rk and his admirers for their consideration.

In making selections for this volume from a large mass of material that
came into my ballad hopper while hunting cowboy songs as a Traveling
Fellow from Harvard University, I have included the best of the verse
given me directly by the cowboys; other selections have come in through
repeated recommendation of these men; others are vagrant verses from
Western newspapers; and still others have been lifted from collections
of Western verse written by such men as Charles Badger Clark, Jr., and
Herbert H. Knibbs. To these two authors, as well as others who have
permitted me to make use of their work, the grateful thanks of the
collector are extended. As will be seen, almost one-half of the
selections have no assignable authorship. I am equally grateful to these
unknown authors.

All those who found "Cowboy Songs" diverting, it is believed, will make
welcome "The Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp." Many of these have
this claim to be called songs: they have been set to music by the
cowboys, who, in their isolation and loneliness, have found solace in
narrative or descriptive verse devoted to cattle scenes. Herein, again,
through these quondam songs we may come to appreciate something of the
spirit of the big West--its largeness, its freedom, its wholehearted
hospitality, its genuine friendship. Here again, too, we may see the
cowboy at work and at play; hear the jingle of his big bell spurs, the
swish of his rope, the creaking of his saddle gear, the thud of
thousands of hoofs on the long, long trail winding from Texas to
Montana; and know something of the life that attracted from the East
some of its best young blood to a work that was necessary in the winning
of the West. The trails are becoming dust covered or grass grown or lost
underneath the farmers' furrow; but in the selections of this volume,
many of them poems by courtesy, men of today and those who are to
follow, may sense, at least in some small measure, the service, the
glamour, the romance of that knight-errant of the plains--the American
cowboy.

J. A. L.

The University of Texas,
Austin, July 9, 1919.

CONTENTS

PART I. COWBOY YARNS

OUT WHERE THE WEST BEGINS
THE SHALLOWS OF THE FORD
THE DANCE AT SILVER VALLEY
THE LEGEND OF BOASTFUL BILL
THE TEXAS COWBOY AND THE MEXICAN GREASER
BRONCHO VERSUS BICYCLE
RIDERS OF THE STARS
LASCA
THE TRANSFORMAT