Cattle and Sheep

ARIZONA COWBOYS--Dane Coolidge--Dutton ($2.50).

The writings of Dane Coolidge have something of the flavor of an oldtimer's leisurely talk, in which personal reminiscences, anecdotes and tall tales are intermingled. A photographer of wild life long before candid cameras were invented, Coolidge wandered over Southwestern deserts, had the wit to pass up wild animals occasionally and photograph wild human beings instead. In 1903. when he was 30, his wanderings took him into the cattle country northeast of the Salt River Valley of Arizona, where he picked up some good stories, some better photographs. Arizona Cowboys is a belated record of his stay, a book of 160 pages, with eleven brief chapters sandwiched among 34 fine camera studies which range from close-ups of outlaw bulls to shots of magnificent desert scenery.

Arizona cattlemen had their backs to the wall when Coolidge first knew them. They had been through three years of drought and were being "sheeped" out of existence, as sheepherders brought their huge herds from dried-up northern ranges to graze on land that had been sacred to cattle. Cattle, said the cowboys, spread out in family groups to graze. Sheep followed each other, were bunched by the herder, tramped the range into dust, with the result that the next rain washed off the topsoil instead of bringing up fresh grass. Cattlemen had tried violence, but after a rancher in the Tonto Basin was hanged for killing two sheepherders, they gave it up. They tried cunning, stampeded wild horses into herds of sheep to discourage sheep-grazing on that part of the range. But the sheep kept coming. Coolidge says the legend of quick-shooting cowboys is pure myth: because they believed the law would hold them guilty if there was any violence, they went unarmed, ate dirt, bowed and scraped before arrogant sheepherders.

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