Out on the range, rattlesnakes don’t bother John R. Erickson much. They’re a part of life on the M-Cross Ranch, Erickson’s home and working cattle operation, in the rough country of the northeastern Texas Panhandle. But the rattler under the porch of his writing cabin is a different story.
“They’re good at killing mice,” he mutters, grabbing his Ruger .22 pistol. “But they’re also good at killing cowdogs.”
Erickson knows from experience: a few years ago, he lost a pup named Bones to a snakebite. He doesn’t intend to let that happen again. Which is why, one morning in July, the 77-year-old writer lowers himself onto his belly until he is eye level with an unhappy coontail rattlesnake...
...Some mornings, “work” might mean scribbling replies to fan mail—piles of it—at the folding table that serves as his desk. Other days, he might jot some notes in his journal. But more often than not, he spends the next four or five hours sunk deep into a faded, dust-covered armchair, pecking at the keyboard of his laptop. He works on articles for livestock journals, essays for various websites, and nonfiction books about ranching, cowboying, Texas history, wildfires, and Panhandle archaeology. And twice a year, as the sun eases over the eastern rim of Picket Canyon, Erickson types these words: “It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog.”
That sentence—one of the most compelling in literature to anyone who’s been a third-grader in Texas in the past thirty years—has begun 75 books and counting of the children’s series Hank the Cowdog, which is narrated by an Australian shepherd who tells of his misadventures as the self-deputized head of ranch security. Hank takes the job (and himself) very seriously. But the truth is, he’s often more bluster than brains. “It’s very subtle humor. Half the time the narrator is lying,” Erickson tells me, “and the other half he doesn’t know what he’s talking about because he’s a dingbat.”
...Since Hank and Drover made their debut in 1983, the series has sold some 9.5 million copies and continues to be in brisk demand at bookstores and libraries. Hank has been translated into Chinese, Danish, Farsi, Spanish, and, as of last year, Latin. There have been stage, television, and radio adaptations, and whenever Erickson makes live appearances, kids and their parents line up to hear him read from the books and to sing along to the original songs that Erickson writes to go with them. Classics include “Cats Are Stupid,” “Me Just a Worthless Coyote,” and “Never Rope a Cow From the Hood of a Pickup.”
...From his mother, Anna Beth Curry Erickson, he inherited a love of storytelling. She would tell him, his older brother, and his younger sister about their family history, which went back five generations in Texas. Some of the tales were gruesome. In 1860, for instance, Erickson’s great-great-grandmother, Martha Sherman, was murdered in a Comanche raid about a hundred miles south of Wichita Falls. Her son, a Shakespeare-quoting cowboy named Joe Sherman, was among the first to run cattle on the Llano Estacado. In 1890, he registered the brand Erickson uses today, the M-Cross. Joe Sherman also met a violent end: in 1917, a neighbor shot him over a disputed watering hole.
His mother’s plainspoken narratives were more interesting to Erickson than the hundreds of books his parents crammed into their home. He was a slow reader, and few authors held his interest. The one exception was Mark Twain. Twain’s novels, especially those featuring Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, were packed with adventure and wordplay—and, best of all, Twain was funny. Most of the time, Erickson preferred to be playing pirates or Alamo with the neighborhood boys. But his best friend was a mutt named Frisky. “Frisky and I shared a bedroom on the second floor of our old house on Amherst,” Erickson writes in a 2018 book, Finding Hank. “When Frisky and I were alone, I talked to him, just as though he were a person, and felt that he understood and ‘talked’ back with his eyes, ears, and tail.”
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