“Smoky the Cowhorse” – A Newberry Award-Winning tale of the West
By Refine Staff
Published on
May 9, 2026
Image by Zeale Staff
This article is part of a Zeale Lifestyle series featuring reviews of classic literature from the 1000 Good Books Project, started by a Catholic homeschooling family on a mission to bring an affordable, trustworthy, comprehensive library of audiobooks to families.
“Smoky let out a snort at the sight of the human and tore up the earth for the far side of the corral. Natural fear of the crethure had a hold on him and once against the solid bars he turned and quivering faced what he felt was his worst enemy. If Smoky could only knowed, . . . right then that human was just admiring him for all he was worth and that doing the little horse any harm was the furthest thing away from his mind. But the wild gelding had no way of knowing and every word that human was saying sounded to him like the growl of a flesh tearing animal, and every move was a step closer to the victim;—he was the victim.“
Smoky the Cowhorse tells the story of a horse, born in the wild, who becomes the best saddle horse and the toughest bronc around. Set at the end of the “Old West” in the early 1900s when cars and trucks were inexorably replacing the horse, Smoky is Will James’ homage to the deep relationship between man and horse that was slowly disappearing during his life. In the introduction to the book, James writes:
“The horse is not appreciated and never will be appreciated enough,—few humans, even them that works him, really know him, but then there’s so much to know about him. I’ve wrote this book on only one horse and when I first started it I was afraid I’d run out of something to write, but I wasn’t half thru when I begin to realize I had to do some squeezing to get the things in I wanted, and when I come to the last chapter was when I seen how if I spent my life writing on the horse alone and lived to be a hundred I’d only said maybe half of what I feel ought to be said.”
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Will James: Cattle rustler, convict, and a new man
Will James was born Joseph Ernest Nephtali Dufault in Quebec, Canada. He learned the cowboy arts in Saskatchewan, and later came into the United States. There he began to put his wrangling skills to poor use — he was arrested in Nevada for cattle rustling and sentenced to a year in prison.
He changed his name to Will James when he came to America and later wrote a book with an invented past, telling a tale of being born in Montana and adopted by an old fur trader.
In prison he began studying art, a pursuit that became his primary work in the following years. His drawings and paintings were primarily of western subjects and supplemented his continued work as a horseman.
In the early 1920s he began writing short stories and eventually novels. Smoky the Cowhorse, published in 1926, is the most famous of his 23 books, all of which he illustrated himself.
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A classic in undeserved obscurity
Will James, and Smoky the Cowhorse in particular, were initially very popular; in fact Smoky the Cowhorse has been adapted for the screen multiple times. The book was awarded the Newberry Award for distinguished contributions to Children’s Literature in 1927.
Nevertheless, in recent generations James’ writing has fallen into at least partial obscurity. We did not read him as children, and only encountered him through John Senior’s recommendation. John Senior, whose work inspires much of the 1000 Good Books Project’s efforts, had a particular love for the cowboy tale and the mythology of the west. When he was only 13 years old he ran away from his New York home and made his way to a cattle ranch in North Dakota where “cowboys still rode horses on roundups.” The ranch owner contacted his parents who prevailed upon him to return, but Senior came back to the ranch in the summers after that.
The Thousand Good Books Project thinks this book has an important place in the canon of Children’s Literature, and enthusiastically recommends it to each of you! Listen to a preview of their Smoky the Cowhorse audiobook here.
This audiobook and many other classics, including Aesop’s Fables, Winnie the Pooh, the Just So Stories, Tom Sawyer, Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, The Secret Garden, The Wind in the Willows, Sherlock Holmes, The Call of the Wild, The Three Musketeers, Sense and Sensibility, The Great Gatsby, A Tale of Two Cities, and others are being reintroduced to families through the efforts of the 1000 Good Books Project. Their affordable, trustworthy, comprehensive library of audiobooks is inspired by Professor John Senior’s list of what he termed the “thousand good books.” The 1000 Good Books Project hopes to give families the resources to form the minds and hearts of the next generation with the classic literature of the past. Check them out and see if audio books can be a window into a larger world of literature for you and your family!
