Hence the purest realism appeals to
the mature imagination more powerfully than any impossible prettiness
can do. The more we _know_ of individual and universal life, the more we
are excited and stimulated.

And the collection of these poems is an addition to American
Scholarship as well as to American Literature. It was a wise policy of
the Faculty of Harvard University to grant Mr. Lomax a traveling
fellowship, that he might have the necessary leisure to discover and to
collect these verses; it is really "original research," as interesting
and surely as valuable as much that passes under that name; for it helps
every one of us to understand our own country.

WM. LYON PHELPS.

Yale University,
July 27, 1919.

INTRODUCTION

"Look down, look down, that weary road,
'Tis the road that the sun goes down."

* * *

"'Twas way out West where the antelope roam,
And the coyote howls 'round the cowboy's home,
Where the mountains are covered with chaparral frail,
And the valleys are checkered with the cattle trail,
Where the miner digs for the golden veins,
And the cowboy rides o'er the silent plains,--"

The "Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp" does not purport to be an
anthology of Western verse. As its title indicates, the contents of the
book are limited to attempts, more or less poetic, in translating scenes
connected with the life of a cowboy. The volume is in reality a
by-product of my earlier collection, "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier
Ballads." In the former book I put together what seemed to me to be the
best of the songs created and sung by the cowboys as they went about
their work. In making the collection, the cowboys often sang or sent to
me songs which I recognized as having already been in print; although
the singer usually said that some other cowboy had sung the song to him
and that he did not know where it had originated. For example, one night
in New Mexico a cowboy sang to me, in typical cowboy music, Larry
Chittenden's entire "Cowboys' Christmas Ball"; since that time the poem
has often come to me in manuscript form as an original cowboy song. The
changes--usually, it must be confessed, resulting in bettering the
verse--which have occurred in oral transmission, are most interesting.
Of one example, Charles Badger Clark's "High Chin Bob," I have printed,
following Mr. Clark's poem, a cowboy version, which I submit to Mr.
Cla