WESTERN ARCHIVE OF ALBERT MOSTY, 1869-1931,

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30 volumes (most 1871-1888; many illustrated); illustrated journal (ca 600pp); ca 90 letters and documents. In the decades before the Civil War, the Santa Fe Trail opened a vast portion of the American west to white traders and settlers, and for many years more it remained a major route for drovers, drivers, and above all else, cattle. Snaking their way from Kansas to Colorado, Texas, the Indian Territory, and New Mexico, ranchers and adventurers wrested a hardscrabble and occasionally profitable living from the arid plains, giving rise to the wild west of stories, legends, and lies, and to a spate of dime novels and bad Gary Cooper movies. Among the flood of itinerants and cowpunchers tramping through the region during the 1870s, Albert Mosty and his brother Lee (Leander) were hardly the best known, but they stand out for the remarkable visual and written record they left of their lives. A talented, apparently self-taught artist, Albert Mosty faithfully kept a journal from the late 1860s through 1880s, chronicling his rough-hewn life and times out west. Beginning in 1869 with a diary covering his departure from Missouri and travel through the Indian Territory to Olathe, Kansas, Mosty left thirty dense and detailed volumes that offer an intimate, reflective, and often humorous portrait of the life of a cowpuncher. The bulk of the diaries were written while Mosty was based between Bent`s Fort (the first permanent white settlement along the Old Santa Fe Trail) and the not too distant town of Las Animas, spanning the final territorial years in Colorado and the first years of statehood. In Las Animas, Mosty found himself at the heart of the burgeoning post-war cattle industry and was witness to the power of the railroad in developing the region as well as the waning of the old military culture. Mosty’s origins are known only in a sketchy form. In his twenties when he moved west, he may have been a Confederate veteran (an Albert Mosty buried in Las Animas in 1883 is recorded as a Confederate veteran), but once his diaries commence, his life is exhaustively detailed. Covering a broad swath of terrain from as far east as Missouri, north to Cheyenne Mountain and south to Las Vegas Hot Springs, NM, Texas, and the Indian Territory, Mosty’s descriptions of life in Colorado are filled with cowboys; cattle drives and tramps; railroads, gunslingers, liars, and thieves; loose women, soldiers, and deserters; Mexicans, whites, and blacks, all spun together in a fluid mix. The strength of the diaries lies in Mosty’s innate ability to draw character like a novelist and impart a feeling for his day to day life of adventure in a raw and sparsely settled, but rapidly changing country. The rough quality of the handwriting belies an intensely literary effort. Despite his humble origins, Mosty had pretensions as a writer – in the good sense -- often resorting to a florid and descriptive language characteristic of the better writers of the day. More to point, he is simply entertaining, and the combination of keen observation, an exciting life, and energetic prose makes for an outstanding first-hand narrative of an average cowboy’s life. Even the occasional outbreaks of cowboy verse seem forgivable. During much of the time between 1874 and 1883, Mosty was a trusted employee of Prowers and Hudnall (merchants in everything), a firm in Las Animas that doubled as commission merchant and cattlemen. Although much of the best content comes from his work overseeing herds between Las Animas and Grenada, Colo., along the Arkansas River, and along the Picket Wire River., a tributary, Mosty roamed as widely as his cattle. Providing a sense of the writing, which ranges as widely as he did, can be difficult, but a few representative passages may help. From Great Bend, Kansas, in 1874, Mosty described a scene that lacked only John Wayne. The two men come out of the depot & went down the steps on the side walk, the one man got up & told them to stop, they turned around to ask what we wanted, he said you swindled me out of ten dollars. They said he was a lyar & he said lay down that money, lay it down on the sidewalk, lay it right down. They told him to go to hell & so he aimed & shot. The fellows got a good step before he got a shot.... The big fellow when he was hit in the leg, jumped away... the fellows trotted all the way to town yet after they were shot, they had been jumping. After the man got done shooting he walked around the depot reloading his pistol, didn’t seem to concerned about it.... Mosty’s accounts of riding after cattle, driving, haying, can be equally vivid and interesting. More typical content: 1881: Musty visits the big city, Denver, a place full of steeples, but in which the steeples cast their shadow over the dens of vice and corruption where the work of death & destruction continue the works of vice & infamy twenty four hours in the day... read more

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