The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 49, July 1945 - April, 1946 Page: 673

Book Reviews

tragic history at that. It remained for Winifred Kupper to
pioneer the field.
The Golden Hoof is the story of sheep in West Texas and
New Mexico. It is a slender book. And one could wish that the
author had taken sufficient time for the research and had told
the entire story of sheep as charmingly as she has that part
in her brief two hundred pages. Hers is a good beginning and
the volume will find a ready welcome from historians interested
in frontier history. The general reader will relish The Golden
Hoof as something new and refreshing in American literature,
and that peculiar and unpredictable tribe of Texans-the col-
lectors of Texana-will, upon reading it, discover another link
in the chain that binds them to their treasures.
Like a good historian the author begins at the beginning. Her
chronicle starts with the first herds brought over by the Span-
iards. This chronicle she continues into New Mexico with the
conquistadores. The Mexican pastores become idyllic under the
author's skillful pen. The long drives, the range war, predators,
blizzards, drouths, and grass fires all come in for brief but lucid
treatment. But why go on? The best insight into the book will
be had in reading it.
A half-dozen typographical errors occur that could have been
avoided with a little closer reading of the proof.
T. R. HAVINS
Howard Payne College
Prairie City: The Story of an American Community. By Angie
Debo. New York (Alfred A. Knopf), 1944. Pp. ix+245.
$3.50.
Angie Debo, with the aid of a Knopf fellowship in history,
has produced in Prairie City a vividly detailed account of a
typical Oklahoma town in the north-central wheat-growing sec-
tion. Out of the recollections of old-timers and her own obser-
vations in Marshall, she has made an accurate composite pic-
ture of the development of most towns in the Prairie West. Be-
ginning with the staking of the first claim in the blue-stem
grass in 1889, her narrative traces the rise and decline of civic
and social institutions in this community through good years
and bad to the present time.
The first settlers, instead of feeling they were receiving a
bounty, considered they were conferring a benefit upon their
country by settling the frontier. For the "sooners" the honest

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