The Coming of Cassidy—And the Others — Reading Companion

A Narrator Gathering Dusty Tales

The preface is the only section written in first person, and it carefully establishes how the stories reached print. Red, the under-foreman, tells the tales "during the last few weeks of my stay," and the narrator promises they will follow "as closely as possible, in chronological order." This framing device explains why the book jumps between episodes: "Between some of them the interval is short; between others, long; the less interesting stories that should fill those gaps may well be omitted." The excerpts do not show any further appearances of this narrator, so the reader encounters the rest of the book as third-person narratives. The effect is that of a campfire session where the listener pieces together the outfit's history from fragments, with the taciturn cowboys themselves controlling what gets told.

Winter's Grip on the Range

The excerpts devote considerable detail to a devastating Norther and its aftermath. One character describes being trapped under a wagon for "'most three weeks, livin' on raw meat after our firewood gave out," with a drift fifteen feet high. Buck Peters is marked by the season: "His daily rides over the range, the reports of his men since that deadly storm had done a great deal to lift the sagging weight that rested on his shoulders." The narrative explains that the valley saved the herds because its "steep ridges of rock" checked the southward drift, and "by some trick of the rushing winds" the grasses had been "whirled clean of snow." This attention to the mechanics of survival—how arroyos and timber break the wind, how rain before freeze threatens ice—shows a writer more interested in the practical challenges of ranching than in shootouts. The cowboys' speech, rendered in dialect, treats the cold with grim humor: "Huh! Cold? That cub don't know nothin'—mebby he will when he grows up, but I dunno, at that. Idyho!"

Voice and Vernacular on the Page

Mulford uses distinct registers for narration and dialogue. The third-person passages are formal and descriptive: "Following the Norther came another menace and one which easily might surpass the worst efforts of the blizzard." In contrast, the cowboys speak in a heavy dialect marked by dropped g's, contractions like "mebby," and colloquial rhythms: "I grab for th' grub, an' while I 'm eatin' I demands to know where I am." The excerpts show that the narrator's voice in the preface is educated and observant, while the body of the text shifts between this polished style and the rougher speech of the characters. This alternation creates a layered reading experience: the reader is always aware that these stories have been filtered through a literate intermediary. The illustrations by Maynard Dixon, mentioned on the title page, are not reproduced in the excerpts, but the text itself paints vivid visual scenes—"a drift shamefully high about a mile northeast of us, an' from th' smoke comin' out of it I knew it was th' bunkhouse."

The excerpts offer no complete plot arcs, only episodes of survival and labor. Readers should expect a collection of linked vignettes rather than a single narrative, with the Bar-20 crew's personalities emerging gradually through action and dialect. Pay attention to how the landscape—the valley, the arroyos, the snow—functions as both obstacle and ally. The book rewards those who read for the texture of daily ranch life and the laconic humor of men who have weathered worse.

The rain kept drumming on the windows that afternoon, and I found myself thinking about how Mulford’s cowboys told their stories sideways, never quite saying what mattered. That same quiet stubbornness seemed to live in the men of The Empire Makers: A Romance of Adventure and War in South Africa — Text and Context, which I picked up afterwards almost without deciding to. The dust and heat felt familiar, just another kind of range.