Andy Adams

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Andy Adams around 1910

Andy Adams (born May 3, 1859 in Thorncreek Township in Indiana , † September 26, 1935 in Colorado Springs , Colorado ) was an American writer who has presented the life of cowboys in their everyday lives very realistically in a series of books . Having been a cowboy himself for about fifteen years during the big cattle business in Texas , he knew what he was writing about. The Log of a Cowboy: A Narrative of the Old Trail Days , which tells the story of a cattle wreck from Texas to Montana in 1882 , is considered his best work, also rated by him . The book falls far beyond the scope of the conventional Wild West novel and is to be regarded as an essential work of American literature itself.

Life

“Our welfare was nothing; Men were cheap, but cattle cost money. "

- Andy Adams : In: A cowboy tells

Andy Adams was of Irish Scottish descent. He was born on the farm of his parents (Andrew and Elizabeth Adams) in Thorncreek Township, a parish in Whitley County , Indiana. He grew up here with two brothers. After attending rural elementary school, he left home and worked for a time in a sawmill in Arkansas .

He went to Texas around 1876 and became a cowboy there. It was the time of the great cattle treks north from Texas on the trails, so there was a lot of work there that must have attracted him, like so many others. He shouldn't have come much later, however, because the "Texas drive" was slowly coming to an end, and this was largely due to the ongoing expansion of the railroad network, which made it easier and cheaper to transport cattle, and the increasingly dwindling open space Pasture land, which forced more and more detours. - Andy Adams went on his first trail in 1882 and did so a few more times over the next eight years.

In 1890 he gave up being a cowboy. But he stayed in Texas and ran some business in Rockport together with a partner, which was not very successful and had to be given up after two years. He then worked in gold mines in Nevada and Colorado and moved to Colorado Springs around 1894, where he probably started writing seriously at some point.

In 1903 his first book, The Log of a Cowboy , was published, which he thought he wrote from "the hurricane deck of a Texas horse." In Germany it was published as early as 1907 under the title The Trail in the Wild West . Although it is a narrative, fiction , it describes the events during a cattle drive and the world of the cowboy so authentically that it is a unique source for historians in this field. The Log of a Cowboy does not correspond to the clichéd cowboy image as it was drawn by Owen Wister , a co-founder of the Wild West novel, and in whose book The Virginian, for example, as Andy Adams once critically remarked, cows are hardly mentioned. - In addition to his cowboy stories, Andy Adams has also written two books for young people ( Well Brothers and The Ranch on the Beaver ). Some other narratives and also dramatic attempts have remained unpublished.

With two interruptions (in Nevada 1908–1909 and in Kentucky 1920–1922), Andy Adams always lived in Colorado Springs from 1894 until the end of his life in 1935. He was in Texas for the last time in 1918 , where he traveled from time to time to research his stories and refresh his memories. However, so much had changed in the country by then that, in his own words, he felt like Rip van Winkle there . And so Andy Adams was well aware that he had previously experienced a very interesting part of the history of his country and described it in his books.

bibliography

  • Andy Adams: The Log of a Cowboy. A Narrative of the Old Trail Days . Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1903; Text archive - Internet Archive
  • Andy Adams: A Texas Matchmaker . Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1904
  • Andy Adams: The Outlet . Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1905
  • Andy Adams: Reed Anthony, Cowmen . Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1907
  • Andy Adams: Cattle Brands . Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1906
  • Andy Adams: A cowboy tells. From the time of the great cattle trucks , with an afterword by Max Mittler . Manesse Verlag, Zurich 1981, ISBN 3-7175-1604-3
  • Andy Adams: The trail in the wild west. From a cowboy's diary . Reprint of the original edition from 1907. Verlag für Amerikaistik, Wyk auf Föhr 2001

literature

  • J. Frank Dobie: Andy Adams, cowboy chronicler . Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas 1926
  • Wilson Mathis Hudson: Andy Adams, his life and writings . Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas 1964
  • HJ Stammel : They were still men. The cowboys and their world . Econ Verlag, Düsseldorf and Vienna 1970, ISBN 3-430-18708-7

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Andy Adams: A cowboy tells: From the time of the great cattle wrecks (1981), page 401 (afterword by Max Mittler)
personal data
SURNAME Adams, Andy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Texas Andy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 3, 1859
PLACE OF BIRTH Thorncreek Township , Indiana
DATE OF DEATH September 26, 1935
Place of death Colorado Springs , Colorado