A Literary History of the American West

J. Frank Dobie

THE WRITINGS of J. Frank Dobie appeal strongly to readers who appreciate good tales, students of the southwestern land, and all who value freedom and the natural order. Known to a generation of admirers as "Mr. Texas," Pancho Dobie inhabited a world that was never limited by the borders of his native region. The man who knows all there is to know about longhorns, to paraphrase the Latin citation accompanying an honorary degree conferred during his year of teaching at Cambridge University, became a man whose works were increasingly concerned with exploring the universal principle of freedom and the relationships of humans and the physical world around them. Like Robert Frost, Dobie became a realmist rather than a regionalist.

The author's decades of writing yielded varied and voluminous publications. These works reflect Dobie's skills as a storyteller, chronicler, folklorist, and historian of sorts. They also reflect his deep love for the land and its people, combined with an equally deep affection for classic literature in the English language. Love for literature, particularly English literature, and for the natural world began to grow in Dobie almost from the time of his birth in 1888 on a ranch in Live Oak County, deep in South Texas. However, he was in his forties before his first major work, A Vaquero of the Brush Country, appeared in 1929. Publication of Coronado's Children shortly thereafter brought national attention. Dobie's desire to chronicle the life of his region never waned, although his interests eventually transported him far beyond the bounds of the cattle kingdom of his birth. In 1952, in The Mustangs, Pancho Dobie noted proudly that searching out the stories for that book had carried him out of the confines of his native region, across centuries and geographical boundaries.

The roots of any writer's growth are complex. Dobie's early years included ample time for riding and working on his father's ranch; there was also time for considerable reading and attending a country school. The first crucial turn in the author's life came while he was enrolled at Southwestern University, a Methodist college in Georgetown, Texas: it was there that thoughts of studying for the bar changed to a desire to teach literature. Dobie indeed became a teacher, principally at the University of Texas at Austin, until he and the school's administrators parted company in 1947 in a widely publicized dispute. On the surface the matter concerned Dobie's request for an extension of a leave of absence; the request was denied, and Dobie subsequently declined to report for classes as he had been ordered to do. The grounds for the conflict were actually highly political. Dobie had made no bones about being dissatisfied with what he perceived as a "fascist" mentality dominating the university's board of regents.

Dobie's years at Southwestern University, in any case, engendered in him a love of literature and an early commitment to teaching. They were also the time when he met Bertha McKee, an undergraduate at Southwestern and a student of language, literature, and the Southwest in her own right. Frank and Bertha Dobie were married in 1916 after a six-year "courtship." The author's life for more than a decade after he left Southwestern in 1910 was a series of comings and goings. He taught and served as highschool principal in the Big Bend country of West Texas, and there met John Young, whose story became the subject of his first book. He was briefly on the staffs of several Texas newspapers and thought, fleetingly, of becoming a fulltime reporter. In 1912 he returned to Southwestern University as a special assistant and teacher of English. Enrollment as a graduate student at Columbia University in 1913 led to a deeper commitment to English literature and also expanded Dobie's world in other ways. That academic year marked his first extended visit to a major city, New York, where he learned to appreciate the theatre and the pleasures of out-of-the-way bookshops. The antipodal pulls of city and ranch country were to remain a strong internal conflict in Dobie throughout his life.

Completing the Master of Arts degree in mid-1914, Dobie in the fall joined the English faculty of the University of Texas. Among the most important of the author's early friendships was a lasting one with the great folklorist Stith Thompson. At Thompson's urging, Dobie became a member of the Texas Folklore Society, an organization Dobie was to rejuvenate in the 1920s. With America's entry into World War I, Dobie volunteered for military service, even though he was by then married, and was awarded a commission as lieutenant in the field artillery. He served overseas with a battery of horse-drawn field pieces, but saw no combat. He became acquainted with France during the war, but was not to visit the England he loved through its literature until he went to Cambridge University in the midst of World War II. His army service and his stint at Cambridge are joined in a sense for, as Dobie wrote in the 1940s, the interval spent learning how to fire artillery and his stay at Cambridge studying and teaching American history were the times he had "gained more brain power" than he had in any other periods of his life.

Dobie returned to Texas in 1919. For the next year he managed his Uncle Jim Dobie's ranch on the Nueces River south of San Antonio. It was on his uncle's ranch that Dobie befriended a vaquero named Santos Cortez, and as a result finally established a goal for his life. He listened with fascination as Santos spun stories through the long South Texas nights. As Dobie wrote in his newspaper column of November 17, 1957:

While Santos talked, while Uncle Jim and other cow men talked or stayed silent, while the coyotes sang their songs, and the sandhill cranes honked their lonely music I seemed to be seeing a great painting of something I'd known all my life. I seemed to be listening to a great epic of something that had been commonplace in my youth but now took on meanings. I was familiar with John A. Lomax's Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. Indeed, I knew John Lomax himself very well. One day it came to me that I would collect and tell the legendary tales of Texas as Lomax had collected the old-time songs and ballads of Texas and the frontier.

While this passage is perhaps filtered through the well-known Dobie romanticism, the decision to collect and to tell the folk stories of his native region was firm, and the vision recounted in the passage remained with the author throughout his life. In the early 1920s disastrous financial conditions for cowmen, including Jim Dobie, hastened Pancho's return to the University of Texas, where he remained, except for a brief period spent as head of the English Department at what is now Oklahoma State University, until 1947.

In the 1920s and 1930s Dobie's life was increasingly active with teaching, public appearances, and writing. Establishing himself in the 1920s as a well-paid author of magazine articles for national publications, he also became a steady contributor to the Southwest Review, an excellent regional journal. Opening another channel of communication as the decade closed, he developed his "Life and Literature of the Southwest" course at the University of Texas; the class, one of the most popular offered at the University during the 1930s, demonstrated Dobie's knowledge of the land, people, and literature of the Southwest, as well as his great vitality as a teacher. A brief mimeographed reading list prepared as the course was organized in 1929 evolved into the renowned Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest (1942; revised edition, 1952). As late as 1979, James K. Folsom, writing in The Western: A Collection of Critical Essays, adjudged the Guide "the most useful single bibliography of Western Americana."

In the 1920s Dobie commenced interviewing scores of trail drivers, cowmen, treasure hunters, and other oldtimers likely to have good tales to tell. He traveled countless miles to secure these interviews, placing the tales in his growing files for use and reuse; it is not an exaggeration to say that Dobie practiced oral history of a sort long before tape recorders were invented. He loved the open road, and he enjoyed getting away from campus to refresh his mind and spirits in the countryside. Still his primary responsibilities were academic and urban in setting.

Much of Dobie's scholarly work in the 1920s was associated with the Texas Folklore Society, which he was largely responsible for reorganizing in the early part of the decade. Dobie edited the Society's annual publication from 1922 to 1943. His literary reputation was finally and firmly established with the publication of A Vaquero of the Brush Country ( 1929) and Coronado's Children (1930), the latter title chosen as a Literary Guild selection. These works reflect the methods of assembling materials and of writing that Dobie was to employ for the remainder of his career. He gathered the tales, wrote short articles for the Texas Folklore Society annual or for magazines, then rewrote the shorter pieces for book publication. The books themselves are a blend of narrative, short lyrical passages, history, folklore, and natural history. In Vaquero, Dobie used autobiographical materials provided by John Young, an old cowman who had once trailed cattle from Texas northward toward Canada before fences ended the trail-driving epoch. Dobie was later to claim, in a list he made of outstanding range country books, that A Vaquero of the Brush Country, along with The Longhorns (1941), supplies "a fairly full and accurate account of the beginnings and early development of ranching in Texas."

If Vaquero is a story of the open range, Coronado's Children takes as its theme the quest for lost treasure. "These tales are not creations of mine," Dobie writes in introducing Coronado's Children. "They belong to the soil and to the people of the soil." He then says the book is a collection of "just tales." The reader familiar with Dobie's work will note characteristic touches here. The author often pointedly identifies himself with the soil and its people. He also often injects a disclaimer, such as the "just tales" phrase, to avoid being labeled a folklorist or historian or scientist of any kind. As Vaquero was followed some years later by The Longhorns, so the treasure tales published in 1930 were followed in 1939 by Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver. The latter was the first of many of his works to be brought out by Little, Brown and Company; the author dealt with five publishers during the 1930s before establishing a permanent relationship with the Boston company.

Dobie had grown up among Spanish-speaking people and was always interested in their folk culture. During the early 1930s he traveled extensively in Mexico, adventures funded in part by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. The literary result of his travels was Tongues of the Monte (1935), reprinted as The Mexico I Like (1942). Francis E. Abernethy, in his excellent pamphlet J. Frank Dobie (1967), notes that this book on Mexico, while never a big seller, has become for many readers their favorite Dobie volume. Cast as a picaresque novel, Tongues of the Monte features Don Federico as its central character; the extent to which Don Federico is also Frank Dobie remains vague. The protagonist, in any event, rides through five separate episodes in northwestern Mexico. The geography of the narrative is never clearly mapped out, but it seems to be set in the dry brush country east of the Sierra Madre and south of the Texas Big Bend and New Mexico. A highlight of the work is the tale of Juan Oso, son of a bear and of a woman (a variant, of course, of the Bear's Son Tale, an archetypal story that appears in the folklore of many cultures). Tongues of the Monte does not go very far in developing the character of Don Federico, and is therefore not a good novel; the book is successful, however, in vividly showing "the life of the Mexican earth" and its people.

The Longhorns, published in 1941, represents Dobie at the peak of his powers. The author begins the book with a statement that the longhorns belong to history, "a past so remote and irrevocable that sometimes it seems as if it might never have been." He advises readers "who object to facts" to begin with chapter four "and then merely to skim all the others." The work is a rewarding mixture of fact, lore, and history. Entertaining tales, such as that of Sancho, the steer who returned, on instinct, to his native Texas range after being trailed to Wyoming, enliven the text. "Sundown," the twelfth and final chapter of The Longhorns, carries a double meaning, one imposed by history, for as this work appeared World War II was about to become a global conflict with Americans involved directly. Dobie closes the book with praise for the longhorns for their great strength, vitality, endurance, and nobility.

Within three years of finishing The Longhorns, the writer would be admiring the English people for some of these same qualities. Dobie went to England during the war to serve as a visiting professor at Cambridge University. It was there that he became "contemporary with myself," as he expressed it, a transformation that can best be seen by following the Sunday newspaper column he began in September, 1939 and produced without fail until his death. "My Texas" was the original title of the column which was published in several newspapers, notably the Houston Post and Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In An American Original: The Life of J. Frank Dobie (1978), Lon Tinkle cites a note found in one of Dobie's "Autobiographical" files, a note in which the author wrote of becoming unconsciously contemporary with the world at "about the time World War II arrived." He could not, he said, be aware of the "Nazis bombing English civilization out of existence and. . . go on tall-taling about Texas as if all were right with the world." He concluded by speaking of "the Fascist spirit asserting itself at home."

Dobie's responsibility at Cambridge was to lecture on American history from 1774 to the 1940s, a responsibility that set him to cramming like a college freshman before an exam. The Dobie who long had loved English literature, especially Shakespeare and the Romantics, found in England a civility and civilized freedom, a serenity and a sense of harmony that moved him deeply. He had not planned to write of his experiences in England, but an article about Cambridge for the Saturday Evening Post and notes jotted down for the Sunday column became, with rewriting, a book unique to his long list of publications, A Texan in England (1944). In a notable chapter, "The Lark at Heaven's Gate," he writes as a Wordsworthian Romantic preparing to go out onto Grantchester Meadows to hear the skylarks of which such poets as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Shelley had written; but in the same chapter he poignantly and realistically describes the longing for liberty that he had seen in two golden eagles in the London zoo, creatures that remind him of a caged eagle observed years earlier on an Oklahoma ranch. "What England Did to Me," the final chapter, reveals a man very different from the creator of The Longhorns, a book written just a few years previously. As Tinkle noted in An American Original (p. 185): "The year at Cambridge crystallized many points of view for Dobie, ideas that had invigorated and enlarged him in the past but that had never dominated his thought." Among the ideas were the relationship of the universal and the provincial, a growing attachment to the metaphor of "the earth," and increased respect for imagination as contrasted with illusion. Notable also is the strengthening of Dobie's affection for England.

The break with the University of Texas in 1947, the involved details of which need not be of concern here, freed Dobie to devote his entire time and energy to writing. The files of materials he had collected, earlier publications in magazines and newspapers, and memories stored over the years formed the basis for several important works published in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Voice of the Coyote (1949), like his other animal books, blends folklore with natural and cultural history. How humans perceive the coyote is at least as important in the book as factual information and description. The author is forceful in his opposition to the frontier tradition of killing for the sake of killing. A hunter from boyhood, Dobie in The Voice of the Coyote expresses anger at those who slaughter coyotes for no good reason.

As opposed to the traditional Anglo attitude, Dobie was attracted to the Indian view of nature, a view which stresses living in harmony with one's natural environment. The author seemed to see such a view reflected in the career of the old hunter Ben Lilly, who had begun on the eastern fringes of the Southwest and eventually moved across Texas into the mountains of northern Mexico, New Mexico, and Arizona. Lilly was in his seventies when Dobie first met him in New Mexico in 1928, and the file of materials on Lilly gathered over the years finally evolved into The Ben Lilly Legend (1950). Lilly was a paradoxical man, impossible in human relationships because of his devotion to hunting and moving on. Dobie was fascinated with Lilly's primitive knowledge of forest and mountain range, with his energy, vitality, strength, and love of freedom. Old Ben Lilly was a son of the natural world that Dobie adored, but it is interesting that the writer gives only a few words in his Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest to the Lilly book, fewer words in fact than to any of his other works.

The Mustangs, published in 1952, may well prove to be the most enduring of Dobie's books. The English Romantic, the lover of the open range, and the critic of contemporary society merge into the marvelously elegiac opening lines of the volume: "Like the wild West Wind that Shelley yearned to be, the mustangs, the best ones at least, were `tameless, and swift, and proud.' " The author says that he has chosen to write about the mustangs "at a time when so many proclaimers of liberty are strangling it." The reference is to the McCarthyism of the early 1950s, an "ism" that Dobie deplored because of the fears and the tightening of freedoms that it engendered. Pancho Dobie was often more direct in his political commentary, such as in the newspaper column in which he compared a prominent Texas politician unfavorably with a rattlesnake, but in The Mustangs he wrote obliquely of the spiritual truth of freedom, a value he believed the wild horses and their world embodied. Such a principle, of course, had been defined by Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the few American writers to significantly influence Dobie. The tales and facts collected in the book, however, have a vital tang of actual experience that transcends the abstract message.

Years of collecting notes and of reading about the horses of the West preceded the writing of The Mustangs. Prior to composing the book the author also did concentrated research under a grant from the Huntington Library in California; Dobie later said the research conducted at the Huntington was equal to that required for the writing of a doctoral dissertation. Pride in the resulting work is apparent in the lengthy annotation found in Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest (revised edition). Dobie explains in the annotation that the volume "incorporates" an earlier, briefer work, as well as "a large part" of the Texas Folklore Society annual of 1940. The first third of The Mustangs traces the Arabian progenitors of the Spanish horse, the horses brought to the New World by Spaniards, and the horse strains developed by the western Indians. Later there is room for legends and tales of Anglo mustangers. "Probably a million range horses," Dobie notes, left Texas during the time of the longhorn drives, and by the end of the nineteenth century the last herds of mustangs had been reduced to scrub stock. In The Mustangs Dobie largely avoids sentiment, something he was not always able to do in previous works. The concluding prose hymn to the mustangs, once free upon a vast range and now "free of all confines of time and flesh," seems noble and fitting rather than sentimental. Tales of Old-Time Texas (1955) continued to mine the familiar lode, as did I'll Tell You a Tale (1960), a selection of some of the best of Dobie's previously published stories. The tales in the latter volume were chosen by Isabel Gaddis, herself from the range country and a former student of Dobie's. The stories are gathered under such headings as "The Longhorn Breed" and "Characters and Happenings of Long Ago," and they represent Dobie at his best in doing what he did with artistry–telling a tale. An advance copy of Cow People was in Dobie's hands only days before his peaceful death in September, 1964. The book summarizes and distils all the vast knowledge of cattlemen that Dobie had acquired over a lifetime of personal experiences and reading. Lon Tinkle claims that Dobie became a better, more realistic writer during his final years. Cow People bears out that judgment. The portraits of cattlemen in Cow People are expertly drawn, sometimes with humor, always with canny understanding.

Following Dobie's death several posthumous volumes–most notably Rattlesnakes (1965), Some Part of Myself (1967), Out of the Old Rock (1972), and Prefaces (1975)–were sewn together and published. The lengthy bibliography compiled in 1968 by Mary Louise McVicker shows, through its more than 700 entries (excluding newspaper columns), how voluminously Dobie wrote. Tinkle's "A Bibliographical Note" at the close of An American Original nicely supplements McVicker's essential bibliography and summarizes well the significant body of writings by and about Dobie as of the late 1970s. That Dobie was a literary son of the cattle kingdom is known widely; less well known are the extent and variety of his writings. As McVicker's bibliography demonstrates, he not only wrote extensively for periodicals, but also contributed 134 items to books by varied hands.

Pancho Dobie could ride the range and treat cattle infected with screwworms, but he was also a literate writer firmly grounded in the best standards of English literature. At times late in his life Dobie worried that he was perceived by the public only as a colorful yarn-spinner. Tinkle ponders the question of whether or not Dobie became "trapped" in the image he so carefully cultivated early in his career. In the final chapter of An American Original, "A Joy to Him and a Joy to Hear," Tinkle concludes that indeed Dobie found himself entrapped "within his loyalties and his public role," but that Dobie the man "never stopped growing." Pancho Dobie was in general a beloved figure in his native Texas and Southwest, and his long life spanned a period of remarkable transitions within the region. His life, if not his works, reflects many of those transitions.

How will Dobie's reputation fare in the future? Students of literature know that judging a writer's accomplishments is usually a lengthy process; reputations must be sifted. A single doctoral dissertation devoted solely to Dobie and a few worthwhile undergraduate papers cited by Tinkle suggest that there has not been an excessive amount of scholarly interest in the author. Larry McMurtry, the Texas novelist, offers strong, generally negative criticism of Dobie (and of the writer's friends, historian Walter Prescott Webb and naturalist Roy Bedichek) in a piece included in In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (1968). Dobie and his colleagues, McMurtry writes, "revered Nature," but were never able to resolve their ambivalent passions: love for the range and love for "the library." McMurtry asserts that Dobie is at his best in Tongues of the Monte and in the "terse opinionated annotations" of the Guide. Only time will test the validity of McMurtry's belief that Dobie's audience "will probably not outlive him much more than a generation."Another Texas writer, Larry Goodwyn, concludes in his essay "The Frontier Myth and Southwestern Literature" that Dobie was "the most significant . . . of the interpreters of the oral tradition," but while he "described a way of life," he never found a way "to describe its meaning."

Perhaps the best judgment of Dobie now possible is suggested by the opening sentences of Francis Abernethy's pamphlet J. Frank Dobie. Abernethy begins with a story Dobie relates in A Vaquero of the Brush Country. A thirsty, bored cowboy rides into Dogtown, and after a visit to the saloon mounts his horse, spurs it, and whoops for a while to "express the buoyancy of his unconquerable spirit." Dobie, Abernethy says, "decided to whoop us into consciousness of what we had and what we have, and of the tremendous life and vitality of things of which we are a part." Chronicler of the cattle kingdom and teller of tales, folklorist, historian, bibliographer, man of letters, teacher, lover of freedom and of nature and of life, and a well-loved figure–Dobie was all of these. Future generations of readers will no doubt confirm that he wrote at least a handful of enduring books about his native region and its animals and people. At times, in addition, he did a lot of whooping and stirring the dust.

HENRY L. ALSMEYER , JR., Hendrix College

Selected Bibliography
Primary Sources (in chronological order)
A Vaquero of the Brush Country. Dallas: Southwest Press, 1929.
Coronado's Children. Dallas: Southwest Press, 1930.
Tongues of the Monte. Garden City: N.Y. : Doubleday, Doran, 1935. Reprinted as The Mexico I Like. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1942.
Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver. Boston: Little, Brown, 1939.
The Longhorns. Boston: Little, Brown, 1941.
A Texan in England. Boston: Little, Brown, 1944.
The Voice of the Coyote. Boston: Little, Brown, 1949.
The Ben Lilly Legend. Boston: Little, Brown, 1950.
Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest. Revised edition. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1952.
The Mustangs. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952.
Tales of Old-Time Texas. Boston: Little, Brown, 1955.
I'll Tell You a Tale. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960.
Cow People. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964.
Rattlesnakes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965.
Some Part of Myself. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.
Out of the Old Rock. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.
Prefaces. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975.
Secondary Sources
Abernethy, Francis E. J. Frank Dobie. Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1967. Combines biography and critical appraisal. Cited by Tinkle (below) as "the best critical survey of Dobie published thus far."
. "J. Frank Dobie." In Southwestern American Literature: A Bibliography, edited by John Q. Anderson, Edwin W. Gaston, Jr., and James W. Lee. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1980. Convenient listing of works by and about Dobie.
Alsmeyer, Henry L., Jr. "J. Frank Dobie's Attitude Towards Physical Nature." Dissertation, Texas A&M University, 1973. Author's thesis is that Dobie was surrounded by nature as a child and through the years developed increased knowledge of and sympathy with many forms of physical nature.
Bode, Winston. A Portrait of Pancho. Austin: Pemberton Press, 1965. Reprinted as J. Frank Dobie: A Portrait of Pancho. Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1968. Book version of a television documentary that combines words and photographs in a "memorial look" at Dobie as man and writer.
Cook, Spruill. J. Frank Dobie Bibliography. Waco, Texas: Texian Press, 1968. A sixty-three-page "labor of love." Bertha McKee Dobie wrote the foreword.
Dugger, Ronnie, ed. Three Men in Texas: Bedichek, Webb, and Dobie. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967. Memoirs of the three friends, rich in personal insights and anecdotes, by people who knew them.
Dykes, Jeff. My Dobie Collection. College Station: Friends of the Texas A&M University Library, 1971. Published on the occasion of the gift by Dykes and his daughter of a major collection of Dobie materials totalling more than six hundred items. Supplements the Cook and McVicker bibliographies.
Goodwyn, Larry. "The Frontier Myth and Southwestern Literature." In Regional Perspectives: An Examination of America's Literary Heritage, edited by John Gordon Burke. Chicago: American Library Association, 1973. See especially pp. 186–88 for consideration of Dobie and the oral tradition of the Southwest. Written by a member of the Center for Southern Studies, Duke University.
Hudson, Wilson M. "Adams, Dobie, and Webb on the Use of Regional Material." In American Bypaths: Essays in Honor of E. Hudson Long, edited by Robert G. Collmer and Jack W. Herring. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 1980.
McMurtry, Larry. "Southwestern Literature?" In In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. Austin: Encino Press, 1968. A sharp look at Dobie, Webb, and Bedichek by a younger Texas writer. The author's judgments may be challenged, but should be considered.
McVicker, Mary Louise. The Writings of J. Frank Dobie: A Bibliography. Lawton, Oklahoma: Museum of the Great Plains, 1968. Essential to any serious study of Dobie's voluminous writings. An excellent bibliography.
Owens, William A. Three Friends: Roy Bedichek, J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969. Reprints letters of the three, augmented by materials from transcribed interviews. The author is a Texas writer and Columbia University professor.
Tinkle, Lon. An American Original: The Life of J. Frank Dobie. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Major biography written by a former Southern Methodist University professor, now deceased, who was also a close personal friend of Dobie's. Balanced and helpful. Makes good use of previously unavailable letters.

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