Cherokee Outlet Cowboy: Recollections of Laban S. Records - Softcover

Laban Samuel Records (author) & Ellen Jayne Maris Wheeler (editor)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0806128720 ISBN 13: 9780806128726

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997

Synopsis

Special Limited Edition leatherbound hardcoverThe author of numerous plays and film scripts, including Green Grow the Lilacs, later made into the hit musical Oklahoma!, Lynn Riggs (18991954) is recognized as one of America’s most engaging dramatists and was the only active American Indian dramatist during the first half of the twentieth century. An elegant leatherbound collector’s edition, The Cherokee Night and Other Plays, features his never-before-published play Out of Dust, as well as The Cherokee Night and Green Grow the Lilacs.A mixed-blood Cherokee, Riggs wrote about the people, places, and events of the Oklahoma he knew so well. A cattle rancher’s son, Riggs was born in the Verdigris Valley south of Claremore in Indian Territory. He first gained recognition as a poet in the early 1920s while attending the University of Oklahoma and later moved to New York, where he worked on and around Broadway. In 1927 Riggs was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, and while in France on that fellowship, he began writing Green Grow the Lilacs, which Rodgers and Hammerstein made into the Broadway musical Oklahoma! in 1943. By the end of his life, Riggs had written some thirty plays and scripts for fourteen films produced between 1930 and 1955.In their 1939 Handbook of Oklahoma Writers, Mary Hays Marable and Elaine Boylan observe: “Lynn Riggs hitched his wagon to Pegasus and rode into the theatre with an output of poetic and regional plays that has brought him outstanding success.”

About this title

About the Author

Ellen Jayne Maris Wheeler, granddaughter of Laban Samuel Records, received the Doctor of Musical Art degree from the University of Oklahoma and is Professor of Voice at Oklahoma City University.

From the Back Cover

At age fifteen, Laban Samuel Records (1856-1940), the youngest of twelve children, moved west with his family from Indiana to Kansas. About sixty-six years later, writing in pencil on Big Chief tablets, he remembered this move and his other western experiences through the year 1892, when he settled with his wife and children on the claim he had staked in the Cheyenne-Arapaho Run. In the intervening years, Laban was a freighter with his brother on the Santa Fe Trail and a cowpuncher in the Dodge City stockyards. He first encountered Indians on the banks of the Verdigris River in southern Kansas, learned the Osage language, and became an agency cook at Pawhuska. Later he worked in the Cherokee Outlet as a line rider for the T-5 and Spade ranches, eventually becoming a foreman. Because of Laban's firsthand knowledge of people and events, his account adds a new perspective to several infamous episodes. For example, he barely escaped the raid by Dull Knife and other Cheyenne warriors in 1878, and he knew the participants in the Medicine Lodge bank robbery, the Talbot raid at Caldwell, and the Potts-Franklin shootout on the T-5 Ranch. In addition, Laban recounted many affectionate and often humorous stories about Outlet ranchers such as Maj. Andrew Drumm, Outlet cowpunchers such as Charlie Siringo, Texas trail drivers such as "Shanghai" Pierce, and western writers such as Thomas McNeal of the Medicine Lodge Cresset, Scott Cummings (the "Pilgrim Bard"), and Pawnee Bill. But perhaps most memorable are Laban's stories of everyday cowboy life: herding cattle with his dog Shep, riding his favorite horses, and surviving the rigors encountered by everyone on the western range - tornadoes, rattlesnakes, cold and snow, outlaws, and hard work.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0806128720
• ISBN 13: 9780806128726
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392