Andy Adams

Background

Andy Adams was born on May 3, 1859 in Whitley County, Indiana, United States and grew up on the farm. He was the youngest of the three sons of Andrew Adams, of Irish birth, and Elizabeth (Elliott) Adams, an American of Scottish ancestry.

Education

Adams attended the cross-roads school.

Career

"An incurable wanderlust, " Adams wrote, carried him to Texas as a youth. Soon he was astride a horse, driving and trading horses, and following a trail herd of longhorns on the long drive north. During the eighties he lived the life and experienced the adventures that later he recreated with such fidelity and appeal. The open-range cattle days vanished quickly.

Following a brief trial at merchandising in Texas, Adams was lured to Colorado by the mining boom at Cripple Creek. After losing his earnings in a mining venture he moved, about 1892, to Colorado Springs, where he was to spend the remainder of his life.

One night he attended a performance of Hoyt's comedy, The Texas Steer. He noted the great interest the audience had in cowboys and he recognized that he knew much more about cowboy life than did the author of the play. So he decided to try to write.

He began with short stories. In these, technical and grammatical errors were numerous, but friends and editors were helpful and encouraging. Some of the stories were accepted by Leslie's Magazine and the Youth's Companion. The best of these were later collected and published under the title Cattle Brands (1906). In 1902 his first manuscript of a book was accepted. The next year it was published by Houghton Mifflin as The Log of a Cowboy. It was followed by The Texas Matchmaker (1904), The Outlet (1905), Reed Anthony, Cowman (1907), Wells Brothers (1911), and The Ranch on the Beaver (1927). All of these interpret the cowboy, the trail, the open range.

He wrote several plays, but none was ever produced or printed. Book and story manuscripts also remain unpublished.

Achievements

• Adams' work The Log of a Cowboy represented his best writing and became his most popular book.

Works

More photos

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  • Andy Adams: The Log of a Cowboy

    (The Log of a Cowboy is an account of a five-month drive o...)

  • Andy Adams' Campfire Tales

    ( Andy Adams' The Log of a Cowboy has long been acknowled...)

  • book

  • book

Views

Quotations: "My insight into cattle life was not obtained from the window of a Pullman car, but close to the soil and from the hurricane deck of a Texas horse. Even today I am a better cowman than author, for I can still rope and tie down a steer with any of the boys, while in writing, the loop of the rope may settle on the wrong foot of the rhetoric. "

"Every cowman takes his saddle wherever he goes, though he may not have clothes enough to dust a fiddle. "

"My characters are really composites rather than faithful pictures of individuals. So with incident. While my first book sounds like the history of a drive over the cattle trail, it is in reality the outcome of fifteen years' experience on that trail. While the incidents happened, they were scattered through many drives. "

Personality

In person he was kindly and unpretentious.

Quotes from others about the person

• "He impressed me more as a good man and a lonely man than as a man of greatness. "

Connections

He never married.

Father:

Andrew Adams

Mother:

Elizabeth (Elliott) Adams

References

• Who was who among North American authors, 1921-1939 (Gale composite biographical dictionary series)