Walter Prescott Webb identifies the revolver, barbed wire, and the windmill as technological adaptations that facilitated Anglo conquest of the arid, treeless region of the Great Plains.

Cowboys are an American legend, but despite ubiquity in history and popular culture, misperceptions abound. Technically, a cowboy worked with cattle, as a ranch hand, while his boss, the cattleman, owned the ranch. Jacqueline M. Moore casts aside romantic and one-dimensional images of cowboys by analyzing the class, gender, and labor histories of ranching in Texas during the second half of the nineteenth century. As working-class men, cowboys showed their masculinity through their skills at work as well as public displays in town. But what cowboys thought was manly behavior did not always match those ideas of the business-minded cattlemen, who largely absorbed middle-class masculine ideals of restraint. Real men, by these standards, had self-mastery over their impulses and didn’t fight, drink, gamble or consort with "unsavory" women. Moore explores how, in contrast to the mythic image, from the late 1870s on, as the Texas frontier became more settled and the open range disappeared, the real cowboys faced increasing demands from the people around them to rein in the very traits that Americans considered the most masculine. Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

The transformation of the American West is one of the key topics in the study of both US history and global environmental history. The role of ranching in the West is also central to the growing field of animal history. This volume covers the periods between the early Indigenous acquisition of horses in the eighteenth century, to the introduction of Hispanic horsemanship techniques and market cattle in the “Old West,” and finally to the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century ranching families sustaining their ways of life. The documents in this volume reveal not simply the human past but also the distinct histories of cattle, horses, and the land. Readers will explore intersecting themes of capitalism and beef, environmental change, rural labor, and gender and racial politics as debated by westerners themselves, as well as the meaning and power of the cowboy myth in American life. The introduction incorporates recent scholarship and provides a fresh look at this key topic in American history, while informative headnotes and rich annotations help orient the reader within the historical sources.

A vast and desolate region, the Texas–New Mexico borderlands have long been an ideal setting for intrigue and illegal dealings—never more so than in the lawless early days of cattle trafficking and trade among the Plains tribes and Comancheros. This book takes us to the borderlands in the 1860s and 1870s for an in-depth look at Union-Confederate skullduggery amid the infamous Comanche-Comanchero trade in stolen Texas livestock. In 1862, the Confederates abandoned New Mexico Territory and Texas west of the Pecos River, fully expecting to return someday. Meanwhile, administered by Union troops under martial law, the region became a hotbed of Rebel exiles and spies, who gathered intelligence, disrupted federal supply lines, and plotted to retake the Southwest. Using a treasure trove of previously unexplored documents, authors James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely trace the complicated network of relationships that drew both Texas cattlemen and Comancheros into these borderlands, revealing the urban elite who were heavily involved in both the legal and illegal transactions that fueled the region’s economy. Confederates and Comancheros deftly weaves a complex tale of Texan overreach and New Mexican resistance, explores cattle drives and cattle rustling, and details shady government contracts and bloody frontier justice. Peopled with Rebels and bluecoats, Comanches and Comancheros, Texas cattlemen and New Mexican merchants, opportunistic Indian agents and Anglo arms dealers, this book illustrates how central these contested borderlands were to the history of the American West.

One hundred fifty years ago the McCoy brothers of Springfield, Illinois, bet their fortunes on Abilene, Kansas, then just a slapdash way station. Instead of an endless horizon of prairie grasses, they saw a bustling outlet for hundreds of thousands of Texas Longhorns coming up the Chisholm Trail—and the youngest brother, Joseph, saw how a middleman could become wealthy in the process. This is the story of how that gamble paid off, transforming the cattle trade and, with it, the American landscape and diet. The Chisholm Trail follows McCoy’s vision and the effects of the Chisholm Trail from post–Civil War Texas and Kansas to the multimillion-dollar beef industry that remade the Great Plains, the American diet, and the national and international beef trade. At every step, both nature and humanity put roadblocks in McCoy’s way. Texas cattle fever had dampened the appetite for longhorns, while prairie fires, thunderstorms, blizzards, droughts, and floods roiled the land. Unscrupulous railroad managers, stiff competition from other brokers, Indians who resented the usurping of their grasslands, and farmers who preferred growing wheat to raising cattle all threatened to impede the McCoys’ vision for the trail. As author James E. Sherow shows, by confronting these obstacles, McCoy put his own stamp upon the land, and on eating habits as far away as New York City and London. Joseph McCoy’s enterprise forged links between cattlemen, entrepreneurs, and restaurateurs; between ecology, disease, and technology; and between local, national, and international markets. Tracing these connections, The Chisholm Trail shows in vivid terms how a gamble made in the face of uncontrollable natural factors indelibly changed the environment, reshaped the Kansas prairie into the nation’s stockyard, and transformed Plains Indian hunting grounds into the hub of a domestic farm culture.

Of the canyons that break the eastern edge of the Staked Plains, Palo Duro is by far the most spectacular. As one approaches the edge, the earth opens up into a vast gash, a geological and ecological wonder. And whether you come to Palo Duro as a novice or veteran canyoneer, the thrill and the mystery are always intense. How did the canyon get here? What caused the vari-color of the walls and formations? Why do some formations stand completely separated from the canyon walls? Did the little stream running along the canyon floor form this canyon all by itself? Who were the first people to find this canyon and how did they react? On this last question imagination goes to work and contemplates what ancient people must have felt when they, even less aware than we, stumbled upon the chasm rim and quickly realized that they had found a bonanza, an immense concentration of water, wood, game, and protection--all they needed to sustain life.--Frederick W. Rathjen Originally published as an edition of the Panhandle Plains Historical Review, The Story of Palo Duro Canyon, with its seven essays devoted to geology, archeology, paleontology, vegetation, park development, and the amphitheater, and its road log from Canyon, Texas, through the Palo Duro State Park, has become a classic. This Double Mountain Books edition, with a new introduction by Frederick W. Rathjen, makes 04 Activeable once again a comprehensive discovery and invaluable memento for the many thousands who visit the park each year.

In 1904, Eugene J. TenBrink, a second-generation immigrant from the Dutch enclave of West Michigan, traveled to the Great Plains to see the "American West" for himself. He found work with a bonanza farm in Mayville, North Dakota; a cattle ranch in Miles City, Montana; and a sheepherding outfit outside of Sheridan, Wyoming. Although seemingly mundane and unremarkable, Eugene *lived* the tremendous social, economic, and technological changes that were occurring throughout the United States in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century. Farm laborer, ranch hand, sheep foreman, and cowpuncher were roles Eugene filled during his time out West (1904-1910) and through which his life gives us insights into a country undergoing profound transformation.