"The Cowboy's Lament" reexamines a folk icon of the American West

Cowboy’s Lament: A Life on the Open Range
by Frank Maynard; edited by Jim Hoy, with foreword by David Stanley

Hardcover, $29.95, 248 pgs., 12 b/w photos; 2 maps  |  978-0-89672-705-2 

CONTACT:  Barbara Brannon, Texas Tech University Press, 806.742.2982

"The Cowboy's Lament" reexamines a folk icon of the American West

In Dodge City in 1876, a 22-year-old cowpuncher picks up an old Irish ballad of a young man’s woes and refashions it as “The Cowboy’s Lament,” the song widely recognized today as “The Streets of Laredo.”

Music historians have long credited that Iowa native and Kansas cowboy, Frank Maynard, with its creation—but the serendipitous discovery of an unpublished memoir gave Western scholar Jim Hoy the compelling evidence.

Not only was Maynard the creator of the best-known cowboy song of all time, he lived a fascinating life during the heyday of the great cattle drives. Among the highlights of Maynard’s colorful experiences were brushes with outlaws and encounters with famous lawmen, such as Bill Tilghman and Bat and Ed Masterson (he was in Dodge City when Ed was shot). On one drive Maynard was set upon and chased by irate German homesteaders; on another he narrowly escaped being killed by a man known as Slusher while driving horses from Kansas to Texas.

Now, alongside the frontier recollections of Charlie Siringo and Charles Colchord, Maynard’s personal account offers a rare and revealing glimpse of the true Old West.

“[Jim Hoy] packs the house and gets great applause for his wonderful presentations on cowboys and cowboy music. His books are lively and compelling—well researched but never boring history lessons.” —Michael Martin Murphey

"Nobody knows cowboys past or present better than Jim Hoy. In this volume he wrangles the memoir of Frank Maynard, a Kansas cowpuncher whose recollections of the range and trail during the heyday of the western cattle trade are as fresh and crisp as new saddle leather."
—B. Byron Price, director, Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West

Following his early experiences on the range, Frank Maynard (1854–1926) married in 1881 and moved to Colorado to settle down as a carpenter. Achieving some renown as a cowboy poet, he published a small book of verse in 1911.

Jim Hoy, director of the Center for Great Plains Studies at Emporia State University, was reared on a Flint Hills ranch near Cassoday, Kansas. He is the author of Flint Hills Cowboys: Tales of the Tallgrass Prairie and has lectured on the American cowboy in Germany, England, New Zealand, and Australia. A past president of the Kansas State Historical Society and past chair of the board of trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Hoy was inducted into the Kansas Cowboy Hall of Fame in 2004.

David Stanley is professor emeritus of English, Westminster College, Salt Lake City. He is the co-editor of Cowboy Poets & Cowboy Poetry and the producer of the Smithsonian Folkways recording Cowboy Poetry Classics.