Date: September 26, 1935

On this day, the famed cowboy memoirist Andy Adams died. Adams, born in Indiana in 1859, was one of the few writers of the West who had a knowledge based on experience that enabled him to record cowboy life authentically. Adams traveled to Texas in the early 1880s and remained there for ten years, eight of which he spent in traildriving. Adams was forty-three when he began writing, and Texas was his literary domain. His available published works comprise seven books and one article. Because he knew the real West, he was able to write with a remarkable verisimilitude--a quality he maintained without compromise, though it led to many rejected manuscripts, since publishers seemed to demand "Wild West" stories. The Log of a Cowboy (1903),Adams's best work, tells of a five-month drive of over 3,000 cattle from Brownsville to Montana in 1882 and has been called the best chronicle written of the great days in the cattle country.