Ten Thousand Cattle: A Song History
Owen Wister, whose 1902 novel The Virginian helped create a large readership for Western fiction, is credited with this lament of a ruined cattleman.[1][2] Its singer has lost his herd and his money, and his sweetheart has gone off with another man.[2] The Traditional Ballad Index reports, with a question mark over the date, that it was written in 1888 and drew on the harsh Wyoming winter of 1886–87.[2] In a letter reproduced by John I. White in Git Along, Little Dogies, Wister recalled making it up in a Wyoming camp in the summer of 1888, said he knew of no similar song then, and said he first sang it to a melody from an old French opera.[1] Sixteen years on he wrote a new tune for the first stage production of The Virginian and taught it to the actor Frank Campeau, and the song was issued in 1904 as "Ten Thousand Cattle Straying."[1] The Cowboy Songs and Range Ballads Archives at the McCracken Research Library keep a copy of that voice-and-piano edition, catalogued as incidental music for the play.[3]
Ridgway Glover, Fort Laramie, Wyoming, albumen silver print from glass negative, about 1866. Fort Laramie in Wyoming around 1866, two decades before the harsh Wyoming winter the song is said to draw on; the photograph has no connection to the song.
Roughly a quarter-century after the play, the song was being passed along by ear under its shorter title, and Margaret Larkin printed it in Singing Cowboy (1931) from Emile Mardfin, who had it from a friend in Colorado.[1] Wister himself treated Larkin's altered text as a lesson in how popular ballads change as they travel.[1] Alan Lomax said he picked up a version in 1932 from Daca, who ran a bookshop on Washington Square in New York; he sang it for the Library of Congress archive in June 1937 and placed it in the 1938 edition of his father John A. Lomax's Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads.[1] Stephen Winick of the Library's American Folklife Center identifies Daca as Harry Payne Reeves, who admitted improvising his own words and tune when he could not remember the original, and suggests that the saltier wording heard in many later versions, including the one that gave Katie Lee the title of her history of cowboy song, descends from Lomax's rendering.[1] The Ballad Index files the song as Roud 5763 and lists later printings, among them a 1990 appearance in Sing Out!.[2]
On the dulcimer, it turns up in Cowboy Songs, Stephen Seifert's own publication of 37 western songs in DAD tuning, pitched as campfire music and sold as a 78-page download that includes a recording of every song.[4]
Sources
- Library of Congress, Folklife Today: "Ten Thousand Cattle for Our One Thousandth Post".
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Ten Thousand Cattle".
- McCracken Research Library, Buffalo Bill Center of the West: "Ten Thousand Cattle Straying: Dead Broke".
- Stephen Seifert: "Cowboy Songs".
- Image: Ridgway Glover, Fort Laramie, Wyoming, albumen silver print from glass negative, about 1866. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.