Unbridled Cowboy

Winner of the 2009 Will Rogers Medallion Award: “Gripping—I couldn't put it down.... A remarkably complete story about growing up in Texas.”

This book has charm and vitality due to the integrity and honesty of the voice. Future generations of readers will greatly benefit.

I have been regularly reviewing Texas and Southwestern nonfiction for some 25 years and even longer on an occasional basis. This is one of the most compelling memoirs I have ever read. For a self-educated man, Fussell was a heck of a writer-storyteller. Portions of the book, particularly his sanguinary trip to Old Mexico, read like something from a Larry McMurtry novel. Unbridled Cowboy definitely constitutes a significant contribution to Texas letters. I particularly learned a lot about railroading, and in a broader sense, something of the mindset of a rural Texas kid in the late nineteenth century. His insight into turn-of-the-century cattle ranching and rustling also was incisive. Frankly, I had come to like the old rascal by the end of the book. A novel couldn’t have had a much more powerful ending.

Arguably, this is one of the finest personal reminiscences of life in the American West. Few memoirs exhibit such breadth—legitimate breadth, that is to say. The writer was a ranch hand, a railroader, a Texas Ranger, an adventurer, and a hobo. He lived through one of the most fascinating periods of American history, including the close of the frontier, the rise of the labor movement, the development of America’s transcontinental railroads, and the depths of the Great Depression. He saw the Mexican Revolution from within. The credibility of his observations lie in the wealth of details he provides. His observations on Mexican “exchange rates” during the Revolution are priceless. The point is that these memoirs read with conviction; the writer does not apologize for the truth. He apologizes for some of his actions, and regrets many of them, especially his vendetta against the Mexican cowboys. Simply, the primary contribution of this manuscript is to remind us of the Real West—of human nature in a raw and often dangerous land.