Four Aces and a Queen

Book excerpt: AUTHORS: Dennis Russell, Terry Nash, Valerie Beard, Floyd Beard, Dale Page What's Cowboy Poetry? The American cowboy sprang up from rag-tag brood of Civil War survivors and the orphans of those who never came home. In that short time from 1865 until 1890, those boys grew to men atop a horse while they pushed wild cattle to the railroads in Kansas. A mixed bunch of black, white, and brown Texans passed on their experiences, stories, and half-truths in rhyme and meter. Rhymes can make the words easier to remember and meter can fit the words of the poem into music. Thousands of those poems survive to this day. They serve as the standard for today's cowboy poetry in passing on the morals, hardships, joys and heartaches during of the unparalleled three decades after the Civil War. Those verses were passed from one outfit to another up and down the Goodnight-Loving, Great Northern, and Chisholm Trails. They're about men who rode rank horses to drive wild cattle to places they'd never been. The poems speak of integrity, fair play, hard work and what it means to be a friend or neighbor. The award-winning authors have corralled their verses here in the hope that the tales will give you a look into the lives and minds of the American cowboy. They've been gathered here to take you back to times when life was simpler. In some ways, they'll tell you, it was better.