In one recently re-read book they bed down 3500 Texas longhorns on 6 acres of land, and later on 8. My house sits on a 1.5 acre lot. A mile down the road I have an undeveloped 6 acre lot. Seems like a mighty tight fit, for that many. What say you cattlemen?

Here is my math (if not in error) - but I know jack all about large cattle herds and cattle drives. Yeah, I know, LL researched the heck out of everything, and did a few cattle drives with Charlie Daniels, but still...


Say each animal needs a 3 X9 "footprint", or 27 square feet to bed, or standing. Not counting the horns. Laying cows side by side and end to end like dominos means 94,500 sq feet, no spaces between. That's a bit over 2 acres (87,000+ sq ft) . So 6 acres would give each animal less than 3 body spaces, or about 3 if body space is over-estimated.

Do-able on paper, but is it in actual practice feasible to bed 3500 free-range, half (at least!)-wild longhorns that closely (6 acres - I'm more comfy with 8) in the open, with only a half dozen or so drive riders, and only two at night?

In another book, his people come into the Tongue River Valley somewhere up around the Pumpkin Creek area IIRC and "follow it up" (the Tongue) to the Yellowstone at Miles City. True, that's "up" north, map-wise, but down river - the Tongue flows north to it's confluence with the Yellowstone less than a mile from my FIL's house. This one could have been a LL brain fart, looking at a map, or just overlooking known knowledge, or a slip of the Tongue.

Pun intended...... . Only things I've ever questioned in his books - and I think I've read all, or nearly all, most of those multiple times.

Or it could be I mis- interpreted somewhat ambiguous verbage....

I have covered most of the ground he talks about in Mojave crossing. Have even been in the cabin he supposedly wrote it and a few others in near tabletop mountain. He got the names of places right but some of the route made no sense.

No offense, but if any of y'all have ever written anything more complicated than a post on the 'fire...well, it's difficult to get it all right. L'Amour was an entertaining writer, but not the best, by any means and if you look hard enough, you'll probably find more mistakes than that in the average 200-300 page novel he put out. Mojave Crossing and Lonely on the Mountain are two decent reads.

Elmer Kelton is another highly-touted "authentic" western writer. He tends to put 30-30's in his characters' hands twenty years before the cartridge was developed and also to celebrate mediocrity.

They aren’t too accurate are they?

With Mr. L'Amour, I knew he was a good writer, and knew he did his homework.

When I came across one of his flubs I just chuckled to myself. None of us are perfect, and when he stumbled, it just added that much more to his mystique.


Reading some other writers, I don't find it quite so amusing. Their ignorance puts me off... And I don't tend to read them again.

The bar has been raised to astounding heights with the internet. You think your uncle who had all L'Amour's stuff in 1972 knew that the 30-30 wasn't around in 1872? Or cared? When I was a kid, you'd have to be a voracious reader and student of western history to know these things. The internet changed all that since information/history, some of it even right, was now available at everybody's fingertips without buying the whole Time-Life western history set. People expect more accuracy now and it is more easily doable in the case of movies, with the proliferation of accurate replicas.

Partially off-topic but, with movies, I don't expect the 1956 movie The Searchers to be completely accurate. There are lots of things about it that are, compared to other movies of the era, but for instance, SAA's and '92 Winchesters weren't available in 1869. Alan LeMay wrote it and it has been so long since I read it that I remember little about his descriptions of weapons in it. In another novel of his The Unforgiven, I would rate his descriptions of weapons of the time period, very highly. The movie is slightly less so but is not bad for 1960.

Edited to clarify...the above isn't directed towards RockinB or anybody else in particular.

The Western novel, as well as the Western movie, were written to be entertaining for whoever was reading or watching. Accuracy, either geographically or historically, is often nowhere close to being right. As much as I love John Wayne movies and consider The Searchers to be the best western movie ever made, the time frame and their choice of guns is not right.

I'm not a L'Amour fan, but I have read every western novel Zane Grey wrote, and have the hard backed copies of those books. I have found Grey's books to be pretty much accurate as far as the time frame goes for things. But, as with any other writer, he wrote his books to sell, and as such the storyline was what was most important.

He wrote fiction, not history. Fictional people in fictional places doing fictional things. Just enjoy them for that they are.

I never was a fan of either L’Amour or Grey.

Not that they were bad writers or anything, just fiction was really never my gig.

What Rock Chuck said.

If I refused to read or watch anything less than 100% factual I'd be out of business. Entertainment is what it is.

I've noticed the further west you go the more story telling is revered. In the east we call it lying.

Absaroka County wasn't real either but the people living there got a lot of top reviews here.

One of the reasons many of the memoirs of the famous mountain men are generally taken with a grain of salt, is they were ghost written 40-50-60 years after the fact by eastern writers. 😉

This! Just like the old dime novels from back in the day. These novels always bothered Kit Carson. Especially after his experience with the White massacre. Read about it. It upset him terribly.

My take is both books and movies portrayed what readers and movie goers expected at the time they were written/released, not necessarily what was factually accurate for the time period portrayed.

One of the most famous Indian speeches was the surrender speech of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, ending with 'from where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever'. It's repeated over and over in history books. But there's evidence that he didn't say it. When he surrendered, a young army officer, Lt Woods, claimed to have written it down verbatim. Woods also wrote for Harpers Magazine and wasn't know for his honesty. There's no accurate record of whether Joseph or Woods said it and some historians believe that it's fake.

Same with the interviews with Ol’ Jim Beckwourth. Apparently he never allowed the truth to ruin any of his stories. Sometimes he was even two, or even three places at once!

Was it J. Frank Dobie, in one of his books that wrote about the time he was in a small ranching town in Arizona and a bunch of cowboys came riding down the street with their hoglegs a blazing. He stopped one and asked him what was going on and the cowboy answered him something like "well there’s this writer here from back east name of Grey that hired us to ride up and down the street a-shootin’ to add some color to the scenery!"

Apparently the town wasn’t western enough to Grey’s likin’!

Have read most of his novels. Made working the graveyard shift a little easier many times. Have one question.........Why has someone not made a movie of "Last Of The Breed " ? Would seem in this day with such overiding interest in everything Russian it would be a nobrainer. Who would get your vote to play Joe Mack ?

Comes to mind, Ned Buntline, and his Buntline specials. To make life imitate art, he had some made, and took them out west, and gave them to his heroes.

The ones that did not take them to the blacksmith to be sawn down, just let them lay on a shelf.

That is the story I read years ago.

The man who made Bill Cody! 😉

This is a mildly offensive statement to a fourth generation Westerner.
As far as Joseph's speech is concerned, we can either accept the report of the Army officer who was there or accept the detractions of academics who were not. GD

Some people just need to find something after the world changed. Aliens are among us.

As to tall tales in the west, the same is true with Northwoods lumberjacks.

Good grief- - - - -pretty soon we're going to start picking Star Wars and Back To The Future apart for "technical inaccuracies"! A creative writing course I took in college back in the 1960's included something about the reader engaging in "the willing suspension of reality" while reading for entertainment.
Jerry

Stick around Hotrod, according to some, the Bible is all wrong.

It must be according to those churches who are accepting queers as pastors.

The story telling tradition is an intergral part of any culture. Unfortunately, it is not what it used to be. How many of you sit down with your grandchildren and share a story from your past with them??

Perhaps a hunt or a journey? Or perhaps about your grandparents and their life?

These are the things that give the past immortality. And it gives your grandkids a story to pass down. Even if all they remember is “Gramps used to tell us good stories!”

Depends on the officer. There were 1000 soldiers there. None reported any speech and that includes several generals. Lt. Charles Woods was an aid de camp for General Howard, the commanding officer. He sold stories to Harpers Magazine and apparently had a reputation for a lack of honesty in his writing. The fact is, nobody knows for sure if Joseph really made the speech or not.

Woods later became a liberal lawyer and author. He championed liberal causes like labor unions and baby killer Margaret Sanger as she originated Planned Parenthood. I don't put any trust in the truth from any liberal.

Remember the movie "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," and that famous line..............."We have a saying in the West, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

I was thinking of just that line reading this thread! LOL!

"Great" minds think alike. Me too!

And yet, given his reputation for oratory, it is at least as likely that he did make the speech, as reported, as it is that he did not, as was not reported. This seems to be a bit of revisionism, to me. GD

My new sig line.... paraphrased of course.

No sure where to document this, but I read that an editor of L’Amour said that he wrote nearly all of his books in one draft and would not go back and edit them for consistency. L'Amour figured that his readers didn't care whether the bad guy was shot two or three times, (such as in the start of Radigan, for example.)

Re terrain and travel: L'Amour nails it most of the time, way better than most authors, because he walked or rode over much of the ground he wrote about. It shows. However, when he was wrong or had not covered the ground, it really shows. The book about trail driving cattle from the plains to the British Columbia gold fields is utterly ridiculous in time and terrain, leaving out whole mountain ranges to cross.

One of our family inside jokes when one of us gets a compliment is to say, "It is nothing." Everybody in the family knows it comes from Last of the Breed, and is the hero's comment about carrying something like a 150 lb. pack over mountains (I am not going to try to look up the exact weight mentioned in the book.)

Oldman3 is a paramount story teller! One of the best I know. He has 1000’s!

All true!

😁

You stole my post before I got it posted!

the eastern elitist/snobs always rejected the story's told by those that went west and saw the grandeur. I had a Uncle that was showing us his wood lot . scrawny slender popple or some such.
he said "look at these, ever see such big trees"?. My dad replied " Lester, out west where we live we have trees so tall the moon has to go around them". Later in his life Lester got off his little eastern farm and came out to California. we took him to see the Big trees in Yosemite. he stood there looking up for a while then walked away muttering " I don't believe it! has to be Hollywood props"
western storytellers don't lie, they embroider.

So, anyway....

Can ya fit 3500 Longhorns on 6 acres or not?

Unrelated to the post, but if some of you western history buffs are interested? Search out Caleb Green(e) and Ewing Young. They were the real deal, and maybe it's fortunate the novelists with the motto of 'never let the truth get in the way of a good story', didn't bother with them. Green at the age most people were pushing daisies was instrumental in rescuing the Donner Party. Young, inadvertently by an epic cattle drive over uncharted territory now known as Interstate 5, broke the chokehold of the Hudson's Bay Co on American settlers in the Willamette Valley. I personally believe the residents of Oregon and Washington might be flying a flag with a maple leaf, if a crazy mountain man hadn't decided he could move 630 head of cattle through some of the toughest terrain in the West.

I've met a few bull shipper truckers who can get nearly that many on a double deck trailer!
Jerry

Certainly. You just have to know how to stack 'em.

"In the fall of 1931 I had booked a party led by noveliest Zane Grey for a two months trip over the Middle Fork country. Zane Grey wrote the novel Thunder Mountain from this trip. He sent me a copy of it, autographed, and it was loaned to somebody. Anyway, whoever it was never brought it back. Zane Grey never paid me the $1,500 he owed me for the trip." Elmer Keith