[.ca] Buffalo Days: Stories From J. Wright Mooar (Texas Heritage) (ISBN 1880510952)

Buffalo Days:
Good personal reminiscence. Very good end notes. Certainly not politicaly correct but a very good view of the prevaling mind set of the nineteenth century buffalo hide trade.

Interesting little book on Buffalo hunting days, not the best one:
I've read in several other books about the Mooar brothers, major figures in the Buffalo hunting/hide trade days, this is a selection of stories told by one of the brothers. Mr. Mooar told a writer a few stories in 1933, I think he'd have been about 82 if my math is good, that were serialized in a magazine. The stories are mostly about his own adventures but some give details about things that happened to others, interesting but not the most educational or detailed to my way of thinking. The man, even in his 80's, was absolutely unapologetic about the buffalo slaughter and seems to have had no use or even respect for the Indians he had contact with. You get to read some details about hunting, the buffalo hide & meat trade and Indian fighting, a little about the guns used and just a bit about the people Mooar met, including (he says)Billy the Kid. I'm thinking that at 82 Mr. Mooar's memory was failing him, he describes a .50 cal. Sharps rifle variation that I've never heard of (even in Frank Seller's big book on the Sharps company), I think he might've meant a .45, not 50. His telling of the Adobe Walls Indian battle sounds both self promoting (he was there before the fight and did some Indian fighting that would've been linked to the battle itself)and a little bit unlikely (he says the infamous cracking ridgepole was a fraudulent story and that the pole itself was 2 1/2 feet thick- seems kind of unlikely that such a heavy log would be a ridge pole). I liked reading the information I did get but consider "Life of Billy Dixon" by Olive K. Dixon (Billy Dixon, who actually did fight at Adobe Walls- and was mentioned by Mooar, was only 63 when he dictated his biography) to be a much better book for most students of the Buffalo Hunting days.