The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 67, July 1963 - April, 1964 Page: 153
672 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Book Reviews
page 376 of The Handbook of Texas.) Leaving his native England
at the age of sixteen, he went to Texas and shortly began working
on Judge George H. Noonan's horse ranch in Medina County.
Thereafter his life was crowded with adventure and excitement.
Collinson was admirably fitted for his future. Equipped with
a useful basic education, he had a robust and iron-clad consti-
tution. He was shrewd, observant, tireless, and without fear,
though not without caution. He was the fortunate possessor of a
photographic memory. His phenomenal memory coupled with
his innate skill as a story teller must have accounted largely for
his success as a writer from 1934 until some years later when
failing health ended this phase of his career. His first story, the
beginning of a series, was published in the magazine Ranch Ro-
mances in 1934. He died in 1943. Of him J. Frank Dobie has
written:
Frank Collinson, one of the most powerful men I have ever met,
came in young vigor to Texas soon after the close of the Civil War
and ranged as far west as grass grew. In the realm of frontier chron-
icles, the writing of educated Englishmen like George Ruxton, R. B.
Townshend, men with the perspective of civilization, with imagina-
tion, and with a lust for primitive nature, stand out. To this class
of men belongs Frank Collinson.
This reviewer has read many descriptions of Billy the Kid, but
none as starkly realistic as Collinson's.
Everything he had on would not have sold for five dollars-an old
black slouch hat; worn-out pants and boots, spurs, shirt and vest; a
black cotton handkerchief tied loosly around his neck. The ever-
ready Colt, double-action .41 pistol around him and in easy reach;
an old style .44 rim-fire, brass-jawed Winchester. I should say he was
about 5 feet, 7 inches tall and weighed perhaps 135 pounds. He had
no chin, no shoulders, and his hands and feet were small. He needed
a haircut. He had a pair of grey-blue eyes that never stopped looking
around.
After two years on the cattle trails, Collinson rode to Fort
Griffin to take up buffalo hunting. There he teamed up with
John White (a "tough hombre," whose real name was Wilson)
and the two, with a sizable outfit of twenty-five yoke of oxen, six
mules, and both heavy and light wagons, hunted together until
the spring of 1878, "when the buffalo were gone." The wanton153
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 67, July 1963 - April, 1964, periodical, 1964; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101197/m1/175/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.