Photographs of early ranch life, with Introduction.

Rattlesnakes and ornery horses, the dreaded Texas Itch, midnight rambles in graveyards, trips to Mexico, and hard riding on the last open range: George Philip recounts all these adventures and more with wit and humour. George Phillip arrived in South Dakota from Scotland in 1899. For the next four years, he rode as a cowboy for his uncle's L-7 cattle outfit during the heyday of the last open range. But the cowboy era was a brief one, and in 1903 Philip turned in his string of horses and hung up his saddle to enter law school in Michigan. In these candid letters, Philip provides fascinating insights into the development of the West and of South Dakota. His writing details the cowboy's day-to-day work, from branding and roping to navigating across the palins by stars and buttes, as the great open ranges slowly closed up.

"A Texas Cowboy" subtitled as "Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony" is one of the few books which offers a true look into the life of a real cowboy and that too written by someone who had actually lived the life. Excerpt: "While ranching on the Indian Territory line, close to Caldwell, Kansas, in the winter of '82 and '83, we boys—there being nine of us—made an iron-clad rule that whoever was heard swearing or caught picking grey backs off and throwing them on the floor without first killing them, should pay a fine of ten cents for each and every offense. The proceeds to be used for buying choice literature—something that would have a tendency to raise us above the average cow-puncher..." Charlie Siringo was an American lawman, detective and agent for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

Offers twenty-four essays about African American men and women who worked in the Texas cattle industry from the slave days of the mid-19th century through the early 20th century.

Family tale set in Southern Texas.

"A Texas Matchmaker" is a romantic adventure novel set in Texas at the beginning of the last century. The novel shows the simple life of ranch people on good and bad days, describing the hard and, sometimes, dangerous work and romantic adventures. It is an account of the Western life from a genuine Western Trail cattle driver, responsible for some of the best and most realistic accounts of cowboy life in literature.