Books: The Lone Prairee*

LONE COWBOY—Will James—Scribner ($2.75).

Will James’s father was a cowpuncher. When Will was a little shaver his mother died and soon afterward his father was gored to death by a steer. Orphan Will was taken over by a friend of his father, a Frenchman named Beaupré. From “Bopy” the boy learned all about how to live in the open: to hunt, trap, ride, cook. One morning, when Will was a boy in his ‘teens, he woke to find the camp fire almost out, and no Bopy in sight. They were camped near a river, and in the river the boy found their battered bucket still kept afloat by the ice. That was the only trace he ever discovered of the old Frenchman.

From then on Cowboy Will went it alone. With plenty of confidence, with more than ordinary experience for his years, he had no difficulty finding jobs as a cowpuncher. Like all his breed he was a journeyman worker; from Canada to Mexico he wandered the West. After he had begun to be known as a writer, a cowboy critic once accused him of writing a fake cowboy language, but Author James explains his variations of speech by his many changes of scenery. Only his outfit and his style of riding, says he, never changed.

Will James has had his zeniths and his nadirs. When still a youngster he helped steal cattle on the quiet and once served a penitentiary sentence therefor. A shooting scrape once put him into a log prison of the Northwest Mounted Police. Once he was in the movies. That, says he, was a tough job. Many were the falls he took, some by order, some not; many the uncomfortable costumes (the worst a suit of armor) in which he fell. During the War he never got overseas, but he had a lot of fun on a horse, after his superior officers were persuaded he knew how to ride—he had to get letters to prove it.

From childhood, says Cowboy James, he liked to draw pictures, mostly of animals. He never drew from life, always from memory. Says he: ”People often ask me how I get to catch horses in action, or how I get my models for my drawings and paintings. I’ve never sketched from life and never watched any animals with intentions of sketching it. And to the people who ask I say that I get my models through my tail bone, and from the many connections it got with the cantle-board of my saddle.” He claims never to have had a lesson, except for a few months’ instruction late in his career at the University of California.

It was a happy day for Cowboy James when he sent in his first story, with pictures by himself, to Scribner’s Magazine. It was accepted. He decided he had had enough cowpunching, that it would be more satisfying to write about it and draw pictures to match.

Will James has also written and illustrated: Sand, Cow Country, Smoky, The Drifting Cowboy, Cowboys, North and South.

Lone Cowboy is the August choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

*New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42110. St., New York City. Champion