A Cowboy Writer in New Mexico: The Memoirs of John L. Sinclair

Brought up in England and Scotland as a reluctant aristocrat, John L. Sinclair (1902-1993) spent sixty years in New Mexico as a cowboy, museum curator, and writer. Sinclair got off a train in Clovis in 1923, saw saddle ponies and cowboys at the station, and knew that New Mexico was the place for him. He spent the rest of the 1920s cowboying around Roswell and in the Capitan Mountains, moving to Santa Fe in the 1930s after he sold his first article to New Mexico Magazine. For ten dollars a month he rented a house on Canyon Road, where he hobnobbed with artists and writers. After a stint as superintendent of the Coronado State Monument near Albuquerque, he and his wife spent the rest of their days nearby in a stone cabin with a view of the mountains.

This memoir, written when the author was ninety, captures his lonely childhood and his delight in the open spaces and society of New Mexico with dazzling clarity. Although Sinclair enjoyed living like a hermit, he was a sociable person who loved to tell tales. His story is a great literary legacy. Anyone with a yen for the West in the good old days will relish it.