THE individual in chaps whom you see from your Union Pacific Observation car, sitting his horse beside a wire fence near a grazing heard, is not a cowboy. He is a more hired man. The cowboy of the glorious days rode from Texas to Alberia, from outfit to outfit, in the days when men, not fences guarded the herds of the Western ranges.

Patrick "Tommy" Tucker is one of the survivors of that golden age and he tells a few rambling recollections in this delightful little book. It has nothing in common with the trash of Hollywood "Westerns," except that old friend, the word "hoss." Tucker's active life-time spanned the roaring decades of the old West: his life was so packed with Indian fights, shootings and hangings of horse thieves that his simple, sober account of a few of them is absolutely convincing. Running through it is the evidence of a genuine love of nature that is the opposite of sentimental: the few blunt words dropped here and there to describe a purple butte or a lush valley are almost touching, naively juxtaposed as they are to accounts of gory Indian fights and saloon shootings.

The book was the fruit of a life-long friendship between the author and Charles M. Russell, the cowboy artist who died a few years ago. Russell encouraged Tucker to write his memoris and had planned to illustrate them, but his death prevented it. Tucker's manuscript was edited by Grace Stone Coates, who has done an excellent job of preserving the authentic tone of the old cowboy's own expression.

The book is heartily recommended to those who like the flavor of the old West, but are fed up with fake thrillers. It is a document in the history of that genuine Western culture, primitive as it was, which the expansion of the nation swept away. The only account comparable to it in conveying the real note of the cowboy era is that brief description written by Samuel Eliot Morison (of all people!) in the "Oxford History of the United States."

Incidentally, the little volume is a delight to the eye and the hand, and a rebuke to the shoddy bookmaking of the big Eastern publishers in this economical day. The publishers' complete list inside the jacket is not impressive; but if they keep up the literary and crafts, manship standards of this book, there is no reason why men should not beat a path to their Caldwell, Idaho, door.