E. A. Brininstool — Collected Poems
Earl Alonzo Brininstool built two remarkable literary lives in Los Angeles. First he was a newspaperman and comic poet, ventriloquizing a telephone operator in Sonnets of a Telephone Girl and turning bunkhouses, broncos, desert winds, trail songs, cowgirls, homesteaders, motion pictures, and the vanishing open range into the large dialect collection Trail Dust of a Maverick. He was not himself a working cowboy; his West came through journalism, observation, friendship, reading, and a gift for dramatic speech. Later he became a prodigious collector, editor, photographer, and popular historian of the Indian Wars and the Little Bighorn. This edition prints the twenty-one telephone sonnets, all 119 poems in the 1914 Trail Dust, and the eleven genuinely new poems added to the revised 1921 edition, preserving the first book’s historical sequence while avoiding duplicate reprints.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Bibliography
Brininstool, E. A. Sonnets of a Telephone Girl. Illustrated by John C. Hill. Times-Mirror Printing and Binding House, 1903.
———. Trail Dust of a Maverick: Verses of Cowboy Life, the Cattle Range and Desert. Introduction by Robert J. Burdette. Dodd, Mead and Company, 1914.
———. Trail Dust of a Maverick. 2nd ed., introductions by Robert J. Burdette and George Wharton James, E. A. Brininstool, 1921.
———. A Trooper with Custer, and Other Historic Incidents of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Hunter-Trader-Trapper Company, 1925.
———. Fighting Red Cloud’s Warriors: True Tales of Indian Days When the Amazing Adventures of the Fighting Cavalrymen Who Opened the West Were the Glory of Every Youngster’s Dreams. Hunter-Trader-Trapper Company, 1926.
———, editor and arranger. David L. Spotts, Campaigning with Custer and the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry on the Washita Campaign, 1868–’69. Wetzel Publishing Company, 1928.
———. “Chief Crazy Horse, His Career and Death.” Nebraska History, vol. 10, nos. 1–2, 1929, pp. 4–42.
———. The Custer Fight: Captain F. W. Benteen’s Story of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, June 25–26, 1876. Privately published, 1933.
———. Major Reno Vindicated. Privately published, 1935.
———. Dull Knife (A Cheyenne Napoleon). Privately published, 1935.
———, editor and arranger. John K. Rollinson, Pony Trails in Wyoming: Hoofprints of a Cowboy and U.S. Ranger. Caxton Printers, 1941.
———. Crazy Horse: The Invincible Ogalalla Sioux Chief. Wetzel Publishing Company, 1949.
———. Troopers with Custer: Historic Incidents of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Stackpole, 1952.
———. Fighting Indian Warriors: True Tales of the Wild Frontiers. Stackpole, 1953.
Brininstool, E. A., and Grace Raymond Hebard. The Bozeman Trail: Historical Accounts of the Blazing of the Overland Routes into the Northwest, and the Fights with Red Cloud’s Warriors. 2 vols., Arthur H. Clark Company, 1922.
Standing Bear, Luther. My People the Sioux. Assisted and photographed by E. A. Brininstool, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928.