Short Take: J. Frank Dobie

I mentioned in the last post that J. Frank Dobie recommends Winifred Kupper's The Golden Hoof as one of the best books on the sheep of the Southwest. Those sheep books, Dobie notices, are few in number but of very high average quality, as opposed to the immense but altogether more variable cattle literature. Sheep just ain't sexy, but those who write about them care. Dobie himself is often at his very best on facts that aren't sexy, and how that lack of sizzle can skew the historical record:

Cattlemen have probably lost a thousand times more cattle to screwworms than to cow thieves, but cow thieves have received more than a thousand times as much attention. You will look in vain through range autobiographies for consideration of screwworms.