fearless, chivalric, elemental, he lived hard, shot quick and true,
and died with his face to his foe. Still much misunderstood, he is
often slandered, nearly always caricatured, both by the press and by
the stage. Perhaps these songs, coming direct from the cowboy's
experience, giving vent to his careless and his tender emotions, will
afford future generations a truer conception of what he really was
than is now possessed by those who know him only through highly
colored romances.

The big ranches of the West are now being cut up into small farms. The
nester has come, and come to stay. Gone is the buffalo, the Indian
warwhoop, the free grass of the open plain;--even the stinging lizard,
the horned frog, the centipede, the prairie dog, the rattlesnake, are
fast disappearing. Save in some of the secluded valleys of southern
New Mexico, the old-time round-up is no more; the trails to Kansas and
to Montana have become grass-grown or lost in fields of waving grain;
the maverick steer, the regal longhorn, has been supplanted by his
unpoetic but more beefy and profitable Polled Angus, Durham, and
Hereford cousins from across the seas. The changing and romantic
West of the early days lives mainly in story and in song. The last
figure to vanish is the cowboy, the animating spirit of the vanishing
era. He sits his horse easily as he rides through a wide valley,
enclosed by mountains, clad in the hazy purple of coming night,--with
his face turned steadily down the long, long road, "the road that the
sun goes down." Dauntless, reckless, without the unearthly purity of
Sir Galahad though as gentle to a pure woman as King Arthur, he is
truly a knight of the twentieth century. A vagrant puff of wind shakes
a corner of the crimson handkerchief knotted loosely at his throat;
the thud of his pony's feet mingling with the jingle of his spurs is
borne back; and as the careless, gracious, lovable figure disappears
over the divide, the breeze brings to the ears, faint and far yet
cheery still, the refrain of a cowboy song:

Whoopee ti yi, git along, little dogies;
It's my misfortune and none of your own.
Whoopee ti yi, git along, little dogies;
For you know Wyoming will be your new home.

As for the songs of this collection, I have violated the ethics of
ballad-gatherers, in a few instances, by selecting and putting together
what seemed to be the best lines from different versions, all telling
the same story. Frankly, the