AnyBook4Less.com	Find the Best Price on the Web Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money Keyword AuthorISBN

Title: Cowboy Life: Reconstructing an American Myth by William W. Savage Jr. ISBN: 0-87081-293-9 Publisher: University Press of Colorado Pub. Date: August, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95

Your Country USA Canada United Kingdom Australia Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Netherlands Switzerland Currency AutoUSD CAD GBP EUR AUD CHF Delivery Only cheapest delivery All delivery options Include Used Books Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Home on the Range
Comment: This is a collection of writings from the 19th and early 20th centuries about cowboys and cattle drives during the "Lonesome Dove" years 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. Readers will learn a great deal about the hard work and dangers of cowboying. 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.

My favorite selections in the book are accounts by the cowboys themselves, describing the day-to-day routines and the occasional adventures of life on the trail. Among these is an excerpt from cowboy author, Andy Adams, whose "Log of a Cowboy" is a classic of Western literature. The editor of the collection, William W. Savage, Jr., who holds a PhD from the University of Oklahoma, has written an informative introduction based on what seems to be considerable familiarity with the subject of the American West.