Hashknife Cowboy: Recollections of Mack Hughes

by Stella Hughes

Book Overview

"Age and size ain't got nothin' to do with it," Mack's daddy once said. "You gotta want to be a cowboy." Mack Hughes wanted to be a cowboy, all right, and he was just twelve years old when he went to work for the famous Hashknife spread in northern Arizona. Growing up on the range, Mack lived a life about which modern boys can only wonder. He spins yarns of bad horses and the men who rode them, tells of wild dogs that ravaged young calves, and recalls...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816511187
• ISBN13: 9780816511181
• Release Date: February 1989
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent service.

Very well written with a lot of information about cowboy life in the early 1900's.

Hashknife Cowboy

This is a wonderful story about coming-of-age, but this book offers much more. It is an authentic account of ranch life in the fading days of the Old West, seen through the eyes of a young ranch boy and recalled now after a lifetime of cowboying. Mack's recollections will delight you. He spins yarns of bad horses and the men who rode them, tells of wild dogs that ravaged young calves, describes the dipping of cattle during the outbreak of the scab in 1925 and recalls lonely winter weeks spent at a remote camp where his home was a shack so flimsy that snow blew through the cracks and covered his bed. Many, many wonderful stories!

Great cowboy memoir . . .

There are a bunch of cowboy memoirs out there and this is a good one. Mack Hughes was his parents' third oldest child, with something like seven siblings, almost all of them boys. His father, also a cowboy, brought his family to the huge Hashknife spread near Winslow, Arizona, in the 1920s, and Mack quickly came of age there helping to support the family. When he leaves again, it is 14 years later, and he's had a broad range of experiences from cowboying to running trucks of sugar from Phoenix for local bootleggers. We get to know his brothers (one of them a mechanic and lover of cars) and many more cowboys, some of whom Mack is truly fond of and makes no secret of it. There are accounts of exteme weather, illness, an infestation of scabbies (cattle) and lice (he and a bed-mate) and spectacular wrecks that leave him with broken bones and a smashed face. He is touched by the deaths of good men, and he has near fatal accidents of his own, once losing a good horse and saddle over a sheer drop into a deep canyon. The language is colorful and salty, and with the help of his wife Stella (who wrote the book) he's able to tell a really good yarn, sometimes exciting as he and some friends chase a wild horse, or darkly humorous as they rid the countryside of wild dogs, or inspiring as he and his family struggle to survive during the Great Depression. The book also has excellent illustrations by Joe Beeler. Thanks to the University of Arizona Press for keeping this fine book in print.

HOW IT REALLY WAS!

THIS BOOK IS THE BEST. IT WILL HOLD YOU IN UNTIL THE VERY END. EASY TO READ, INFORMATIONL AND A TRUE EYE-OPENER. IT MAKES YOU PROUD TO KNOW THAT THESE ARE THE KIND OF PEOPLE THAT MADE THE WEST WHAT IT IS. THE BEST PART, IS'T ALL THE TRUTH. TO ENDURE WHAT THIS FAMILY WENT THROUGH AND THOUGHT NOTHING OF IT, REALLY MAKES YOU STOP AND THINK ABOUT THE LITTLE THINGS WE MAKE SO MUCH OF TODAY. I KNOW THAT THIS IS A TRUE STORY BECAUSE I KNEW THE MAN THAT IS WAS WIRTTEN ABOUT, AND HE WAS A TRUE AMERICAN HERO - EVEN TO HIS BITTER END, THE WORLD LOST HIM IN 1999. THIS BOOK SHOULD BE IN EVERY SCHOOL LIBRARY, IT HAS SO MUCH TO OFFER. IT'S THE BEST.