18 Log of a Cowboy

I’ve got another somewhat obscure book for you. “The Log of a Cowboy, A Narrative of the Old Trail Days” by Andy Adams first published in 1903. I found this book when I was doing research for a western screenplay several years ago. The screenplay didn’t go anywhere, but the book became a favorite.

Adams spent 12 years in the saddle on the trail. If you have a love for the old west and want to know what a cattle drive was really like, this is Andy Adams true story of a cattle drive in 1882 his first journey. He was 16 years old.

Filled with true adventures of gunfights, buffalo stampedes and dangerous river crossings, it’s the kind of book I love. Told by a real guy in his own voice, and I promise you his voice is authentic. Anything but the stereotypical cowboy book. I’ve read he wrote it as a response to unrealistic cowboy stories that were being written at that time in American history.

“Just why my father moved, at the close of the civil war, from Georgia to Texas, is to this good hour a mystery to me. While we did not exactly belong to the poor whites, we classed with them in poverty, being renters; but I am inclined to think my parents were intellectually superior to that common type of the South. Both were foreign born, my mother being Scotch and my father a north of Ireland man,--as I remember him, now, impulsive, hasty in action, and slow to confess a fault. It was his impulsiveness that led him to volunteer and serve four years in the Confederate army,--trying years to my mother, with a brood of seven children to feed, garb, and house. The war brought me my initiation as a cowboy, of which I have now, after the long lapse of years, the greater portion of which were spent with cattle, a distinct recollection. Sherman's army, in its march to the sea, passed through our county, devastating that section for miles in its passing.”

If you decide to read this book, or have read it would love to hear what you think/thought.

Видео 18 Log of a Cowboy канала Steven Pressfield