Lord of beasts : the saga of Buffalo Jones PDF
Preview Lord of beasts : the saga of Buffalo Jones
TABOR COLLEGE LIBRARY 923.973 E13L —_ Easton, Robert POlne/LVord of Tbeasts 2002 00004867 6 Yo)5U eS CHON Rents MACKENZIE BROWN _~ wit ek 17 J6 E3 1970 TABOR COLLEGE LIBRARY HILLSBORO, KANSAS 67063 301238 LORD of BEASTS DATE DUE Tas; 993 E I3L LORD of BEASTS The Saga of BUFFALO JONES @ ROBERT EASTON and MACKENZIE BROWN @ Foreword by Jack Schaefer Illustrations by Mac Schweitzer BISON UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS - LINCOLN 3801233 TABOR COLLEGE LIBRARY TIT 'ermmbpDm iitILARTIC AC AavTne2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA PRESS Copyright ©) 1961 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved International Standard Book Number 0—8032-5727-9 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 61—14501 % \ First Bison Book printing: October 1970 Bison Book edition published by arrangement with the University of Arizona Press. Manufactured in the United States of America To Charles Franklin Parker ® “To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inqiisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom — these are traits of the frontier.” — Frederick Jackson Turner The Significance of the Frontier in American History Foreword IT TOOK TWO MEN several years to rope Buffalo Jones and tie him down in this book. Not surprising. He was a bigger, tougher, more rambunctious quarry and he led them a longer chase than any buffalo or musk ox or lion or rhino or gorilla he ever looped with his own rope. There were giants in the land in the old days. Buffalo Jones was one of them. Much in this book about him is unbelievable. That all the facts are as accurate as careful scholarship can make them and all interpretations are roundly reasoned does not in itself induce belief. The man simply does not fit into the framework of the modern wel- fare state, into the context of life as we frailer mortals know it today. He is something big in more than size, exaggerated, pushed past the limits of contemporary cribbed credibility about the capabilities of the lone man, out of a past that is far-gone in more than time. He fits and with a cramped fit only into his own period, that of the brash, arrogant, over-confident, rashly individualistic, reckless, bumptious America of between-the-wars, the two epoch-making wars, the Civil War and the First World War. He came to man- hood with the one and he died with the other. He can be grasped in proportion only against that garish oversize exag- gerated background. His two captors, tying him down here, have tried to present him in that way. I do not think they have quite succeeded. He still breaks loose occasionally, right out of their pages, a Gulliver snapping bonds, escaping the last final absolute belief. His career was the stuff of which legends can be made — and they were made during his lifetime. But his captors have tried. Manfully, somewhat in his own tradition. There is something ironic here. Two modern men, quite vii viti FOREWORD at home and at ease in the modern: overstuffed overcivilized world, settled in the sedentary profession of teaching as well as writing, living in the soft comfort of the softest most comfortable part of the United States, southern California, from the quiet serenity of armchairs and desks pursue a man whose whole life was a negation of softness and comfort, who made his friend Teddy Roosevelt’s notion of the stren- uous life seem mild and tame, who, till age and jungle fever took him, courted danger as another man might have courted a woman. They turn to, are attracted to, a pioneer period that contrasts sharply with their own, to subject matter much different from and outside their professional specialties, to a man whose life in condition and intent and the actual living was wholly unlike their own lives. I throw no stones. I embrace the same irony. I do the same, in my way, with my fictional quarries, in my books. But why this backward look, from the lush plush gadget-bolstered today to a rougher tougher more adventurous time and a man who deliberately sought the rough and the tough and the personalized adven- ture? Is this done solely to provide interesting reading? To make a contribution to that piling up of printed facts and opinions about them called history? Those goals are well met here. But is there something more? The attempt to recapture, if only vicariously, journeying from the armchair if only in spirit with Buffalo Jones into silly grandiloquent yet somehow superb feats, something of the zest for living, something of the strong juices of life, which advancing civili- zation seems to be squeezing out of contemporary existence? If so, what better quarry to pursue, loop of words swing- ing free, than Charles Jesse Jones, lord of beasts, man among men! 5 And about time. He was a westerner. Though he courted danger and fame and won both in far parts of the world, he did so with the cowboy’s rope and the western cowpony.
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