Includes bibliographical references.

This is a collection of writings from the 19th and early 20th centuries about cowboys and cattle drives after the Civil War. The book includes a large selection of full-page monochrome photographs of working cowboys, dating back to the 1880s. Readers can trace the emergence of the cowboy as mythic figure, from his origins as a wild, unsavory character often regarded as a public menace in the frontier towns for his hard drinking and shoot-em-up antics. And you get a sense of how cowboys on the range (most of them very young) were an elite fraternity of workmen, with specialized skills and a code of behavior that stoically honored bravery, while spending lavishly on saddles and the latest fashions in trail-wear. You also get a sense of how brief this period of history actually was, as the frontier swiftly moved westward and open rangeland was fenced in.