The Wild Horse of the West_, Caxton, Caldwell,
Idaho, 1945. A scholarly sifting of virtually all available material
on mustangs. Readable. Only thorough bibliography on subject so far
published.

24. The Bad Man Tradition

PLENTY of six-shooter play is to be found in most of the books about
old-time cowboys; yet hardly one of the professional bad men was a
representative cowboy. Bad men of the West and cowboys alike wore
six-shooters and spurs; they drank each other's coffee; they had a
fanatical passion for liberty--for themselves. But the representative
cowboy was a reliable hand, hanging through drought, blizzard, and high
water to his herd, whereas the bona fide bad man lived on the dodge.
Between the killer and the cowboy standing up for his rights or merely
shooting out the lights for fun, there was as much difference as between
Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. Of course, the elements were mixed
in the worst of the bad men, as they are in the best of all good men. No
matter what deductions analysis may lead to, the fact remains that the
western bad men of open range days have become a part of the American
tradition. They represent six-shooter culture at its zenith--the wild
and woolly side of the West--a stage between receding bowie knife
individualism of the backwoods and blackguard, machine-gun gangsterism
of the city.

The songs about Sam Bass, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid reflect popular
attitude toward the hard-riding outlaws. Sam Bass, Jesse James, Billy
the Kid, the Daltons, Cole Younger, Joaquin Murrieta, John Wesley
Hardin, Al Jennings, Belle Starr, and other "long riders" with their
guns in their hands have had their biographies written over