By Sue Hancock Jones
Before he became famous, Will James was an authentic working cowboy.
Nearly every library in America and parts of Canada has books by Will James, but the summer he spent in a New Mexico cow camp may have been the turning point that took him from hard times, lean times and even jail time to legend status as a Western author and artist.
James wrote and illustrated 24 books, five of which were made into feature films. Each book captured the spirit and experience of the working cowboy so well that in cow country some folks hold James to an esteem comparable to the likes of Western artist Charlie Russell and movie star John Wayne.
Before he could rise that high, James had to hit lows that would give him plenty of time to think. He was arrested in 1914 for cattle rustling and spent 18 months in the Nevada State Penitentiary. This first extended period of thinking helped encourage his concentration on drawing.
James used his art in connection with his parole application by making a sketch entitled “A Turning Point” and including the note: “Have had ample time for serious thought and it is my ambition to follow up on my art.”
His prison time may not have been a turning point for James, but it definitely was a wake-up call. Until then, he had not given much thought to the unusual ability he had in drawing predominantly cowboys and rodeo scenes with an uncanny resemblance to the art of Charles Russell.
James only had an eighth-grade education when he left home at the age of 15 to pursue his dream of living on the Western frontier. Initially, that meant Western Canada.
James was born Joseph Ernest Nephtali Dufault in 1892 in French-speaking Saint-Nazaire-d’Acton, Quebec, Canada. His French-Canadian family called him Ernest. He was the second of six children despite mythologizing his life years later in his 1930 autobiography, Lone Cowboy. Researchers estimate the first third of his autobiography is fiction, including the claim of being born in Montana, losing his mother when he was only a year old and being raised by a French-Canadian fur trader (which explained his French accent).
After leaving home to learn to be a Western cowboy, James settled in real life near the new French-Saskatchewan settlement of Val Marie and was taught wrangling by a local cowboy. The two built separate homesteads along the Frenchman River in southwest Saskatchewan. At some point he became involved in a dispute with the law, changed his name to William Roderick James and drifted permanently to the United States.
Before being arrested for cattle rustling, the newly named Will James captured wild horses for profit and worked as a hand for cattle outfits in Montana, Idaho and Nevada.
Several months after his prison experience, he suffered a severe kick to the jaw while breaking wild horses for a ranch company south of Carson City, Nev. Because he needed dental work, James was told the best dentists were in Los Angeles. He moved to California for dental work and joined the famous Clarence (Fat) Joes Stable late in 1916 and became a movie stuntman specializing in daring horse action.
This 1935 photo shows Will James preparing a pencil sketch of his favorite subject—bucking horses. (Photo from Will James: The Life and Works of a Lone Cowboy)
World War I interrupted his movie life when he was drafted into the Army and served as a mounted scout with the 21st Infantry Regiment along the California-Mexican border. His discharge in 1919 brought him American citizenship, and he returned to his cowboy lifestyle.
James relocated to Nevada in time for the First Annual Nevada Round-Up in Reno and was paid $50 to illustrate the program cover. He also worked as a wrangler for the round-up before teaming up with two friends to stage “bronc-busting” exhibitions. During one of these events, James was thrown from a horse, sustained a severe concussion and received 22 stitches after landing head first on a railroad track.
While convalescing at the home of his friend, Fred Conradt, James again had time to think and took up drawing in earnest. His decision to pursue an art career was encouraged by Conradt’s 15-year-old sister, Alice, who would later become his wife.
During this time James sold two series of sketches to a West Coast periodical named Sunset Magazine. Both sketches formed a narrative and contained text written by James. Published in 1920, the sketches were the first glimpse that James had talent for drawing cow country action scenes with a superb ability to express himself in the writing style of cowboy vernacular.
After his concussion healed, James traveled to Santa Fe to mingle with the art colony and try to develop a market for his artwork. In Santa Fe he met Wallace Springer, a Western art enthusiast and part of the family that owned the CS Ranch east of Cimarron, N.M. Springer’s brother, Ed, was boss of the CS spread in 1921 when James realized he wasn’t going to be able to make a living on art alone.
Ed Springer hired James and sent him to the ranch cow camp about 9,000 feet up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
“It’s got pole corrals and it’s surrounded by aspens. It was used as a summer cow camp, and every cowpuncher who ever went there learned the story of Will James,” explained Steve Zimmer, former director of the museum and library at the Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron.
Zimmer is retired now and has his own ranch near Cimarron, but he grew up reading James’ novels at his family ranch on the Canadian River north of Amarillo, Texas. In like fashion, he raised his two sons reading novels by Will James.
“His books reaffirmed everything that I was learning growing up,” Zimmer said. “All the cowpunchers seemed to read him. He was the quintessential cowboy’s cowboy who talked the cowboy language.”
This illustration is from Will James’ most famous book, Smoky the Cowhorse. The book was first published in 1926 by Charles Scriber’s Sons, but an illustrated edition that included this illustration was published in 1929.
During the summer of 1921, James was getting a reputation in the cow camp for being as good with a story and a sketching pencil as he was with a rope and a cowhorse. One day Ed Springer rode into the camp with a couple of friends—Jack Nairn, a neighbor, and Nairn’s house guest, Burton Twitchell. Twitchell was dean of students at Yale University.
All three men were impressed with James’ storytelling ability and his art talent. Twitchell offered James a special Yale art scholarship. Ed Springer and Nairn agreed to pay whatever expenses the scholarship did not cover.
James left the CS Ranch in the fall of 1921 for Yale University in New Haven, Conn. He quickly discovered he’d rather lead the cowboy life than the academic life, but his summer in the cow camp proved to be his life’s turning point. Twitchell introduced James to Charles Scribner, the most important publisher in America at the time, and the rest is history.
After dropping out of Yale within a few weeks, James began writing an article on horse bucking. Scribner editor Max Perkins believed the writing revealed “authentic American vernacular” and recommended its publication. Scribner paid $300 for “Bucking Horses and Bucking-Horse Riders” with illustrations. He published James’ first major article in 1923 in Scribner’s Magazine.
Perkins encouraged James to write novels, and they gained wide approval and fame over the next two decades, including translation into six foreign languages. James married the sister of his friend—the one who encouraged his art career—and they bought a small ranch in Washoe Valley, Nevada, where he wrote his most famous book, Smoky the Cowhorse. The book was published in 1926 and won the Newbery Medal for children’s literature in 1927. It also was made into three movies, and in 1933 both the film and the novel won the Lewis Carrol Shelf Award given by the University of Wisconsin.
Smoky the Cowhorse was made into a movie in 1933 starring Victor Jory, 1946 starring Fred MacMurray and 1966 starring Fess Parker.
James never forgot his benefactors on the CS Ranch in New Mexico. He sent personally inscribed first editions of his books to Ed Springer, writing inside Smoky the Cowhorse: “To Ed Springer, a man who backs his beliefs with a heap more than words.”
Success also brought James new pressures. For some people, success can be as hard to handle as failure. James had always been a drinker but turned more and more to whiskey to help him cope with the pressures of success. He was living and writing in a cottage on the Godshall Ranch in Victorville, Calif., when he died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 50 on Sept. 3, 1942.
His memory is still kept alive not only by his books but also by the Will James Society, a group devoted to promoting everything that’s good and honest about cowboy life by encouraging the reading of Will James’ works and donating sets of his books to schools and libraries.
The group was started in the early 1990s by Steve Zimmer and other loyal New Mexico residents who grew up reading James’ novels. The national group now has an office in Idaho and includes board members from nine states. Their 2019 annual meeting was at Big Horn County Museum in Hardin, MT.
For some folks in cow country, Will James is still the cowboy’s cowboy.
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