Traces the history of the cattle industry from its beginning in Mexico to the present.

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.

This first comprehensive biography of Charles M. Russell examines the colorful life and times of Montana’s famed Cowboy Artist. Born to an affluent St. Louis family in 1864, young Russell read thrilling tales of the West and filled sketchbooks with imagined frontier scenes. At sixteen he left home and headed west to become a cowboy. In Montana Territory he consorted with cowpunchers, Indians, preachers, saloon keepers, and prostitutes, while celebrating the waning American frontier’s glory days in some 4,000 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculptures. Before his death in 1926, Russell saw the world change dramatically, and the West he loved passed into legend. By then he was revered as one of the country’s ranking Western artist with works displayed in the finest galleries, his romantic vision of the Old West forever shaping our own. Taliaferro reveals the man behind the myth in his multifaceted complexity: extraordinarily gifted, self-effacing, charming, mischievous, and playful, a friend to rough frontier denizens and Hollywood stars alike. The author also explores Russell’s controversial partnership with his fiery young wife, Nancy, whose ambition and business savvy helped establish Russell as one of America’s most popular artists.

The cowboy, America’s most popular folk hero, appeals to millions of readers of novels, histories, biographies, and folk tales. Cowboys command a vast audience on country radio, television, and at the movies, but what exactly is a cowboy? Authors Joe B. Frantz and Julian Ernest Choate, Jr., reveal the real, dyed-in-the-wool cowboy as a heroic being from the American past, who richly deserves to be understood in terms of reality, instead of myth. Here, then, is the definitive portrait of the American cowboy—in frontier history and in literature—reexamined, revitalized, and set in the proper perspective. Many exciting accounts of cowboy life have been presented by such talented writers as J. Evetts Haley, J. Frank Dobie, Wayne Gard, Walter Prescott Webb, Edward Everett Dale, Helena Huntington Smith, Ramon F. Adams, and C. L. Sonnichsen. But Frantz and Choate see the cowboy in relation to the entire panorama of western history and as part of a continuing tradition: “The American cowboy has carved a niche—niche nothing, it’s a gorge—in American affection as a folk hero, and in this role we have surveyed him.” The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality is illustrated with sixteen pages of the great cowboy photographs made more than a century ago by Erwin E. Smith.

Annotation Before Owen Wister's publication of The Virginian in 1902, the image of the cowboy was essentially that of the dime novel. This title details the evidence that Everett Johnson a cowboy from Virginia who had been a friend of Wister's in Wyoming in the 1880s, was the initial and prime inspiration for Wister's cowboy.

Presents, in text and illustrations, an overview of the life and legend of the American cowboy.