Book review: “Cowboy” by Clair Huffaker

On the cattle drive to Wichita for the train to Chicago, Frank Harris goes out looking for strays and finds a new-born calf beside a dead cow. He tosses the calf onto the saddle of Capper, one of the trail crew.

“Hey! Get him off there! He’s still wet!”

“Take the calf back to the herd and find a cow that’ll feed him.”

“To hell with that! Leave him for the coyotes!”

“Do what I said,” Frank ordered.

“But he’s a sticky mess!”

“He’s worth ten dollars in Chicago. What are you worth in Chicago?”

It’s more than three-quarters of the way through Clair Huffaker’s short 1958 novel Cowboy, and Harris is finally learning what the cattle business is all about.

Months earlier, when he was still callow and soft and just learning how to ride the range, he probably would have wanted to save the calf out of the goodness of his heart. Now, after the rigors of the trail and more than a few hard knocks, he knows the value of the calf.

(By the way, ten dollars back in the early 1870s would be worth about $270 today. The herd they were driving totaled 2,568 animals at the start in Chihuahua, Mexico, which means it was worth about $700,000 in present-day money.)

 

“General joy for living”

Cowboy begins and ends in Chicago.

As it opens, Tom Reece, a “cowman,” not a “cowboy,” arrives in town with a huge herd to sell and stays at a major city hotel where Frank Harris is the desk clerk. Harris wants to test himself out West and join the crew, but Reece rejects the idea:

“You see us having a great time in town. We’ve got more life and fun and general joy for living than any ten city men. There’s a reason for that. Any one of us can be dead before the moon changes. This last drive wasn’t too bad, but the way we came is marked with three graves. One Indian arrow, one stampede, and one crazy maverick.”

As luck — bad luck, good luck — would have it, Reece ends up losing all of the $60,000 he made from the sale of the herd (about $1.6 million today) at the poker table. He jumps at the chance to win it all back when Harris offers him $3,800 that he has from the sale of the family farm (about $100,000 today). But there’s a catch.

By lending the money, Harris says he’ll be a partner with Reece in the business. Reece just takes the cash and ends up winning back a lot of what he lost. And, then, he’s flabbergasted that Harris still wants to join the drive as a “partner.”

Cowboy is a simple, straightforward story of Harris’s maturation as a cowboy and as an adult.

 

A story of a story of a story

Huffaker’s book is a novelization of the script of the crackerjack 1958 movie Cowboy, written by Edmund H. North and Dalton Trumbo.  It starred Jack Lemmon as Frank Harris and Glenn Ford as Tom Reece, spelled Reese in the credits.

That film was itself based on a 1930 book by the Irish-born writer Frank Harris, My Reminiscences as a Cowboy. Although the Cowboy book was reviewed in the New York Times, Harris gained much greater celebrity and/or notoriety the next year with the publication of his autobiography My Life and Loves, famous for its scandalously explicit account of his sexual experiences.

While My Reminiscences as a Cowboy is usually described as a semi-biographical novel, the Times reviewer Percy Hutchinson called it “a fine, ‘tall’ tale.” He also noted that it was “different from the usual Wild West book in that there is no heightening of style, no especial attempt at drama, no dialect, not even an attempt to reproduce the vocabulary of the cow-puncher.”

While several of the incidents in the Harris book do appear in the movie, North and Trumbo needed to jazz up the story, and they did so by simplifying and organizing the film around the “partnership” of Harris and Reece, one that involves them banging heads on more than one occasion but ultimately ending up as friends.

 

Dust

That was Huffaker’s task as well — to heighten the style, attempt drama and give a sense of the cowboy life to a deeper extent than the movie was able to.

Huffaker’s other novels are noteworthy for their inventiveness in veering away from the usual cliches of westerns, but, in Cowboy, he has to stick close to the movie plot. So, what he brings to the novelization is his ability to describe action and enable the reader to feel the situation.

For instance, in trying to dissuade Harris from joining the cattle drive, Reece tells him, “You don’t know what heat is, or what real dust can do to a man’s eyes and nose and throat. Did you know dust can kill?”

Nearly a hundred pages later, Harris isn’t killed by dust, but he’s extremely inconvenienced:

One blistering hot day, riding drag, Frank figured out that there were more than ten thousand hoofs moving up ahead of him, and every one of them was kicking hot, choking, strangling dust straight into his face. 

The handkerchief drawn up around his nose and mouth was so covered with dust that it didn’t look like cloth, but more like a board made out of dirt, and his eyes were swollen and red from the thick clouds of sun-hazed dust swelling around him.

 

Cattle

And then there was the stupidity of the cattle.

After three days of rain, the soil was a sea of mud, ankle-deep and fetlock-deep, and slippery.

Half a dozen steers slipped and fell in the mud and were trampled to death by the others before they could regain their footing. The cows behind came on dumbly, plodding, and walked over the downed animals as though a fallen body were only a slight rise in the ground. Several steers, faces lowered into the driving rain, walked over a slanting embankment and rolled to the bottom of the shallow ravine.

The others would have followed if Reece hadn’t gotten his horse in front of them and beat them onto a different path.

 

“Done a great thing for all of us”

About midway through the novel, one of the cowboys, Singer, is bitten by a rattlesnake and dies.

Reece gives the eulogy, and, in its poetic simplicity, Huffaker raises the western story to something that is universal.  Reece says:

“I’ll tell you this, Lord. There isn’t a man among us who can look at the two hands You gave him with the two eyes You gave him, and really feel sorry for Singer. You did a great thing for Singer, just like You’ve done a great thing for all of us.

“You gave him, and us, life. You gave us hands to work and eyes to see. And we’re in no position to complain about it, if You see fit to take back what You gave us.  We have to allow that You know what You’re doing.”

Life, long or short, is a great gift, no doubt about it.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

10.7.25