"What I Have Saw"

A STOVE-UP COWBOY'S STORY by James Emmit McCauley. 76 pages. Southern Methodist University. $5. "I was borned on the 14th day of August 1873, in Anderson County, Lone Star State. My parents be poor like Job's turkey. But my first memory was to ride a stick horse and my first wishes and desires was to be a wild and woolly cowboy." A wild and woolly cowboy that little boy became, and many years later, encouraged by Folk Singer John Lomax, the old wrangler rustled up a stub pencil to scribble off the story of "what I have saw." Published locally in 1943 and now nationally for the first time, A Stove-Up Cowboy's Story comes jackknifing off the page with all the red-eyed energy of the life it describes. Jim McCauley wrote as he talked, and he talked Texas with a wild and wheezy wit that makes these pages twang as they turn, and sounds like Will Rogers when he still smelled of horse. His story is oral literature at its best. Holler Calf Rope. "It was natural for me to be mean," McCauley confesses contentedly, and at 14 he was much too mean for East Texas. One day he tangled with an older and stronger boy. "I was about ready to holler calf rope when his knife fell out of his pocket. I slammed it into his hip and started for the setting sun." Somewhere west of Jacksboro, Jim stopped running and took his first job as a cowboy: trail hand on a cattle drive to Montana. At 15, he pulled a man's weight on the job, running all night with the stampeding herd and even swimming the notorious Yellowstone River (" Tis such a suck to it that to sink is a gone fawn skin") with his bunch of cattle. The work was hard, McCauley recalls, but the company was cheerful. After a rugged day on the trail, there was hot grub and mescal liquor to pleasure a person, and down Mexico way there were bullfights too--though it did "look like a man was getting tola-ble low to fight a duel with a bull when he could easy get out of it." Now and then the cowpoke got to a big city. San Francisco was his favorite. In the funniest passage in the book, McCauley describes how a country boy behaved in one of the elegant restaurants there. "I saw I had overjumped my pile but I looked wise, told the waiter to bring me a steak about the size of a mule's lip from the ear down and to put in a few more things that would fill up, like fried eggs. I did the best I could to get on the outside of all of it. Asked what I owed them. Said $2.50. Called the proprietor. He come in with a collar so high he had to set down quick or it would have cut his ears off. I told him that down in Texas I could get all I could eat for 250, and as long as the court knows herself I'd eat somewhere else. I thought they would throw me out, but I reached for my old standby and they didn't dare." There were perils as well as pleasures. Once, while riding alone through Arizona's Skeleton Canyon, McCauley ran into a passel of Apaches. "They fired and my horse fell. I fired twice and two of them fell from their horses, but the balance was after me. As they went by in a lope I let one more of them out of his saddle. All day long I layed flat on them rocks with the sun baking me. Oh, how I did want water! But I love my life better than water."

Last Time Out. Accidents were more frequent and more troublesome than Indians. At least three horses threw

McCauley and then "kindly" contrived to fall on top of him. At 30, he was a badly stove-up cowboy, and he knew he would never ride the range again. A doctor in Fort Worth finally noticed that McCauley had "a prostatic abscess as large as two fists," and three major operations put him on his feet again. "I've been married now three years," he concludes, "and I have 320 acres of land and two little ones to bless our home and it would take $5,000 to get me to move."

Not long before his death in 1943 he wrote a letter to Lomax that adds a touching peroration to his tale: " Tis hard to quit the wild free life where you have to feel if your closest friend is still on your hip and wonder where you are going to get your next water, and if your old horse will make it in, and to make the Mexico line and get back without any holes in your hide--that is real living, that is sport, but 'tis the vio-lant kind and lots of people love it beyond a doubt." Beyond a doubt.

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