Texas Cowboys

Bland beef washed down with Arbuckle coffee, dusty trails where cattle strayed, and camaraderie on the prairie all had a share in the favored way of life for early cowhands. The thirty-three Depression-era interviews presented here were culled from the WPA-Federal Writers' Project. They faithfully show how old-time Texas cowhands lived and how they felt about their glamourless existence. These were the men and women - blacks and Mexican Americans as well as Anglos - who helped ranchers as renowned as King, Kenedy, Slaughter, and Waggoner shape the open rangeland into economic empires. Their stories, as they themselves told them, are beautifully enhanced by early ranching photographs.