" They would understand some things on
which he was not explicit.
About 1940, as he told me, Bob Beverly of Lovington, New
Mexico, made a contract with the proprietor of the town's
weekly newspaper to print his reminiscences. By the time the
contractor had set eighty-seven pages of type he saw that he
would lose money if he set any more. He gave Bob Beverly back
more manuscript than he had used and stapled a pamphlet
entitled _Hobo of the Rangeland_. The philosophy in it is more
interesting to me than the incidents. "The cowboy of the old
West worked in a land that seemed to be grieving over
something--a kind of sadness, loneliness in a deathly quiet.
One not acquainted with the plains could not understand what
effect it had on the mind. It produced a heartache and a sense
of exile."
Crudely printed, but printed as the author talked, is _The End
of the Long Horn Trail_, by A. P. (Ott) Black, Selfridge,
North Dakota (August, 1939) . As I know from a letter from his
_compadre_, Black was blind and sixty-nine years old when he
dictated his memoirs to a college graduate who had sense
enough to retain the flavor.
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