"The Cattlemen," by Mari Sandoz, is another essay, following Paul Wellman's "The Trampling Herd," at summing up the whole drama of cows and cow people—women excluded—on the ranges of western America. It begins with a good deal of fancifulness over the first Spanish cattle and ends with the contemporary "ritual" of rodeo riding and roping. The best part of the book is laid in the part of the country with which, despite dutiful reading, Mari Sandoz is most familiar—Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana—the setting for the stronger parts of her books on Crazy Horse, the buffalo hunters, the Cheyennes, and Old Jules, her masterpiece.
Miss Sandoz uses the word dedicated over and over in subtitles and as a kind of Homeric epithet for certain cowmen. In her sense, Silas Marner could be called a "dedicated" man. She herself seems particularly dedicated to killings in Kansas cow towns and to the lot of smoke and comparatively little blood-letting of the so-called Johnson County War (by big cowmen and politicians against homesteaders and thieves) in Wyoming. Some of her chapters are easily recognizable rewrites of standard books on the range. It would be interesting to have the sources specified for a rather extended account of Print Olive—a tough cowman from Texas who got tougher in Nebraska. I don't think any authority could be cited for statements that Texas granted a syndicate 500,000 acres (actually 40,000 acres) to survey what became the 3,000,000-acre XIT Ranch, and that brush poppers in lower Texas leap from horses to bulldog outlaw steers in the way Bill Pickett bulldogged for the 101 Ranch Wild West Show. Although she uses the word, Miss Sandoz surely knows that "cowpoke" is recent journalistic jargon. No real range man has ever called himself a cowpoke….
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