More than any other single work of western Texas historiography, The Quirt and the Spur helped shape the perception of Old Northwest Texas as a wild and woolly frontier. Rye, who intended the work to bring pleasure to old friends, never anticipated that it would be taken as history. Indeed, he anticipated that his more exacting reader would find his yarns to be "all wool and a yard wide". Nevertheless, in The Quirt and the Spur Rye successfully grasped at those "vanishing shadows" of the frontier past and set them down for posterity. Over the years, historians and writers have drawn upon the mythical Fort Griffin in their own works, and today Rye's opus is a staple in collectors' libraries.