Tales of Lost Treasure

Cattle Drive Follow a cowboy's hard days and jittery nights moving beef over unwatered terrain during the Roaring '20s

James Frank Dobie (1888-1964), a lifelong collector of traditional tales and folklore of the borderlands, authored 17 books, some 500 magazine articles, and more than 1,200 newspaper articles.

Commenting on his work, Dobie once said, "I've been called a folklorist; I'm not one in a scientific way, but I've put hundreds of tales into books, writing them in my own style."

His first article for Arizona Highways appeared in November, 1941, under the title "Mesquite"; more were to follow.

The article that appears under his byline this month was written in 1927 and was sold to Editor Raymond Carlson sometime in the 1950s, but for some reason it was never published in Arizona Highways or, as far as we can tell, anywhere else. Then it disappeared to turn up about 10 years ago in a file case of yellowed Highways manuscripts, which were about to be sent to the trash bin. By a stroke of luck, Managing Editor Richard Stahl was asked to review the material first. Among a number of old manuscripts he retrieved was this Dobie story, which preserves for all time what life on the range was really like in the Old Southwest.

The accompanying photographs, taken over a period of two decades, represent the kind of cattle drive Dobie wrote about.