Cornua Longa, Ars Brevis

THE AMERICAN COWBOY (232 pp.)--Joe B. Frantz and Julian Ernest Choafe Jr. --University of Oklahoma Press ($3.75).

It's getting so it's plumb impossible these days for a cowboy to go walking on the streets of Laredo without getting his chaps all snarled up in dude professors fixin' to wring another book out of his innocent tanned hide.

This latest roundup is the work of Joe B. Frantz, University of Texas history professor who specializes in the history of the cow, and his pard, Julian Ernest Choate Jr., a professor of English at

David Lipscomb College, Nashville, a specialist in the prose of the cow. It is published by the notably pro-cow University of Oklahoma. And, to use an expression from Australia (where they don't have cowboys but stockmen), it is all a fair cow of a book.

It is also coy. But much bovine erudition has gone into it. Although the writing is tame and woolly, those at home in this overgrazed field will consider the book right up there at the point of the lowing herd of longhorn literature.

Purple Page. The brief and simple annals of the poor cowboy span the years between 1867 and 1885. There was a stringy breed of cattle down in Texas called the longhorn and a market for them in the North. The cowboy brought these facts together until he was defeated by the onrush of civilization and by cattle tick (which killed less hardy herds), by sheep (which competed with them) and by Methodism (which tamed the hard-drinking cowhands). At this point in the book, the apparatus of scholarship gets to work. The reader is told that a cowboy seldom fought with a gun and never with his fists, but elected what the modern delinquent calls a shiv (knife); that most of the gunplay in Dodge City was caused by non-cowboys; that Billy the Kid was a product of New York's Bowery; that Calamity Jane claimed that she never went to bed sober.

There is also a good deal of other assorted information, some fascinating, some obvious. Cowboys sometimes found it difficult to get about 3,000 cows to swim a river. Steak was cheap (5-c- a pound). The Colt six-gun was invented by Samuel Colt. Bullwhackers had deplorable vocabularies. All this may be interesting. But a thought, as troublesome as Geronimo, persists in the reader's mind that the cowboy is perhaps best left as myth. William MacLeod Raine and Clarence E. (Hopalong Cassidy) Mulford (whom the authors call a "second-rate practitioner"), or even Zane Grey, that old rider of the purple page, may be -better custodians of the cowboy than two teachers trying to put the brand of their scholarship on the twitching flanks of popular legend.

Vicarious Kaqueros. The point not grasped by Messrs. Frantz and Choate is that the myth is the only reality worth bothering about. A thousand cap pistols will leap from their holsters to protest this attempt to debunkhouse the cowboy. By the time the reader is led by the book's two vicarious vaqueros to their massive cowboy bibliography (306 solemn references), his alkali-parched lips may well be forming a song:

Ah'm an ole Phi Bete

From the Lone Star State

Ma pard's Ph.D.

Out o' Tennessee

We tote no guns and we rob no stages

We punch no cows and we bank our wages But we sure ride herd on them Eng.

Lit. majors, Yippeeyi Oklahoma U.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.