[Capps is an American novelist whose works are often set in New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. In the following explication of Log of a Cowboy, he affirms the book's primary value as a work of social history.]

In his history The Great Plains, published in 1936, Walter Prescott Webb makes a definite and all-inclusive statement about cowboy novels published before that time: "Hitherto there has been written but one novel of the cattle country that is destined to become a classic—The Log of a Cowboy, by Andy Adams." Many critics might quarrel with the narrow limits of Webb's definition of a classic. Another statement might be more acceptable, but it is still a strong statement and it is true in 1964: any list of classic western novels, no matter how long or short the list, is incomplete without The Log of a Cowboy.

The book was published in 1902 and was immediately acclaimed. It made Adams as a writer. Today, in the public domain, it is still making money for publishers and can be found in any complete library of western Americana. Surely it has stood the test of time.

The novel's unique value was defined by WWA writer Stephen Payne in these pages in 1962 with these words: "… genuine cow-country stuff … Simple, homespun, authentic…" He might have added that it is rich and direct and artless and full of good humor. Like Mark Twain and Will Rogers and a few other rare Americans, Andy Adams had the natural ability to interest people.

Perhaps a close look at the book will show something about the relationship between fiction and history; indeed, it may indicate that The Log of a Cowboy is not essentially fiction at all, by which statement I do not mean to quibble over definitions, but only to get at the nature of the book. Note this fact: that the question is not whether Adams' characters and events actually existed in 1882, for the writer of fiction often uses actual fact, and the writer of non-fiction uses hypothetical people and events to illustrate ideas. Let us look at three aspects of The Log of a Cowboy: the characters, the story, and the relationship between character and story.

Probably no writer has given us a better picture of the real old-time cowboy. He shows us a fun-loving, sentimental, easy-going, hard-working, skilled laborer—no myt<.But the question Adams answers about the nature of the American cowboy is a non-fiction question. What was the cowboy really like? Adams tells you. Pick any of his characters there's the answer. They are all alike. You can remember the names: Flood, Priest, McCann, Rountree, Wheat, Stray-horn, but if you haven't read the book in the past month, you will find it hard to remember any difference between them, except, perhaps, that Flood was the boss. A reader who is weary of cheap stereotypes and the heroic cowboy myth finds Adams' people delightful. But Adams fails to show us the deeper truth that people are individuals, each different. And the difference lies at the heart of all good fiction. Authenticity is not the crucial criterion of good fiction. Shakespeare, for example, was an atrocious historian.

Look at Adams' story. An editor would say it is episodic. One event after another happens, separate events, almost unrelated. Each is interesting in itself, colorful, superbly descriptive. They capture some rustlers. They stop a stampede. They get cows out of the quicksand. They repair a broken wagon. They build a bridge. If one made a list of the events and found thirty, then he would find that he could exchange the order of numbers three and twentyseven, numbers nine and sixteen, etc.—this with little rewriting and little damage to the story. The incidents do not have fictional organization.

A look at the relation between character and event is even more revealing. The relationship hardly exists in Adams' narrative. Which particular man did what? One does not remember. A good piece of fiction has in it people that can hardly be separated from the things that happen to them. A fictional character is moulded by events and he causes events; to a great extent, he is defined by events. Try to write an interesting character sketch of Hamlet without using any of Shakespeare's story. The reverse is also true: fictional events take their very nature from the nature of the people involved.

Adams' lack as a conscious artist in fiction is shown by the fact that he wrote only this one really successful book, though he kept trying. He could not repeat himself. In this book he had unconsciously hit upon an organizing principle, a sort of automatic story framework: a cattle drive. If one tells the truth about a cattle drive, he has sense of movement, a progression. He has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So Adams' narrative hangs together. He was never able to hit upon such unity again.

This evaluation is not intended to disparage The Log of a Cowboy. It is not only interesting reading still today. It is valuable primary source material. Adams knew what he was talking about. But his book belongs more with The Oregon Trail, by Parkman, and Roughing It, by Mark Twain, than it does with classic fiction.