The Bounty of Texas Page: 59

                                
The Bounty of the Woods

The only big liberty I took with him was that I moved him back
thirty years in time, and changed his name.
The Hewey Calloway of my book could have been the old man I
saw when I was a boy.
That is a side of the cowboy story that not many people write
about, or talk about. Most cowboy stories have a strong tinge of
romanticism. It spoils the mood to tell about cowboys getting old and
lonely and sick, to tell of them spending their final years stove up,
living on social security in some poor little house in town, or in a
nursing home, bored, broke and hurting.
But I have seen it happen too many times, to too many of the best.
That is why you can laugh at the surface humor in The Good Old
Boys. But you can cry a little too, at the sadness beneath.
I used the same theme in a little different way in The Man Who
Rode Midnight.
Stand Proud:
I HAVE probably caught more flack from critics about Stand
Proud than about any of my other books. Many of them disliked the
main character, old cowman Frank Claymore, because he is so hard
and unyielding, proud and stubborn and at times a little mean.
I didn't intend him to be any plaster saint. I meant him to be
stubborn and difficult, because he had lived through a life that had
made him that way. I tried to show that in the story. Some of his life
was based on real history.
We fiction writers often borrow from real historic personages,
though we may not call them by their true names, and we weave a
certain amount of fiction around them. For instance, in Stand Proud
you'll find a good bit of Charles Goodnight, under the guise of Frank
Claymore. I am not the only one who has borrowed liberally from
Goodnight. Ben Capps did it with his Sam Chance. Larry McMurtry
did it in Lonesome Dove.
I guess a lot of us owe some royalties to the Goodnight estate.
One of the points J. Evetts Haley made in his biography of
Goodnight was that Goodnight had no particular allegiance to the
Confederacy, and he joined the frontier Rangers as a means of

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