1927: SMOKY THE COWHORSE by Will James
It seemed like Mother Nature was sure agreeable that day when the little black colt came to the range world and tried to get a footing with his long wobblety legs on the brown prairie sod.
Look, I don’t want to toss around big sweeping phrases like “this project is going to destroy me”, but I do just want to say, I really want to read books for grown-ups again. I am saving plenty of the hits for the final months of Newburied, but we’re in a patch right now where we’ve been reading a lot of the weirder, duller books, including the last three I’ve read from the 1920s: The Dark Frigate, Tales From Silver Lands, and 1927’s Smoky The Cowhorse, a bizarre 300-plus-page - 300 pages! - epic about a horse who is into racism and BDSM.
Roughly the last fifth of the novel follows our title horse as he is captured by a biracial rustler, helpfully referred to as a "breed", which I guess is 1920s shorthand for half-breed. The "breed" abuses Smoky and works him half to death, and the author notes what a tragedy it is, that a horse so noble could turn mean simply because he was touched by someone who wasn't white:
"It would of been a surprise sure enough, and afterwards, she’d figgered the horse being mean that way would of been on account of rough treatment by some one. She’d been right, even if that some one was only a scrub of a degenerate halfbreed and not fit to be classed amongst humans."
Smoky, rest assured, also becomes racist - again, Smoky is a horse - as a result of this mistreatment:
"That pony seemed to have a grudge against humans in general; his ambition was for exterminating ’em all off the face of the earth. But there was one thing which the riders noticed in him as most queer, and that was in the way he seemed to hate some humans worse than others,— his hate was plainest for the face that showed dark."
Smoky is eventually discovered by and reunited with his old owner. In the final showdown between the "breed" and the rightful owner of Smoky, things devolve into a fistfight, with the local sheriff helpfully calling out:
"“Say, cowboy,” he finally says, “don’t scatter that hombre’s remains too much; you know we got to keep record of that kind the same as if it was a white man, and I don’t want to be looking all over the streets to find out who he was.”"
The light comic relief we get from that joke about what a hassle it is to fill out the paperwork for the death of someone who isn't white lays down the final glidepath of Smoky's saga as a brilliant cowhorse and strong rodeo horse. Unfortunately, in the 1920s, it appears that the adjective writers would use to describe energetic rodeo horses was "kinky":
"There’s some talk of the skill that’s showed between the angler and the trout, but the skill that was brought out from that hundred and fifty pound cowboy a holding that eleven hundred pounds of kinky, wild horseflesh was past talking about, and beyond the figgering out of any human that’s not up to the trade of bronco busting."
Once again, that word was "kinky":
"As has been said before, bronc fighting was beginning to tell on Clint,—none of them ponies he’d broke had spared him, and instead they’d called on for all that was in him. Many had tried to tear him apart and scatter him in the dust of the big corrals; hoofs had come like greased lightning and took hunks off his batwing chaps, teeth had took a few shirts off his back, and as he’d climbed on one after another of these wild, kinky ponies they most all tried to see if they could move the heart of him from one side of his body to the other."
Yes, that's right: "kinky":
"The cowboy wants ’em that way tho,— it’s a pride of his to have a kinky horse under him that’s feeling good rather than some gentle old plug that’s leg weary."
Now, you may have noticed some weird idiosyncrasies across these block quotes about wild kinky horseflesh under your legs and evil half-breeds, like how the verb tenses don't appear to be consistent at all throughout a 300-page novel, or how the entire thing appears to be written in Phonetic Cowboy Language, with inexplicable "would of"s and other glaring grammatical mistakes. Yeah, those are all over the book. They have no discernable pattern or purpose; the narrative voice is third-person omniscient and it’s not like a cowboy is directly narrating the story of Smoky.
Was writing just not considered an art in 1927? Is this Charles Lindbergh’s fault or something? Were we so upset by the Sacco and Vanzetti trial that we weren’t paying close attention to our Newbery ballots this year? Could you just scratch a bunch of shit into the dirt with a stick, not revise or edit it in any meaningful way, and get it published and then the American Library Association would look at it and be like “sure it’s about a horse, let’s give this a medal and say it’s the best children’s book of the year”? The other two recent selections we read from the twenties were very boring, but they were at least recognizable as books that were products of publishing houses that would have put multiple sets of eyes on the manuscripts to make these things marketable to some sort of audience after the familiar processes of editing and revision. Smoky can’t even get to that point. The Twenty-One Balloons, my previous pick for Worst Newbery Medalist, was a failed attempt by du Bois to create a fun story about whimsical inventions that also happened to be weirdly colonial and paternalistic, but it was, again, a real book. Smoky is openly racist, it’s maybe 225 pages longer than it should be, and it’s not a “bad book” because you can’t even identify it as a book; rather, it is the ramblings of a racist cowboy who married a sixteen-year-old when he was twenty-eight and, before starting his writing career, survived a severe concussion in a rodeo accident and it shows and I’m glad he’s dead now. I didn’t love the book, is what I'm saying.
I want to read books for grown-ups again. I got a copy of David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks on sale and, because I loved Cloud Atlas so much, I’m excited to dig into it, but I can’t because I had to read Smoky The Cowhorse. John Darnielle's Devil House has been out for over a year and I haven't even gotten a copy yet. I want to make a sixth attempt at reading Gravity’s Rainbow; right now I can only kind of get through the shorter Pynchon books, and even then not really. I want to read Oakley’s Warlock, the Western that influenced Pynchon’s writing, and then that reminds me of all of the Westerns I haven’t read yet, like I’ve only read one of McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove books and I have to get the rest done someday, and I want to read the rest of the Michener epics because I loved Hawaii and Centennial so much that I wrote an entire novel as an homage to Michener, but he has like 80 other novels I need to get through. I reread Infinite Jest every four or five years to remind myself that this is the world we actually live in, and that doesn’t count all of the other books on my shelf I want to reread. And then there’s the Russians, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky et cetera, none of which I’ve ever read and my understanding is that they’re supposed to be pretty good. But right now I’m stuck with Smoky The Cowhorse and the whole Newburied project is starting to feel a little bit like homework.
I recently received one grown-up book as a gift, and I started to read it concurrently with Smoky just because I really needed a break from racist horses, and thank God, it actually delivered, not just as a great book that I loved reading, but as, I’ll just go ahead and say it, maybe the best piece of nonfiction writing I’ve seen in a decade. I apologize that you now have to type this title into your search engine.
Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, the 2023 masterpiece by comedian and podcaster Jamie Loftus, is the history of the American hot dog, and a travelogue of Loftus’ cross-country drive to eat every famous hot dog in the country. I read at night before I go to sleep, and there were multiple chapters that made me laugh so hard, so involuntarily, so loudly, that I woke up my daughters. At the same time, Loftus’ book is shot through with righteous fury, as the history of the hot dog is unspeakably foul and practically defined by cruelty to meatpacking workers, from the days of The Jungle to the current era of meat manufacturers juking the government into getting around COVID protocols as hundreds of workers sacrificed their lives in the name of cheap food. Loftus’ road trip happened to fall in summer 2021, when the COVID pandemic was very much still raging but large parts of the country were refusing to acknowledge it, and food service outlets were loudly complaining about how “nobody wanted to work anymore”. Culture and American enterprise had been wiped out in a plague and rebuilt into something much darker and crueler. Raw Dog is the first great work of post-COVID Americana and history. It is Loftus’ masterpiece.
But at the same time, I don’t know if me calling it “Loftus’ masterpiece” carries any weight anymore, because every time she puts out a new project, I say “wow, this is her masterpiece right here”. I probably first came to Loftus’ work through stupid dark jokes on Twitter (how I discovered most writers I admire from 2013-2022), and then through her brilliant podcasts: My Year In Mensa, about the history of the high-IQ Mensa society and her yearlong membership after taking the test as a joke and accidentally passing. Lolita Podcast, on the history and cultural impact of Nabokov’s novel and its many adaptations (two major films plus an extremely ill-advised attempt at a Broadway musical). AACK!-Cast, on the history and cultural influence of Cathy, as in the comic strip about the lady who says “AACK!” that put out new strips for nearly four decades as the relationship of women to the workplace changed rapidly. Ghost Church, on American Spiritualism, the religion of table-tapping and mediums. All of them exhaustively researched, all of them expertly produced, all of them excellent listens. And her first book may have outdone them all.
Loftus is one of a small group of people that I admire for so expertly combining deep research and fascination and understanding of history and context and moral stakes, but still frames that all up with a great sense for what’s funny and interesting and riveting and shocking and infuriating and entertaining for an audience. Michael Hobbes does it with health trends, Jon Bois does it with sports, Charles Starr does it with the law. I write my stupid little newsletters because I hope that with each essay I write and revise and (in some cases) research, I can get myself a little closer to their level. They learn about things, they find what’s funny and weird and outrageous, they want to tell anyone they can find about what they learned. I don’t think I can ever write something as good as Raw Dog, but after seven years of writing for an audience, with hundreds of thousands of words behind me, I can look back and confidently say I have risen above the level of the stupid kinky horse book.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1999 medalist, Holes by Louis Sachar.