The fact that the hired man on horseback has been as good a man as the owner and, on the average, has been a more spirited and eager man than the hand on foot may afford some explanation of the validity and vitality of his chroniclings, no matter how crude they be. On the other hand, the fact that the rich owner and the college-educated aspirant to be a cowboy soon learned, if they stayed on the range, that _a man's a man for a' that_ may to some extent account for a certain generous amplitude of character inherent in their most representative reminiscences. Sympathy for the life biases my judgment; that judgment, nevertheless, is that some of the strongest and raciest autobiographic writing produced by America has been by range men. {illust. caption = Tom Lea, in _The Longhorns_ by J. Frank Dobie (1941)} This is not to say that these chronicles are of a high literary order. Their writers have generally lacked the maturity of mind, the reflective wisdom, and the power of observation found in personal narratives of the highest order. No man who camped with a chuck wagon has written anything remotely comparable to Charles M. Doughty's _Arabia Deserta_, a chronicle at once personal and impersonal, restrainedly subjective and widely objective, of his life with nomadic Bedouins. Perspective is a concomitant of civilization. The chronicles of the range that show perspective have come mostly from educated New Englanders, Englishmen, and Scots. The great majority of the chronicles are limited in subject matter to physical activities. They make few concessions to "the desire of the moth for the star"; they hardly enter the complexities of life, including those of sex. In one section of the West at one time the outstanding differences among range men were between owners of sheep and owners of cattle, the ambition of both being to hog the whole country. On another area of the range at another time, the outstanding difference was between little ranchers, many of whom were stealing, and big ranchers, plenty of whom had stolen. Such differences are not exponents of the kind of individualism that burns itself into great human documents.