Action/Adventure:YES Compelling:NO

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Although his interesting childhood kept you glued to the first quarter of the book, the rest is just a basic cowboy's life written with little or no techniques to keep you compelled to read every word. It is interesting to read, however, since he was a true to life cowboy. If I had to do over, I'd saved my money.

What was it like to be a cowboy on cattle drives?

Rating:

This book has the answers. Exciting stories, concise writing (too concise sometimes). Siringo is honest about his faults. He obviously tries to capitlize on his tangential involvement with Billy the Kid (whom he knew and admired). Ever wished you could have a beer with a real Texas cowboy who was there when the cattle drives started? Well, here's your chance.

Give this guy your money!

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A long, stupid and boring story that you MUST read and memorize at college for quiz tests. I still wonder how studying this most unimportant account of a most unimportant guy is going to help me become a better Mechanical Engineer.

Cowboy memoir classic. . .

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At the age of 28, when he wrote his memoir, Charles Siringo had already been a cowboy for 15 years. Born in 1855 on the Gulf Coast of Texas, Siringo worked in one job after another across the Midwest and Southwest, ranging from St. Louis to New Mexico. Still a teenager, he settled on cowboying at the time of the great cattle drives and was apparently very good at it, though no luckier than most at making a living from it. He worked for many years for the LX ranch in the Texas Panhandle, for a while rounding up cattle that had drifted away or were stolen. This occupation put him in New Mexico at the time of Billy the Kid, who was four years his junior. He never met Billy but knew men who did, and his imagination seems to have been fired by the stories they told about the pursuit and eventual shooting of this young outlaw. Though by his own account Siringo never shot a man himself, he was a dead aim with a six-shooter.

His memoir was written, as he admits in his preface, to make money "and lots of it." It's not great literature, beginning with his earliest childhood memories and recounting the events of his life with no particular sense of compelling storytelling. It's just one darn thing after another. But a reader with some patience will be rewarded in the latter part of the book as his adventures begin adding up to something like a real narrative - working for the LX as a range detective - and he begins emerging as more of a coherent protagonist in his own story.

And it's not all about the work of cowboying, herding and rounding up cattle, and taking them to market. There are some close scrapes and some fearless derring-do. And there are also matters of the heart, as the young cowboy falls in love with a string of sweethearts he meets along the way, finally marrying one he meets in Kansas and ending his career as a cowboy. I'm happy to recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the Wild West, cowboys, ranching in the days of the open ranges, and social history of the late 19th century. [The 1950 edition is worth having for the wonderful introduction by Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie.]