More Than Courage (1960)

More Than Courage: Real Life Stories Of Horses And Dogs And People Who Have Loved Them
Patrick Lawson, il. Earl Sherwan
1960, Whitman Publishing Company


To all the horses and dogs that have been trying to communicate with dumb humans for thousands of years, this book is affectionately dedicated.

This collection of stories about horses and dogs is undoubtedly dated - the references to Native Americans as redskins and the cheerful statement that bloodhounds are not gay but solemn dogs make that clear. But there's a sort of romance to its sweeping vision of the world.

The horse relieved man of the burdens he had always had to pack upon his own back. It enabled him to plow more land and so produce more food. Its greatest gift, however, was mobility. By carrying man swiftly from one place to another, the horse helped him to increase his area of activity and speed up the interchange of knowledge. Take away the horse and history would have to be rewritten.


More to the point, the author does know animals.

As with all animals, horses have a habit of blithely disproving every statement made about them by experts.

The first chapter sets up the entire book. This is to be an examination through examples of the debate between those who attribute all animal behavior to instinct and training, and those who believe animals are capable of intelligent reasoning. It's quickly evident which side the author is on. When I researched Lawson and discovered he was actually Lois Eby, it made sense. Women, like animals, have often been on the wrong side of the experts when it comes to judging intelligence and reasoning power.

The chapters switch off, one concentrating on dogs and the next on horses. Below are the horse chapters.

The Question
The crowd's roar of admiration suddenly changed to a gasp of horror. The horse had whirled to face his fallen rider. He looked to them now like a maddened killer... Then an astounding thing happened. The horse paused beside the man's prone body, sniffed it, and carefully, delicately, stepped over it to trot unconcernedly toward the arena exit.
(rodeo bucker Midnight)

Drumming Hoofs
...the action of cavalry horses and their courage in battle is all the more remarkable. A horse can be taught to ignore gunfire, but how can he continue to have confidence in a master who deliberately leads him into a situation where he is severely wounded.
(military horses including 19th century Indian fighters Prince and Two Bits, General Sherman's horse Sam, General Meade's horse Baldy, and Alexander the Great's horse Bucephalus)

Pegasus Without Wings
Kincsem's approach to the post would have shamed a milk wagon plug. Where the proud thoroughbreds paced and pranced, she plodded. Having arrived at the starting line, she just stood there, tail drooping, head down. In race after race she was left behind, while every track fan in Europe held his breath and chewed his nails. Yet somehow she always managed to win.
(a blind pacer named Sleepy Tom, the jumper Snow Man, the Hungarian racehorse Kinecsem)

Enter - A Star!
Fury is definitely a camera hog. On the set, he keeps edging forward to get close to the camera until he is practically hanging over the human actor's shoulder. One harassed director finally set up a dummy camera. Fury, unaware that there was no film in it, posed before it happily while the real camera shot the scenes with the rest of the cast.
(The Lipizan stars of the film Ben Hur, Roy Roger's Trigger, Gene Autry's Champion, TV stars Fury and California)

About Lawson
Lois Eby grew up in California, where she fell in love with Arabian horses and nature. A writer for film, she also wrote mysteries and novels.

Other books by Patrick Lawson
Star-Crossed Stallion

Star-Crossed Stallion's Big Chance

Patty Lynn: Daughter Of The Rangers

Patty Lynn At The Grand Canyon


"Hard Luck Stallion" - a short story about a boy trying to tame an Arabian stallion named Ajaz. July 1954 edition of the magazine Boys' Life. Basically the Star-Crossed Stallion story.

About the illustrator
(1917-2002)
A native and lifelong Michigan resident, Sherwan specialized in nature and dog pictures, writing and illustrating many books and producing a popular line of canine-themed notepaper.

Books written by Sherwan
Mask, The Door County Coon by Earl Sherwan (1963)
Bruno, The Bear Of Split Rock Island by Earl Sherwan (1966)


Links
"Hard Luck Stallion" (Part I) at Google Books - Sam Savitt illustrations
"Hard Luck Stallion" (Part II) at Google Books
"Hard Luck Stallion" (Part III) at Google Books
"Hard Luck Stallion" (Part IV) at Google Books

Jane Badger Books bio of Lawson
(The comment about the book's physical limitations is spot on - I basically destroyed my copy doing this review. It is now a collection of loose yellow pages within a fragile carcass of covers and spine.)
IMDB on Lawson
Lawson's mystery series
Standard Printing - Earl Sherwan info

Thoroughbred Heritage - Kincsem
Show Jumping Hall of Fame - Snow Man
Greene County, OH - Sleepy Tom
Sam Savitt poster of famous Standardbreds with Sleepy Tom

Other material about featured horses
Dwight Akers wrote a 1939 book about Sleepy Tom.
Sam Savitt wrote a book called Midnight: Champion Bucking Horse about Midnight.
Rutherford George Montgomery wrote a book about Snow Man; there was also a movie and a Breyer model.
Fury, of course, was a TV show based on a book, Albert G. Miller's series. He was also made into a Breyer model.

Wild Horse Annie And The Last Of The Mustangs: The Life Of Velma Johnston

David Cruise & Alison Griffiths

2010, Scribner

Velma walked over and peered through a gap in the slats, expecting to find cattle or sheep. Instead, she saw a horrifying tableau of mutilated horses, some barely alive. Her eyes caught sight of a colt, or what was left of him, lying trampled, his bones crushed and coat blood-soaked. A number of horses had bloody stumps instead of legs. Others had sections of their hooves torn off and hides shredded by buckshot. A stallion stood with his head bowed, blood seeping from empty eye sockets. He had been blinded to subdue him. It was only the tight quarters that kept many of the horses upright. A penetrating stench, the combination of blood, urine and feces, rose from the truck while flies swarmed over the brutalized animals, jammed so tightly they couldn't flick the insects away with their tails.

In the spring of 1950, Velma Johnston was a 38-year-old woman permanently crippled up by a childhood attack of polio, but she was a fighter who'd carved out for herself the life she'd always wanted - a husband, a home, and horses. When she noticed blood flowing out of a livestock truck near Reno, Nevada she followed it to the stockyards, intending to let the driver know he had a hurt animal on board. What she found was the intended end of the wild horse in the American West - a bloody, violent death for the mustangs, thousands of dollars in slaughter sales for the chasers, and a more complex victory for the Burea of Land Management (BLM), the government agency that oversees vast swathes of public land in the United States.

The BLM's attitude was that the mustangs were a nuisance at best and a pest at worst, and needed to be eliminated. The authors trace that attitude back to various issues of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the use of 'free' wild horses as a profitable source of meat to satisfy a growing market for commercial dog food, endless competition and violence over grazing rights, a new industrial market for horsehide in conveyor belts. But ultimately, the policy that the survival of the range and the rancher depended on the extinction of the mustang lay in the post-WWI expansion of ranches, and the heedless use of the range to feed herds. Over-stressed native grasses died; the plants that replaced them were less nourishing and when they also failed to hold the earth together as well, the topsoil began to wear away.

There was no incentive for conservation on the public land. Everyone owned it and nobody owned it. It was the classic dilemma of the commons, where no one takes responsibility for a resource that is free for all, and therefore it is ruined by all. And ruin was exactly the state of the grazing lands in the early 1930's when drought struck.

In 1934, Congress passed the Taylor Grazing Act. From that act came what would eventually be the BLM, and its power over 143 million acres of public land. From the beginning, the big cattlemen had a big voice with the BLM. The agency, under pressure to do something about the depleted grazing lands, blamed the mustangs. And by 1950, the BLM was claiming they'd removed over 100,000 horses from the range. Which is roughly where the middle-aged secretary from a hardscrabble ranch in Nevada stepped in. By the time she died in 1977, she'd gone from an independent operator whose first forays into saving the mustangs was to literally sabotage pens of miserable horses in the middle of the night and release them back into the wild, into a savvy political operator who used direct-mail campaigns and media sympathy to circumnavigate a hostile bureacracy. Her results - and her dogged determination to enforce the laws she got passed - would have been impressive for anyone; for a working-class woman struggling with physical pain, working a full-time job and caring for a sick husband, it was extraordinary.

The authors don't flinch from discussing Johnson's less attractive side. She's quite calculating about her depiction in Marguerite Henry's version of her story, Mustang: Wild Spirit Of The West, and she clashes with other mustang activists over the years. Worse, she essentially steals the work of a rancher named Gus Bundy, whose spectacular photographs of mustangs being chased by airplanes in a 1951 roundup were repeatedly used by Johnston without credit or payment. As the authors point out, she worked for a businessman for most of her adult life and she certainly knew a few things about copyright.

For anyone who read the Henry fictionalization of Johnson's life and work, some of the most interesting sections here are chapters 9 and 10, which focus on the relationship between the writer and her subject. Henry was already famous for her children's horse books when she began the project and Velma grew to like both the personable author and the cachet of being associated with her. Marguerite Henry employed her usual folksy style to make a kinder, cuddlier - and considerably less aggressive - Velma. Her family is made more of a rural sterotype, people who can't string three words together without uttering some pithy bit of down home wisdom. Her husband Charlie is transformed from a loving but wordly roughneck 13 years older than her to a sweet neighbor boy named Charley. Velma's disfigurement is only hinted at, her job is downplayed, and altogether she's made over into a simple, happy young wife who stumbles across a brutal injustice and fights back successfully using right as her shield. The simplification is understandable, but I never found Henry's version as satisfying as her other, equally folksy books. Maybe it was the serious content - there's something about those gruff and lovable poor folk that doesn't quite gell with slaughtered horses and trips to Congress.

The writing style is clear and the research was thorough and honest. Cruise and Griffiths make a big story thorough and enjoyable, and while Wild Horse Annie doesn't have the power or lyricism of a great work of nonfiction, it easily surpasses most of the competition.

Links

Simon & Schuster

Find A Grave

Running Wild (1973) at IMDB (movie based on Velma's life)

Bureau of Land Management Environmental Education Resource

Time Magazine - July 27, 1959 article