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Summary: Splendid Photohistory of the American Cowboy
Comment: If you're a Cowboy and Western History enthusist you might be disappointed in how slim Mr. Collins' volume is - it is one of those wonderful books that make the reader wanting more.
Still he captures the essence of the American Cowboy in that brief period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning years of the 20th Century. Using archival photos by Charlie Belden, L.A.Huffman, and others, and coupling it with a splendid but terse essay, Collins adequately captures the life and the spirit of the American Cowboy; the cattle drives, the chuckwagon, the campfires, the loneliness,the ranch life, the joys and sorrows,including the extremely sad photo of a large group of cowboys surrounding the gravesite of a dead pardner. This last photo is even more poignant when one considers that even when that photograph was taken, the time of the individualistic cowboy riding the open range itself was coming to an end.
A beautiful coffee-table book for anyone who loves the history of the cowboys or for those who wanted to know what it was like back then between the opening of the trails and the closing down of the frontier. Mr. Collins' book, coupled with renowned photographer Jay Dusard's works of contemporary images of cowboys, would make an awesome two-pack gift for all who wished they could be a Hoppy, Gene, Roy, or Teddy Blue Abbott and Andy Adams.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wonderful collection of historic cowboy photographs
Comment: There are 110 pages of vintage photographs in this oversize book, by a half-dozen or so early photographers working with bulky equipment out on the plains during the years of open rangeland. Most of the photographs chosen for this book date from 1885 into the first decades of the 20th century, with a few as recent as the 1930s. Besides herding, driving, and working cattle and horses, which have become familiar images over the years, the editor has included shots of meal-time and preparation of food at the chuckwagon. Some of these are nights shots, lighted by the campfire. There are shots of cowboys with fiddles and guitars, one a younger man on a cot in a cabin, the photograph rich with details: the layers of worn blankets on the cot, the cowboy's big white hat, the two shirts he's wearing, the cuffs of his jeans turned up, two pairs of boots (the more beat-up pair shoved against one corner of the cot), a towel hanging against the log wall behind him, and a copy of Liberty magazine lying open on a seat in the foreground. There are cowboys on horseback performing the remarkable trick of drinking water from their hat brims. (One of these is on the cover.) There are many groups shots of men lined up to face the camera. Two of them from early 1880s Montana show artist and writer Charles Russell. Another shows over 30 men at a cowboy's funeral, hats off, standing around a patch of freshly turned prairie sod, two of them holding shovels. A group of ten trail cowboys from the XIT ranch sit for a portrait shot, two with revolvers drawn in their laps, each of them dressed very differently. There are two studio portraits of individual cowboys from the 1890s, one of them with long, shoulder-length hair, the other a fresh-faced youth, with silk scarf, woolly chaps, leather gloves with wide cuffs, gunbelt, and a monogrammed shirt with big medallion buttons. There are a few shots of cowboying in winter, taken in the 1920s and 30s. In one remarkable two-page spread, a cowboy on his horse watches a long, long line of Herefords moving across a landscape totally whited out by snow. Also interesting are shots of early ranch houses and cow camp cabins, one of them against the eroded rocks of the Missouri Breaks. The opening essay by Bob Edgar, curator of The Museum of the Old West, Cody, Wyoming, gives a general overview of the period, focusing on the cattle drives and talking briefly about the career of one dedicated photographer, Charles Belden. For more of a historical background to go with the photographs, there is Andy Adams' "Log of a Cowboy," "Cowboy Life" by William Savage, Jr., Ramon Adams' book about chuckwagons and the camp cook "Come an' Get It," and Larry McMurtry's novel "Lonesome Dove." For another book of vintage photographs of the Old West, look at "The Early Days in Jackson Hole" by Virginia Huidekoper.
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