Bones Hooks: Pioneer Negro Cowboy.

Bones Hooks: Pioneer Negro Cowboy. By Bruce G. Todd. (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Company, 2005. Pp. 221. $23.00, ISBN 978-1-58980-294-0.)

Bruce G. Todd's Bones Hooks: Pioneer Negro Cowboy joins the expanding body of literature revealing the important role that blacks played in the cattle West. The author, who founded the African-American Oral History Project in Amarillo, Texas, became intrigued with the life of his subject and has produced a useful if sometimes disjointed biography.

Todd's effort provides that rare glimpse of a working cowboy of color, in this case Matthew "Bones" Hooks, a child of ex-slaves. While Hooks was only semiliterate, leaving no Fetters or diaries, two aspects of his life facilitated Todd's work: Hooks's singular skills brought him regional fame, and he possessed an exceptional historical consciousness. He had crossed the plains of West Texas, breaking horses and handling remudas on cattle drives, but he later settled into life as a townsman, granting a number of interviews through the years and collecting newspaper articles and other bits of his personal record. In his urban role Hooks became a leader of Amarillo's black community, joined numerous cowboy and pioneer organizations, and helped found the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. This left historical detritus from which Todd cobbled his valuable story.

Born in eastern Texas, Hooks, like most blacks, found only menial jobs as a boy, eventually driving a chuckwagon. By age twelve he had wrangled horses on his first cattle drive to the Kansas railheads, and ranch work soon lured him to the open ranges. Hooks specialized in breaking and caring for horses, excelling in these skills and achieving a striking reputation reaching wherever riders needed mounts.

When the era of the open range ended, Hooks put down roots in Amarillo, working for the Santa Fe railroad. Drawn by railway jobs, blacks began filtering into a corner of Texas largely free of the southern systematic mechanisms of racism; and Hooks worked with careful subtlety to preserve black plainsmen's rights. Through his ranching years Hooks had shaped a singular reputation not only as a horse breaker but also as a man of unshakable integrity and honesty. This gave him credit with Amarillo's power brokers, securing an honest hearing in pivotal circles and easing the way for Hooks's work in education, housing, social services, and economic advance for the city's black population.

Bruce Todd is an amateur historian, and Bones Hooks is his first book; the volume bears the imprint of those facts. While the paucity of available sources restricts the understanding of the man, his time, and his place, the emergent portrait of Hooks, if at points indistinct, is that of an extraordinarily capable and dignified cowhand who became an effective advocate for the black population of the High Plains.

JOHN L. ROBINSON 

Abilene Christian University