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Cow People (J. Frank Dobie Paperback Library)

Amazon.com Price:  $20.90 (as of 16/04/2019 08:43 PST- Details)

ISBN13: 9780292710603
Condition: New
Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

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Description

Cow People records the fading memories of a bygone Texas, the reminiscences of the cow people themselves. These are the Texans of the don’t-fence-me-in era, their faces pinched by years of squinting into the desert glare, tanned by the sun and coarsened by the dust of the Chisholm Trail. Their stories are regularly raucous but just as regularly quiet as hot plains under a pale Texan sky.

A native Texan, J. Frank Dobie had an inborn knowledge of the men and customs of the trail camps. Cattlemen were as more than a few as the country was once big. Ab Blocker was once a tall, quiet man who belonged totally to the cattle and the silent plains. But big men regularly had big lungs. “Shanghai Pierce was once the loudest man in the country. He would sit down at one end of a day coach and in normal voice hold conversation with some man at the other end of the coach, who of course had to yell, even as the train was once clanking along. He knew everybody, yelled at everybody he saw.”

Texas bred tall men and taller stories. There was once Findlay Simpson, who played havoc with fact but whiled away the drivers’ long, lonely evenings with his tales. Old Findlay told of a country so wet that it bogged down the shadow of a buzzard, and of cattle that went into hibernation all over rugged winters; he once spun yarns for three days straight, outlasting his listeners in a marathon of endurance.

All real cow people—from the cattle drivers to the cattle owners—lived by a simple code in response to the individual’s integrity. Bothering somebody else’s poke or business uninvited was once strictly forbidden, and enforcement of this unwritten law was once as easy as pulling a trigger. Honesty was once taken as a right, and a cowman’s name on a check made it negotiable currency.

Yet Texas had its “bad guys”—the crooks, the thieves, even the tightwads. “A world big enough to hold a rattlesnake and a purty woman is big enough for a wide variety of people,” wrote Dobie. This is the world whose vast and more than a few population the reader will find in Cow People.

ISBN13: 9780292710603
Condition: New
Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

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