“I always wanted to be a cow-puncher,” says Shorty Caraway. “As a little kid back on the farm in east Texas I couldn’t think of nothin’ else.” Shorty’s father took some persuading, but in the end he staked his fourteen-year-old son to a white pony, a second-hand saddle, and “forty dollars to go with the two I had, an’ he said that ought to run me until I got a job.” What happened from that day until Shorty was taken on as a regular hand is told in the pages of Ross Santee’s Cowboy, first published in 1928.
“From beginning to end the reader is made at home in a world of unique standards, customs and preoccupation through the eyes of a boy who absorbs them with quick, keen ardor. He tells his own story without a backward glance toward home, without any curiosity concerning the lives of the millions who live in other worlds than his. By virtue of this contracted point of view one gets a singularly intensive and intimate picture of the cowboy and the things that make up his existence.”—New York Herald Tribune Books
“Here is a Wild West narrative that is literature—and it closely verges upon being ‘Treasure Island’ literature. Here the boy is, ‘all boots an’ spurs,’ with dreams in his head and the will to make them materialize.”—Saturday Review of Literature
