[Boatright was an American educator who edited many histories and studies of the American Southwest during his thirty-year career. In the following excerpt, Boatright offers a favorable review of Why the Chisholm Trail Forks, and Other Tales of the Cattle Country.]

Andy Adams published The Log of a Cowboy one year after Owen Wister had published The Virginian. Adams remained poor the rest of his life. The Virginian made Wister a wealthy man, and unfortunately the most influential of the "Western" writers; for although he had had predecessors in some of the dime novelists, he as a respectable writer publishing in a respectable magazine, and issued by a respectable publisher, largely established the traditions of the synthetic Western fiction as now exemplified by the mass media.

Wister was a class-conscious easterner taken in by the easy manners of the Chegem Club. Adams was a working man before he was a writer. He came to Texas at the age of twenty-three. For some ten years he traded horses and drove them up the trail from South Texas. So accurate is his portrayal of trail driving that J. Frank Dobie has said, "If all the other books on trail driving were destroyed, a reader could still get a just and authentic conception of trail men, trail work, range cattle, cow horses, and the cow country in general from The Log."

Adams' bent was toward a realism that stopped short of naturalism. His raw material was his own experience—what he had seen and done—the people he had known, their recollections and their tales. He knew that an authentic portrayal of cowboys' life must include their relaxations as well as their work—what they did around the campfire at night as well as what they did during the day.

The campfire [he noted in The Log of a Cowboy] is to all outdoor life what the evening fireside is to domestic life. After the labors of the day are over, the men gather around the fire, and the social hour of the day is spent in yarning. The stories told may run from the sublime to the ridiculous, from a true incident to a base fabrication, or from a touching bit of pathos to the most vulgar vulgarity.

The stories however, serve other purposes than verisimilitude. They embrace a wide variety of subjects and moods, and reveal the attitudes of the tellers and listeners toward a great many subjects, including women, Negroes, Indians, and the mores of the older states.

Integral parts of the novels in which they occur, the tales are yet interesting and significant when read by themselves. Wilson Hudson has done a service both to Adams and to the public by going through the Adams books and manuscripts, taking out the campfire tales, and placing them in a single volume—particularly since all the Adams books except The Log of a Cowboy are out of print, and it is available only in a shortened edition.…