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Show O'Malley's work, which was submitted to and published by the Miles City Stock Growers' Journal beginning in 1889, suggests that at least some cowboy poetry was originally intended for musical performance, rather than as verse to be read or recited. At any rate, the second generation of American cowboys became familiar with rhymed verse that used the cowboy lifestyle as subject matter, whether they read it in western publications or heard variations of it as song or verse in an occupational context. In 1889, one of those cowboys, N. Howard "Jack" Thorp, became interested enough in the songs and poetry he was hearing around the campfire that he set out on a 1500 mile journey to collect and record them from his co-workers. Traveling on horseback, mostly through Texas and New Mexico, he wrote down the text to a number of songs before taking a job and returning to life in the cow camps. In 1898, while working in the mountains of New Mexico, he composed "Little Joe, the Wrangler" which was destined to become one of the all-time favorite cowboy songs, and in 1908, in Estancia, New Mexico, published 2,000 copies of a thin, red, pocket-sized book entitled Songs of the Cowboys. According to White, Thorp's book, the first known published collection of cowboy music, included the text, i.e. the words only, for twenty-three songs, including his own "Little Joe, the Wrangler," with authorship indicated for only one of the other twenty-two songs, (p. 196) The importance of the words, not the music, as well as the anonymity in these second-generation texts, suggests a couple of things. First, as Logsdon points out, "It can be assumed that his life 10 Cowboy Poetry From Utah |