SOURCE: "Cow Camp Trails," in Southwest Review, Vol. XLII, No. 3, Summer, 1957, pp. 254-55.

[Boatright was an American educator who edited many histories and studies of the American Southwest during his thirty-year career. In the following excerpt, Boatright offers a favorable review of Why the Chisholm Trail Forks, and Other Tales of the Cattle Country.]

Andy Adams published The Log of a Cowboy one year after Owen Wister had published The Virginian. Adams remained poor the rest of his life. The Virginian made Wister a wealthy man, and unfortunately the most influential of the "Western" writers; for although he had had predecessors in some of the dime novelists, he as a respectable writer publishing in a respectable magazine, and issued by a respectable publisher, largely established the traditions of the synthetic Western fiction as now exemplified by the mass media.

Wister was a class-conscious easterner taken in by the...