"Age and size ain't got nothin' to do with it," Mack's daddy once said. "You gotta want to be a cowboy." Mack Hughes wanted to be a cowboy, all right, and he was just twelve years old when he went to work for the famous Hashknife spread in northern Arizona. Growing up on the range, Mack lived a life about which modern boys can only wonder. He spins yarns of bad horses and the men who rode them, tells of wild dogs that ravaged young calves, and recalls lonely winter weeks spent at a remote camp-where his home was a shack so flimsy that snow blew through the cracks and covered his bed. Stella Hughes, author of the best-selling Chuck Wagon Cookin' and a cowhand in her own right, has compiled from her husband's reminiscences an authentic look both at Arizona history and at cowboying as it really was. Illustrated by Joe Beeler, founding member of the Cowboy Artists of America.

For more than 140 years, the Hash Knife brand has intrigued Western history lovers. From its rough-and-ready-sounding name to its travels throughout Texas, Montana, and Arizona, the Hash Knife sports a romance like few others in the cattle industry. Several outfits have been proud to call the brand their own, and the stories behind the men who worked for these companies are the epitome of Western lore and truth combined. Beginning in 1884, the Hash Knife--owned by the Aztec Land and Cattle Company--came to Arizona. The brand left a lasting impression on places like Holbrook, Joseph City, Winslow, and the famed OW Ranch while shaping Northern Arizona. From its historic roots to the famed Hash Knife Pony Express Ride that takes place each January, the Hash Knife has left its mark as a beloved mainstay of the American West.

When Gloriana comes to Arizona to visit her tenderfoot brother Jim, trouble is rampant. The notorious Hash Knife Outfit of rustlers and gunmen are stealing the ranchers' cattle and terrorizing the beautiful valley. Guns will blaze and blood will run hot and red before Goloriana and her brother have a chance to become true and valiant citizens of the frontier Wild West...

For more than 140 years, the Hash Knife brand has intrigued Western history lovers. From its rough-and-ready-sounding name to its travels throughout Texas, Montana, and Arizona, the Hash Knife sports a romance like few others in the cattle industry. Several outfits have been proud to call the brand their own, and the stories behind the men who worked for these companies are the epitome of Western lore and truth combined. Beginning in 1884, the Hash Knife--owned by the Aztec Land and Cattle Company--came to Arizona. The brand left a lasting impression on places like Holbrook, Joseph City, Winslow, and the famed OW Ranch while shaping Northern Arizona. From its historic roots to the famed Hash Knife Pony Express Ride that takes place each January, the Hash Knife has left its mark as a beloved mainstay of the American West.

"Unique in the breadth of its appeal to students and aficionados of the American West. A well-wrought microcosm of ranching in the early West, a 'must' read for scholars and western buffs alike."--Francis L. Fugate, former president, Western Writers of America "The first serious and in-depth account of one of the West's largest and most renowned cow outfits [and] a history of the romantic and colorful cowboy culture . . . rustling and robberies, gunfights and Indian skirmishes."--James Babbitt, Northern Arizona University Old-time western action and adventure punctuate this history of cowboy life and commerce, the story of a large-scale cattle-ranching business when ranges were still unfenced and cattle drives raised dust from Texas to Montana. The author traces the development of the Hash Knife outfit--its brand, its owners, and its hell-for-leather cowboys--through three Texas ranches (one with its own Boot Hill and a foreman who wore chaps with cartridge loops that dangled to his knees), a vast Montana range, and a two-million-acre spread in northern Arizona. On one level the book is a business history based on exhaustive research in archival sources. The Hash Knife's fortunes wax and wane through complex financial deals, droughts, and hard Montana winters as the investment focus shifts from Texas to New York to Arizona. On the ranges themselves, however, and on the trails and in the cowtowns and saloons, the Hash Knife cowboys were writing their own kind of history--of brand changing and Indian skirmishes, train robberies and gunfights. A few Hash Knife cowboys were inadvertently part of the Pleasant Valley war between Arizona cattlemen and sheepmen. In Montana, the great tribal warrior Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses appealed to the U.S. government to rid the Sioux of the Hash Knife cowboy who was stealing their horses. The book includes over a hundred rare drawings, newspaper ads, brand registrations, and photographs of sheriffs, cowboys, range work, and roundups, among them a sequence of Hash Knife cowboys exhuming a gunshot comrade from his grave to give him one final shot of whiskey. This vivid narrative of Western culture will be appreciated by all students of the history and lore of the American frontier as well as by scholars interested in the economics of large-scale cattle ranching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jim Bob Tinsley has been a working cowboy and a performer, collector, and more recently a preserver of cowboy music. His many works on southern and western subjects include He Was Singin' This Song (UPF, 1981), Florida Cow Hunter: The Life and Times of Bone Mizell (UPF, 1990), and For a Cowboy Has to Sing (UPF, 1991).

Published for devotees of the cowboy and the West, American Cowboy covers all aspects of the Western lifestyle, delivering the best in entertainment, personalities, travel, rodeo action, human interest, art, poetry, fashion, food, horsemanship, history, and every other facet of Western culture. With stunning photography and you-are-there reportage, American Cowboy immerses readers in the cowboy life and the magic that is the great American West.

When Jo Jeffers was a young girl suffering from asthma, she promised herself, "When I grow up, if I ever do, I shall go to Arizona and be a cowboy." She did both, and Ranch Wife tells the story of her life as wife and partner of a rancher in the high country of northeastern Arizona. Here she describes the routines of ranch life and vividly recalls the dust storms, plagues, and other hazards that challenged the young city-bred woman. It offers readers not only an insider's view of a working ranch but also an appreciation of how ranchers' wives help sustain such a rugged enterprise.