HOLIDAY GIFT BOOKS : Cowboys and Cowgirls

This holiday season brings a whole remuda of cowboy books to the coffee table. Some of them are the kind of duded up, decked out projects only a city slicker could love. Others are the real animal, ornery and lean as a grullo mustang.

It occurs to me I should qualify for reviewing these books: I drive a ’65 Chevy truck, Louise, and herded cattle on my grandfather’s ranch for my summer job.

What I remember of those summers--other than the taste of dust and fresh tomato sandwiches--is precision. You slid loose the top loop of a stretched tight cattle gate just so , shoulder humping the pole in place so you wouldn’t tear up your fingers. You rode into a wash at a certain angle, working mavericks back toward the herd without sending them skittering down the shale to break a leg. Cowboying was careful work. I mention this because that was the standard by which I judged these books. Some have the low-key perfectionism of the cowboy’s craft; others, gaudy as rhinestone cowboys, were gimpy as a tenderfoot after a day’s read.

THE COWGIRL COMPANION by Gail Gilchrist, introduction by Dale Evans (Hyperion: $10.95, 178 pp.), promises “Big Skies, Buckaroos, Honky Tonks, Lonesome Blues and other Glories of the True West.” Just like that Cosmo Girl, it delivers . . . in broad terms.

In her introduction, Evans tells us, “Cowgirl is an attitude, really. A pioneer spirit, special American brand of courage. The cowgirl faces life head on, lives by her own lights and makes no excuses. . . .” (This cowgirl sounds suspiciously like Joan Didion in her famous essay on self respect.) Evans continues, “Cowgirls take stands. They speak up. They defend the things they hold dear.”

If Evans’ cowgirl sounds a little generic, she is.

“A cowgirl might be a rancher or a barrel racer, or a bullrider, or an actress. But she’ll just as likely be a checker at the local Dixie, a full-time mother, a banker, an attorney, an astronaut. . . .” That must have been some buck, I couldn’t help thinking.

In other words, according to Evans and Gilchrist, if you want to consider yourself a cowgirl, count you in. This open-gate policy might surprise Charmayne James Rodman, the barrel racer who is dubbed the first “million dollar cowgirl.” (She and her horse Scamper have been racking up wins for eight years.) Such inclusiveness leads inevitably to a certain smarmy tone. As distinctions are lost, so is distinction.

No such problems plague COWBOY GEAR a handsome book by photographer and publisher David R. Stoecklein (Dober Hill Ltd.: $59.95; 228 pp.), himself a working rancher. He fearlessly declares in Chapter 1, Sentence 1: “A man is not a cowboy if he’s never pushed a cattle herd across a prairie. . . .”

This man does not mince words. Not for his, loose, one-size-fits-all writing. His is a prickly, particular prose. His photographer’s eye knows the value of a telling detail. Describing the completion of the first transcontinental railroad--an event roughly equivalent to Lindberg’s flight for cattlemen--he tells us, “Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific railroad, swung an unwieldy silver-headed sledge-hammer toward a shiny golden spike.”

Most writers would have left it there, but Stoecklein is a cowboy and cowboys are careful, and so he adds, “As Stanford’s shiny maul awkwardly clanged down (he missed on the first swing, hitting a steel rail instead) telegraphs simultaneously signaled ‘Done’ to both East and West.”

It is Stoecklein’s eye for precise detail that makes “Cowboy Gear” such an enjoyable book. His color photography, while frequently magnificent, is both subtle and naturally lit. As he explains, “Many books have been published about cowboy collectibles and the like, but to date nobody has shown the gear as it actually looked to the cowboys. . . . Like many of today’s cowboys, I was accustomed to seeing early gear in old, poorly reproduced black and white photographs. . . . I realized I had never seen color photographs of actual cowboys using authentic old gear.”

Actual cowboys . . . authentic old gear . . . sigh. I am not sure Stoecklein would be pleased to know that for those of us who find the Marlboro man a romantic icon, his book is a veritable cache of erotica, satisfying not only a lust for wide open spaces but also the men to go with them. To say this book is seductive is to put the case mildly. Whether your interest is “cowboy” or “gear,” this book is a bargain at $59.95.

Calling itself a “saddlebag guide for cowpunchers, dudes and tenderfeet everywhere,” Michele Morris’ THE COWBOY LIFE (Fireside/Simon & Schuster: $12; 256 pp.) suffers an occasional attack of the cutes but is actually grounded by her four generations of Montana blood. Raised on a working cattle ranch, Morris went East to work for magazines and came back West to write her book. Perhaps it’s inevitable that some of the “slicks” stuck with her. Hers is a breezy but fact-filled book. Even better, at least to my eye, it’s accurate. She makes careful, sometimes humorous, distinctions: “A wave is a common courtesy in the rural West. One digit--I have known you all my life. Two digit--I’ll pay my feed bill next week. Three digit--I know you’re not a local. Three missing digits--Hi, I’m a dally roper.”

If “The Cowboy Life” has the ring of authenticity, Jane and Michael Stern’s entrant WAY OUT WEST (Harper & Collins: $35; 400 pp.) hits a very different note: “As far as valuable life lessons go, the American cowboy probably knows more about making it in this world than all the self-help psychologists who have ever been seen on ‘Oprah.’ We therefore present our version of the Code of the West. We can’t promise you that adhering to the code will make you rich, thin, successful or even happy, but we can almost guarantee that you will never be shot dead for cattle rustling.”

Hah. Hah. Or, as the Sterns might write, “Hee haw.” Do I need to tell you the Sterns are East Coast New Yorker writers smitten with the Great Southwest? If Westerners by tradition and temperament are laconic, the Sterns specialize in that peculiarly Eastern school of enthusiasm that manages to be both effusive and condescending . . . “Cowboys” . . . aren’t they darling?”

Like the Ugly American habit of talking louder and slower as if foreigners exhibit lower IQ’s instead of a different language base, the Sterns’ habit of peppering their prose with “westernisms” is inherently patronizing. They write endlessly of “powerful hankerings,” “critters,” “tough hombres” and “buckaroos.” Still, they do write endlessly; at heart, “Way Out West” is a consumer’s guide for cowboy kitsch: everything from food to footwear, chuck full as an eight-day tour of Europe and All the Sights. Read this book and you can say you’ve been there, or at least heard of there: the best Tex-Mex chili joint, best barbecue, best custom boots outside of Texas. In short, the Best of the West as Trivial Pursuit. If you love that game, you will love this book and all these darling cowboys. . . .

If you prefer to meet a cowboy or two in their own words, you might prefer reading--and listening--to BUCKAROO, edited by Thomas West (Simon & Schuster: $45; 125 pp., plus a CD with running time of 59:35.). Like Stoecklein’s “Cowboy Gear,” “Buckaroo” is idiosyncratic and particular. The superb watercolors are by William Matthews. The photographs, culled from the work of Peter de Lory, Kurt Markus and others, is of a caliber bested only by Mitchell Canoff’s Western work. Eighteen writers and musicians contribute songs and text. The book reads like a storytellers’ convention. Of course, it is newfangled: “This is BoundSound. As an innovative new form of multimedia publishing, BoundSound, integrates text, image and music. . . .”

What the hell. More than one cowboy has a CD player in that pickup.