From true cowhands who stood tall in the saddle as the prototypes of the American myth, historian Patrick Dearen has collected priceless, spellbinding stories of a simpler era when a man's word was his bond and a cowhand rode hard and lived harder. Within the pages of this book these genuine legends who rode through a golden moment in American history live on.

In a series of letters to his grandson, an elderly gentleman relates how he and his remarkable little dog traveled to America on an expedition to the Wild West to find the dog's grandfather, rumored to be living among cowboys following a successful moviecareer.

"A can't-put-it-down modern Western." —Kirk Siegler, NPR Longlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing The Last Cowboys is Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter John Branch’s epic tale of one American family struggling to hold on to the fading vestiges of the Old West. For generations, the Wrights of southern Utah have raised cattle and world-champion saddle-bronc riders—many call them the most successful rodeo family in history. Now they find themselves fighting to save their land and livelihood as the West is transformed by urbanization, battered by drought, and rearranged by public-land disputes. Could rodeo, of all things, be the answer? Written with great lyricism and filled with vivid scenes of heartache and broken bones, The Last Cowboys is a powerful testament to the grit and integrity that fuel the American Dream.

Includes an excerpt from Bad hombres (pages 293-315).

In the world of Western films, Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, and Audie Murphy have frequently been overlooked in favor of names like Roy Rogers and John Wayne. Yet these three actors played a crucial role in the changing environment of the post–World War II Western, and, in the process, made many excellent middle-budget films that are still a pleasure to watch. This account of these three Western stars’ careers begins in 1946, when Scott and McCrea committed themselves to the Western roles they would play for nearly twenty years. Murphy, who also joined them in 1946, would continue his Western career for a few years after his cohorts rode into the film sunset. Arranged chronologically, and balanced among the three actors, the text concludes with Audie Murphy’s last Western in 1967. Covering both the personal and professional lives of these three Hollywood cowboys, the book provides both their stories and the story of a Hollywood whose attitude toward the Western was in a time of transition and transformation. The text is complemented by 60 photographs and a filmography for each of the three.

In this romantic, humorous and harrowing novel, the acclaimed author of Make Believe Love returns to the epic skies and straight roads of Broken Head, Saskatchewan, and takes us into a very modern Western. Sam McMahon can’t understand why his banker colleagues in Toronto keep calling him “cowboy,” when he prefers opera to C&W and fine wine to beer. Sam’s wife is in love with his brother Vern, who has followed the family tradition and works their parents’ farm, a mixed cattle and crop operation inherited from his grandfather, Old Sam. When his wife leaves him stranded by the side of a Saskatchewan highway, Sam is rescued by a woman, Ai Lee, in a rented Toyota. Ai is a film location scout who’s searching for the perfect cliff for legendary director James Aspen’s new film, The Last Cowboy. Thirty years previously, Old Sam dreams of better days in an older West, mending fences, riding horses, raising cattle. To save young Sam, then 10 years old, from what he considers the malaise of the late-20th century, Old Sam drags him off into a blizzard on horseback. His goal is to save a lost cow and her new calf, which may or may not exist. Sam’s parents fear he’ll only manage to kill his grandson. When, only days later, the old cowboy wanders out of doors without his parka in the freezing cold, muttering about a lost boy, he’s rescued by a Native couple out in a “borrowed” car, who run afoul of the police and end up driving into their final sunset. When Ai hears their story from Sam, she thinks she’s found her perfect location. The Last Cowboy does much more than update the Western; it weaves together stories and generations and unveils, with beauty and compassion, the leap or fall that awaits us all. So I stretch back in permanent recline and do my best to travel off to a better day, a summer day back fifty years past, a few days after a big rain, so that everything was green except for the cuts in the draws where the runoff had chewed right through the grass. There was a glow to the world back then that has long since been lost. It is painfully elusive, that particular luminescence, but I sit here stubbornly trying to restore the shine of it. I begin with a sky that was as blue as the better skies now, and work my way down to the green, only a breath of a line of white dividing the earth from the heavens. -- from The Last Cowboy

No one is better suited to convey the flavor of the Old West than this authentic American original. At age 13, in the 1930s, Hyde ran away from home in Michigan to his uncle's ranch in eastern Oregon. Yamsi was one of the last great cattle ranches of the West. Soon the boy won the cowboys' respect. A natural bronco buster, he eventually became a rodeo rider, bull fighter, clown, and photographer, working all over the West with the likes of Slim Pickens, Rex Allen, and Mel Lambert. After the war, he took Yamsi over, ensuring its survival in changing times. Now, half a century later, he gives us his valedictory to that last great period of the Old West. Full of humor, rollicking stories, and love of the land, he pays homage to the cowboys, Indians, and great horses who made the West the legend it is.--From publisher description.