Ross Santee, An Appreciation

“A corral may be deserted but one is never empty to a man who has ridden the range. Men and horses come alive again and move before his eyes,” Arizona author-illustrator Ross Santee wrote in Lost Pony Tracks, one of 12 books which he larded with first-hand experiences in the Old West.

For millions of readers, both then and now, the 6-foot-3-inch cowboy filled the corrals, peopled the main streets of turn-of-the-century towns, and circled the campfires with cowboys in leather chaps, chewing tobacco and telling stories of the West, the way it really was in the early days.

But his writing isn't all that has survived. Santee was also an illustrator, creating drawings which told stories as eloquently as his written word. And it was with his pictures that his life-long career as a chronicler of the Real West began.

Born in 1888 in Thornburg, Iowa, Santee experienced the urge to draw early in life. “. . . as a kid,” he wrote in June of 1928, “I drew pictures of the things that interested me anything that struck my fancy. They were no better nor no worse than those the average kid makes; but I drew the things I wanted to, and I drew them my own way.” After graduation from high school, Santee went to Chicago in response to his creative urgings and enrolled in the prestigious Art Institute. Four years later, he tried his luck as a cartoonist in New York, pursuing every fashion of the time . . . and subsequently accumulating enough rejection slips in 12 months to paper the walls of his room.

Thomas Hart Benton, a good friend of Santee's (later a well-known regionalist painter) saw some of his sketches “I'd really made for fun without any attempt at using the bag of tricks I'd learned from someone else” admired them, and suggested a perusal of the drawings of Daumier. “It was that book of Daumier's draw-ings that made up my mind for me,” Santee wrote, “for he put things down just like he saw or felt the thing, with-out the sign of a trick. So simple an' honest they were, to my mind his draw-ings have never been equaled. An' something rolled off my back that night as I walked home that had bothered me for years.

"I didn't intend to copy Daumier or imitate his style, but I made up my mind I'd try an' do things my own way, and put things down the way I saw an' felt the thing, no matter what else came."

Then Ross Santee headed for Ari-zona "to wrangle horses for a cow outfit for $50 a month. I wanted to get as far away from pictures and people who drew them as I could. So I took the first train west."

In 1915, still in his mid-20s, Santee arrived in Globe, Arizona, where he went to work for the Bar F Bar Ranch. In two years he earned his spurs as a full-fledged horse wrangler. "It was kind of a lonesome job. But I can think of lot worse company than a bunch of saddle horses," he wrote in a later sketch for American Magazine.

It was almost a year before Santee started drawing again. "At times I'd itch to get ahold of a pen, and then I'd think of New York, and tell myself I was through."

But he wasn't. The day came when he found himself sitting cross-legged on his horse, sketching with the burnt end of a match. Eventually, he was making as many as 100 drawings a day the hills, the horses, the punchers anything that struck his eye. And each night he would build a fire and burn all he had made.

But change was in the wind. In 1918, after seeing service in World War I, Santee responded to a letter from an old school friend by the name of Fitzpatrick, who had managed to locate him in Globe. In his letter heincluded a sketch of a cowpuncher. Captivated, Fitzpatrick showed it to an editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Shortly afterward, "Eight Cowboy Sketches by a Cowboy," appeared as a double-page spread in the St. Louis newspaper. And Santee was on his way back to being an artist. Soon after, he was being published regularly, captur-ing the character of the West in such popular magazines of the time as Col-lier's, Life, and Century. In 1922, his first etchings were exhibited in New York.

Another major change in Santee's career came in the early 1920s. After relating an incident at the ranch to one of the editors at Boy's Life, the editor suggested he write about it and include several sketches. Ross was skeptical. He'd never written professionally. "Pictures caused me grief enough without taking on more misery," he said. But he wrote the piece anyway and received a check for $25 and a request for more of the same.

It wasn't long before his illustrated articles were earning him as much as $200 apiece, better than four months wages as a cowboy. But Santee was not yet ready to give up the cowboy life. During most of the 1920s he continued wrangling horses in Arizona. He was still having a love affair with the Ari-zona range country, and " the very thought of returning to New York sent a chill through me." So he began rou-tinely wrangling through the spring and fall roundups in the Burro Mountains, one of his favorite places near Globe. And when cattle were shipped to market, Santee would buy a pair of "flat-heeled" shoes to head east with the animals.

Santee's first book, Men and Horses, published by the Century Company in 1926, was about his cowpunching friend Shorty Caraway. Later, for Hastings House and other publishers, he wrote Pooch, the Story of a Cow-puncher's Dog; Sleepy Black, the Story of a Cowhorse; Bar X Golf Course, and others, all of which were well received, creating a pantheon of heroes a bit more real than the B-movie types then coming out of Hollywood.

"If you want to read stories of the Westsimple, beautiful stories of men and horses of the western range, we refer you to the books of Ross Santee," wrote Raymond Carlson, a close friend and at the time editor of Arizona Highways. His January, 1939, sketch of the author-illustrator, concluded: "Ross Santee writes straight, draws straight, talks straight, and therein lies his charm."

With spirited vividness and a touch of rough humor, he captured the character of the cowman, the Apache, and even the ranch woman, bringing the Old West not only to New York and Chicago in the early decades of this century but also preserving a taste of those times for modern readers.

Most of the material for his books was gathered from cowboy friends in Arizona, like Shorty Caraway. "Most cowpunchers," he admitted in Tales the Cowpunchers Tell, "are good storytell-ers. I have never known a puncher who did not have a sense of humor and a point of view that was decidedly his own. Santee captured it all, including the cowman's rich earthy dialogue, as in this scene in Lost Pony Tracks.

When I hit town I've got a $40 thirst an' finally I wind up drunker'n $700. Even to this day that trip is hazy to me. But one mornin' I wake up miles from anywhere. I've got a taste in my mouth as I've jes et breakfast with a coyote. There's several ponies grazin' near, all saddled an' bridled.

They all look familiar, too, an' it was some little time before I get it through my haid that there's only one pony in the bunch an' he belongs to me.

Another area in which Santee's mastery of dialogue and description blossomed was rodeo. His yarn about one in Globe is a classic.

Looking over the bucking bulls at one affair Frank Saunders who was just a boy, pointed to a bull and laughed, "Watch this one when he comes out of the chute. I broke him to ride when he was only a milk-pen calf, an' he's gentle as a dog I only put him in for a joke." Not only Frank but the crowd enjoyed it, too. When the chute gate opened Frank's bull walked sedately out. The rider finally spurred him into a jolting trot, that was all - the pet bull seemed bored with the whole affair. But for humorous writing - some say his best Santee's Bar X Golf Course, published by Northland Press in 1960, is in a class by itself. Peopled with Santee's typical cowboy types, the book purports to be a tale about the creation of the "Biggest and sportiest golf courst (sic) in the world."

At the Bax X Golf Courst, a dude plays one hole a day. It takes nine days to go out and nine more to get back to the ranch . . . no matter how fond a dude is of the game by the time he has played the eighteen holes he will have a belly full. No. 2, the shortest hole . . . is not quite fifteen miles. We know this hole is short but Dad figgers the lack of distance is more than offset by the fact that No. 2 is up hill all of the way And a dude must pack his own water. But No. 2 is the only hole on the courst where the dudes must make a dry camp. Each dude is mounted, of course . . . and has a puncher to ride herd on him to see that he don't get lost.

And some of Santee's stories are more legend than humor, like the tale of Breezy Cox, which appeared in Arizona Highways. To Santee, Cox was the tops in bronc riding, roping, and dogging.

They were having a jackpot roping below the San Carlos Agency years ago when Breezy came by in a car. They thought Breezy was out of his head when he paid his entrance fee, for the cowboy wore crutches, one leg in a plaster cast. Knowing Breezy, they got cagey when he produced a roll that would choke a cow and offered to bet the bank roll that he would take down the money. And Breezy did just that. He borrowed a rope horse and caught his calf first loop; hobbling on one leg he threw and tied his calf with seconds to spare ahead of the nearest contestant. Nor were the others Johnnycome-latelys they were top hands from the range. One of the boys brought him his crutches. After picking up the take he hobbled to his car and with a wave of his arm, a gesture not unlike a king dismissing his vassals, Breezy headed his car towards Globe.

But it was Santee's scene-setting drawings which provided the springboard to the reader's imagination. "As far as the stories go," Santee once said, "I know nothing of so-called writing. I simply try to tell them my own way." And his way worked very well.

Considerable success was his eventually, but it had little effect on him. He could still be seen in his old broadbrimmed Stetson and worn boots. His long face and old Levi's blended in well with any group of weary cowboys he might meet. But while his wardrobe didn't change, his whiskey did. He went from Old Crow to Chivas Regal, but always with water because, he said, you could drink more that way. He'd sit around with his friends and drink and reminisce and later turn it into a book . . . so he could buy more drinks for his cowboys friends and do more research.There were other claims to fame. A New York magazine singled him out as "the typical American cowboy," and even Hollywood beckoned once, but he turned them down. In 1935, he won the O. Henry award for a shortshort story titled "Water," a tale about drought on a ranch, which appeared in Collier's Magazine. Then, in 1936, he became the State Director of the Federal Writers Project.

Late in life Santee married, moved to Delaware and for a time gave up his writing-illustrating career. But after his wife Eve's death, he came back once more to Arizona, renewed acquaintances with such old friends as artist Ted De Grazia and editor Raymond Carl-son, and began working again.

When Santee retired, it was to his old Globe stomping grounds, where he took up golf with his friend Danco Gurovich, owner of the town's Copper Hills Hotel. It was Gurovich who was