Lost Pony Tracks

by Ross Santee

First published in 1953, this book is currently out of print, and it shouldn't be. It's a fine, wonderfully written, sensitively drawn memoir of cowboying in Arizona in the years before and after WWI.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803257406
• ISBN13: 9780803257405
• Release Date: January 1972
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 303 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Quicksilver

Fortunately, I have a copy of "Lost Pony Tracks" in my personal library. Well, two; the second one, a replacement of the original, is in excellent condition; the "first", a small pocketbook version, is battered, well-worn; bears all the earmarks of an energetic cowgirl child having read it many times over, including a well-placed ketchup stain or two. The cover of that over-loved book still fascinates me - a silhouette of a cowboy on his horse, leg thrown over the pommel, a Saguaro cactus off to the left, and a flaming Southwest sunset backdrop behind them both. It's something not forgotten easily, and that photo-cover is etched in my mind and belongs to the story. The book without the cover at all, stands at the top of it's kind. Ross Santee was a writer of extraordinary talent. As a self-described "tenderfoot" coming from the East, "Lost Pony Tracks" sprang from his personal encounters with the cowboys of the Arizona of long ago. It is a wonderful book; he captures the essence of everything; the horses, cattle, the "wrecks" with the pack horses; the unique individuals he meets during his stay with them, a self sufficient, tough "breed apart" of men - although us women are in short supply within the pages of his book. (lost woman tracks?) They made their own entertainment, their own religion. He gives us a glimpse into almost everything real of the life of the buckaroo. One of the passages best remembered was toward the end of this remarkable story that you didn't want to end: "Why is it", he wrote, "when an old cowboy gets ready to take that long, one-way ride, he always starts talking about some old pet horse that's been dead for forty years?" The way of life as they knew it is dead too; and while it stubbornly exists in some places still, it is in a form that would be unfamiliar to the one Santee saw and lived with on his journeys into the old West. I highly recommend this book if you can obtain a copy. It's authentic Western Americana, written in a style you won't forget.

Realistic and heart-felt portrayal of cowboy life . . .

First published in 1953, this book is currently out of print, and it shouldn't be. It's a fine, wonderfully written, sensitively drawn memoir of cowboying in Arizona in the years before and after WWI. Santee was 26 years old when he left his small-town Iowa roots and a struggling career as an artist in New York to spend some time with family in Arizona, where he took a job as a "lowly" horse wrangler for an outfit near Globe. Over the years, as a western writer, who illustrated his own books in his distinctive style (now much appreciated), he based his stories and novels on this experience of the everyday lives of men and their horses. Santee was a perceptive, thoughtful, and observant writer who captured in accounts of incidents and conversations a depth of social history that is hard to find in other books of its kind. It's also rare to find a portrayal of cowboy life so heart-felt. While he had his complaints about men whose faults and deficiencies made them ill-suited to being cowboys, he is chiefly interested in the many men he regarded as admirable for their one-of-a-kind personalities and their strength of character. Among them is the foreman, Shorty Caraway, whose early years on the range are recounted in Santee's "Cowboy," and there are many others, each captured with a precise and loving eye for detail. There is a generous spirit and a gentle humor throughout this book that is sometimes sentimental without ever being corny. In his depiction of daily life in an all-male work environment, Santee gets it just right. His books belong on any shelf of western literature.