A TEXAS COWBOY CONTENTS J M ., . INTRODUCTION by J. Frank Dobie V j x BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SIRINGO S WRITINGS xxxvii AUTHOR S PREFACE 3 1. My Boyhood Days 7 2. My Introduction to the Late War 11 3. My First Lesson In Cow Punching 18 4. My Second Experience in St. Louis 26 5. A New Experience 32 6. Adopted and Sent to School 37 7. Back at Last to the Lone Star State 41 8. Learning To Rope Wild Steers 45 9. Owning My First Cattle 51 10. A Start up the Ghisholm Trail 58 1 1 . Buys a Boat and Becomes a Sailor 63 12. Back to My Favorite Occupation, That of a Wild and Woolly Cow Boy 69 13. Mother and I Meet at Last 74 14. On a Tare in Wichita, Kansas 80 15. A Lonely Trip down the Cimeron 88 16. My First Experience Roping a Buffalo 94 17. An Exciting Trip after Thieves 99 18. Seven Weeks among Indians 103 19. A Lonely Ride of Eleven Hundred Miles 111 20. Another Start up the Chisholm Trail 117 21. A Trip Which Terminated in the Capture of quot Billy the Kid quot 124 22. Billy the Kid s Capture 1 36 AUG 171950 Grande On a Mule 141 24. Wsty ftjul by Unknown Parties 146 25. LbftVoft the Staked Plains 151 26. A Trip down the Reo Pecos 160 27. A True Sketch of quot Billy the Kid s quot Life 168 28. Wrestling With a Dose of Small Pox on the Llano Esticado 178 29. In Love with a Mexican Girl 187 30. A Sudden Leap from Cow Boy to Merchant 193 ILLUSTRATION Frontispiece of First Edition facing page xii Second Frontispiece of First Edition xiii Title Page of First Edition xl Fly Sheet of First Edition Q INTRODUCTION CHARLIE SIRINGO, WRITER AND MAN By J. FRANK DOBIE c, HARLES A. SIRINGO was born in Matagorda County, Texas, February 7, 1855, and he died in Hollywood, California, October 19, 1928. AngeloSiringo, the census report of 1860 has the name he was known to thousands simply as Charlie Siringo. For the first eleven years of his life he was his quot folk s contrary son. quot For the next fifteen years or so he was a cowboy then, for two decades, a detective. Thereafter his life, lived mostly in New Mexico and California, was meager and splattered, some of it spent in writing, perhaps more of it spent in contesting a power that suppressed what he had written. Carrying them in a satchel, he peddled his own privately printed books. He wrote his first book when he was less than thirty years old but was considering himself quot an old stove-up cowpuncher. quot It is the story of his life on the range. During the last twenty years or so of his life he repeatedly rewrote the story, with the additions made by time but without those extensions in meaning that an expanding intellect gives to a subject on which it prolongs con sideration. His second book, however, is independent of the first, beginning with his employment as a private detective in Chicago in 1886. Two years before this a blind phrenologist who came to Caldwell, Kansas, had felt his quot mule head quot and assured him that he was quot cut out for a detective. quot His titles in order of pub lication are A Texas Cowboy 1885, A Cowboy Detective, Two Evil Isms Pinkertonism and Anarchism 1915, ix A Lone Star Cowboy 1919, Billy the Kid 1920, Riata and Spurs 1927. Siringo had five themes his experience on the range Billy the Kid, whom he chased as a cowboy Pinkerton s National Detective Agency, for which he worked for twenty-two years tough men and tough experiences that he met as a de tective and then more tough men. He had aninclination to write about women but suppressed it. Whatever he might have said on the subject would not have been news. His collection of cowboy songs is hardly to be rated as a book. The first book of any significance pertaining to the range, His toric Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest, by Joseph G. McCoy, appeared in 1874. In point of time, Siringo s A Texas Cowboy y or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony was the second range book of any significance to appear...