SOURCE: "A Critical Look at a Classic Western Novel," in The Roundup, Vol. XII, No. 6, June, 1964, pp. 2, 4.

[Capps is an American novelist whose works are often set in New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. In the following explication of Log of a Cowboy, he affirms the book's primary value as a work of social history.]

In his history The Great Plains, published in 1936, Walter Prescott Webb makes a definite and all-inclusive statement about cowboy novels published before that time: "Hitherto there has been written but one novel of the cattle country that is destined to become a classic—The Log of a Cowboy, by Andy Adams." Many critics might quarrel with the narrow limits of Webb's definition of a classic. Another statement might be more acceptable, but it is still a strong statement and it is true in 1964: any list of classic western novels, no matter how long...