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<\/a>There are some books you hear about so often that you begin to think, wrongly, that you might have read them.<\/p>\n<\/a>There are some books you hear about so often that you begin to think, wrongly, that you might have read them.<\/p>\n
Such was the case with John R. Barrows\u2019 \u201cU-Bet: A Greenhorn in Old Montana.\u201d When I came across another reference to it recently, I told myself I\u2019d read it, but then I started to wonder.<\/p>\n
I wasn\u2019t even sure whether it was on my shelves or not, so I went looking. I did have a copy of the book\u2014a University of Nebraska softcover reprint from 1990\u2014but a quick survey of the contents persuaded me I hadn\u2019t actually read it. I figured it was high time I did.<\/p>\n
Barrows came to Montana from Wisconsin in 1880, joining the rest of the family here when he was just 16. After six months as a handyman at a trading post near Martinsdale, he signed on as a cowboy at the famous DHS ranch, run by Montana pioneer Granville Stuart.<\/p>\n
\u201cU-bet\u201d is the story of Barrows\u2019 adventures as a cowboy during his five seasons at the DHS. A blurb on the back of the book says Barrows describes trail herding, roping and branding \u201cwith a mastery of language rarely brought to the subject.\u201d I had read several times that it even deserved a place alongside E.C. \u201cTeddy Blue\u201d Abbott\u2019s \u201cWe Pointed Them North,\u201d one of my favorite Montana books.<\/p>\n
Now that I have read Barrows\u2019 book, however, I feel that I must have missed something.<\/p>\n
![\"Ed\"](\"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/1Kemmick.mug-copy-36.jpg\")
<\/a>Ed Kemmick<\/p><\/div>\n
There were some good things in it. I particularly liked his description of how the old-time cowboys made their own rawhide lassos, delivered in plain, clear language. And I enjoyed the humor and the magnanimity of his description of Moses Wells, part of a family of \u201cRed River half-breeds\u201d: \u201cBeyond the fact that he could ride and shoot, was an accomplished hunter and could speak English, French, and three or four Indian languages fluently, he was uneducated.\u201d<\/p>\n
But overall, his \u201cmastery of language\u201d was nothing like that of Abbott, whose words were raw and vivid, as lean and tough as Abbott himself. Abbott told his life story to Helena Huntington Smith in the late 1930s and she assembled his stories into a book, but she says her main job was staying out of his way, so as not to make the book too \u201cliterary.\u201d<\/p>\n
The literary malady, unfortunately, was precisely what Barrows suffered from. He might have been a good cowboy, but his writing reeks of the dandy.<\/p>\n
I just now opened the book at random and came across this, in reference to his sometimes being asked to superintend a poker game at the trading post: \u201cMy youth was my greatest protection, and I was compelled on more than one occasion to resort to an acquired guile, learning that what cannot be carried by force may sometimes yield to persuasion.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cU-bet\u201d is littered with this kind of windbaggery. I kept thinking of Francis Parkman as I read Barrows. Parkman, who would go on to become one of the best historians America has produced, wrote \u201cThe California and Oregon Trail,\u201d an account of a two-month tour he made through Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado and Kansas in 1846, when he was 23.<\/p>\n
He kept a journal during his travels and it is obvious that he relied heavily on them, because the writing changes dramatically in the course of the book.<\/p>\n
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<\/a><\/div><\/div>Once Parkman has been in the saddle for a few weeks and has begun to grow used to daily hardship and the dry, wide-open life of the remote prairie (he even hunts buffalo with some Sioux Indians), his writing becomes noticeably more vigorous and spare. You have to wonder if would he have become a great historian if he hadn\u2019t made that trip.<\/p>\n