Review of PuUing Leather: Being the Early Recollections of a Cowboy on the Wyoming Range, 1884-1889

Authors

Lynn M. Cawthra, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Date of this Version

1989

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly SUMMER 1989 .Copyright 1989 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska—Lincoln.

Abstract

In the early 1930s, dentist-physician Reuben Mullins decided to chronicle his youthful experiences as a cowpuncher on the Wyoming range. He was unable to secure a publisher for this work, however, and after his death in 1935, the manuscript was filed away for more than fifty years. Scholars Jan Roush and Lawrence Clayton discovered Mullins's narrative in 1986 and recognized its importance as a historical document. Their editorial support and Mullins's own articulate and entertaining style have assured Pulling Leather a place alongside such standard accounts of cowboy life as Adams's Log of a Cowboy and Siringo's A Texas Cowboy.