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Wilson
Hudson
Andy
Adams. Why the Chisholm Trail Forks and Other Tales of the
Cattle Country. Ed. Wilson M. Hudson. Austin:
University of Texas Press.1956.
(pp. xxiv-xxvi)
Andy's rendering of the language used by tellers of the campfire tales
is in keeping with his general literary attitude. It is colorful
and appropriate but not overdone or exaggerated. It is the language
of cowboys and Rangers reworked and made smoother than it actually was.
Though it has the ring of real talk, it could hardly be studied by a
modern scholar as an altogether accurate and reliable specimen of the
language of the Southwest in the seventies and eighties. Andy
has done what most writers attempt to do when they have to represent
a specialized or localized way of talking: he has retained the
idioms and figures and improved the grammar and connection. The
result that he obtains is convincing and lively. All of Andy's
storytellers speak approximately the same language, with little individual
variation. If the names of the tellers were scrambled, it would
be very difficult to sort them out and attach them to the proper stories.
The stories told by cowmen and those told by the Rangers could perhaps
be distinguished by the less frequent occurrence of "cow talk"
in the Ranger stories, leaving out of consideration the difference in
subject matter. Andy's own language is less figurative and racy
than that of his narrators; it has a quiet dignity that sometimes leans
toward formality. Now and then he makes a grammatical slip; as
he once said of himself, "The loop of his rope may settle on the
wrong foot of the rhetoric occasionally."
John
Allen Peterson
"Facts
As I Remember Them": The Autobiography of Rufe LeFors.
ed. John Allen Peterson. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1986.
The memoirs are reproduced here as close to Rufe LeFors' original version
as possible. The original manuscript was handwritten in pencil, and
so occasional illegible words had to be reconstructed from context.
Various problems with the text, such as long run-on sentences, lack
of paragraphs, and major misspellings were corrected in the interest
of readability. As LeFors rushed to narrate exciting events, his style
deteriorated. Words were omitted, and spellings became more phonetic
and colloquial. To preserve the character of LeFors' language, editorial
changes were kept to a minimum. A photocopy of the original manuscript
can be reviewed at the Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas
at Austin; the original is in the possession of the LeFors family.
(p. x)
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