"The Cattlemen," by Mari Sandoz, is another essay, following Paul Wellman's "The Trampling Herd," at summing up the whole drama of cows and cow people—women excluded—on the ranges of western America. It begins with a good deal of fancifulness over the first Spanish cattle and ends with the contemporary "ritual" of rodeo riding and roping. The best part of the book is laid in the part of the country with which, despite dutiful reading, Mari Sandoz is most familiar—Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana—the setting for the stronger parts of her books on Crazy Horse, the buffalo hunters, the Cheyennes, and Old Jules, her masterpiece.

Miss Sandoz uses the word dedicated over and over in subtitles and as a kind of Homeric epithet for certain cowmen. In her sense, Silas Marner could be called a "dedicated" man. She herself seems particularly dedicated to killings in...