Cowboy Life on the Sidetrack Being an Extremely Humorous & Sarcastic Story of the Trials & Tribulations Endured by a Party of Stockmen Making a Shipment from the West to the — Reading Notes

Diction and the Cowboy Vernacular

Benton's prose is saturated with the rhythms and vocabulary of late-nineteenth-century cowboy speech. The narrator uses colloquial contractions like "sort a-throwed" and "kind a-getting," and deploys vivid, understated comparisons: a rattlesnake "didn't seem to have any notion of going around, but just laid there coiled up." The dialogue, though reported rather than direct, retains the laconic, deadpan quality of oral storytelling. When the narrator recalls a bull's snuff that "I can hear in my dreams to this day," the hyperbole is grounded in a specific, sensory detail. The preface's claim that the book was written "just as they came from the cowboys' lips" is borne out by these linguistic choices, which avoid literary polish in favor of a rough, performative authenticity.

Structure as Waiting-Room Comedy

The book's twenty-four chapters, with titles like "Waiting for the Train to Start" and "The Final Roundup," mirror the episodic, stop-and-start rhythm of a stock train delayed on sidetracks. Each chapter functions as a self-contained anecdote or tall tale, often framed by the narrator's present-tense predicament—holding a bull's tail, dodging a rattlesnake, or suffering thirst. This structure allows Benton to shift abruptly from farce (tying a bull's tail into a knot) to near-disaster (being tossed into a gulch) without transitional exposition. The cumulative effect is less a plotted novel than a series of oral performances, where the humor depends on the audience's familiarity with cowboy life and the narrator's deadpan delivery.

Setting and the Physical World

The excerpts reveal a landscape that is both vividly specific and functionally indifferent. The narrator measures distance by "one hundred and fifty yards" to a gulch, and time by the position of the sun ("about two o'clock in the afternoon"). The mesa, gulch, and trail are described only as they matter to survival: the gulch's banks are "steep and broken," the trail "leading out of the gulch." Benton's setting is not picturesque but tactical—a space where a man must calculate escape routes while a bull and a rattlesnake close in. The absence of romanticized vistas reinforces the book's claim to a cowboy's pragmatic view of the range, where the environment is an obstacle to be outwitted rather than admired.

Humor Through Exaggerated Predicament

Benton's comedy derives from the narrator's matter-of-fact narration of absurdly escalating situations. The scene of holding a bull's tail while a rattlesnake "went to sleep" nearby is played straight, with the narrator's internal monologue—wondering "which would live the longest, me or the bull"—underscoring the absurdity. The punchline, tying the bull's tail into a knot to sneak away, is both practical and ridiculous. The humor is never explained or italicized; it emerges from the gap between the narrator's calm, detailed reporting and the sheer improbability of the events. This technique, consistent across the excerpts, suggests that the book's sarcastic tone is a deliberate authorial choice, not merely a byproduct of the subject matter.

Readers approaching Cowboy Life on the Sidetrack should expect not a linear story but a collection of oral performances, each built around a specific predicament. Benton's authorial choices—the vernacular diction, the episodic structure, the tactical setting, and the deadpan humor—work together to create a voice that is both authentic and self-consciously theatrical. The book rewards attention to the small, concrete details of cowboy speech and survival, rather than to plot or character development.

There’s a particular loneliness in Benton’s sidetrack tales—cowboys waiting out the slow hours with nothing but jokes and dust. I found myself recalling that same quiet ache while turning through the rangeland stillness in Golden Face: A Tale of the Wild West — Reading Companion. Both leave an impression of vast spaces and stories told mostly to oneself.