Warpath and Cattle Trail

Warpath and Cattle Trail is a middle-aged man's recollection of a year spent with his older brother at Red Fork Ranch, between the Reno and Chisholm trails in Indian Territory. Hubert E. Collins was eleven at the time, and the experience impressed him mightily. Indeed, he never forgot those wild days; and later, as a New Yorker, when he began his memoir, he contacted survivors as well as independent scholars to confirm the accuracy of his recollections.

Collins counted among his friends the Cheyenne chief Little Robe. He spent considerable time with the Cheyennes, in their lodges and as witness to their ceremonies, including the Sun Dance. In 1928, Collins made a case for Indians as human beings that wouldn't occur in popular culture for another two decades -- in fact, Collins took Hollywood to task more than once in this memoir, not only with regard to its treatment of Indians bur also in the matter of its portrayal of cowboys and other "frontier" types.

Warpath and Cattle Trail provides a superb social history of the heyday of the nineteenth century frontier, replete with cattle drives, dog feasts, fiddle-playing gunmen, discussions of burial practices in coyote country, and stories of men who were shot between the eyes and arose and walked -- well, stumbled -- away. Sure to entertain those with interest in the frontier west.