'Real Western Americana buffs are going to love this book and even casual readers should be tickled by it. Myers is wise enough to intrude little, letting the reminiscences of old-timers stand on their own merits' - "Library Journal". Two dozen pioneering men and women talk about life out west on the downward slope of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth. It was still rough and raw. Paul Gray rode the cattle trails of the Staked Plain, where 'nobody asked anybody's name' because 'it wasn't courtesy'.Jake Goss recalls the fuss when chickens raised on Salt Creek in western Colorado were found to have gold in their craws. J. Selby Batt's father owned a general store in Wells, Nevada, where a lady could buy yards of ribbon and a gallon of whiskey. Other old-timers reminisce about characters like Bat Masterson and the Tabors, range wars, unpopular government representatives, wild longhorns and marauding wolves, boom towns turned ghostly, and unsolved mysteries. Here, too, are the voices of miners, schoolteachers, dentists, businessmen, traveling salesmen, journalists, and writers from frontier Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, and beyond.
In an arena like this, 'You could do anything you was big enough to do'. John Myers Myers interviewed his subjects during the late 1960s. He is also the author of "The Alamo", "Bravos of the West", "Doc Holliday", "Tombstone's Early Years", and "The Saga of Hugh Glass: Pirate, Pawnee, and Mountain Man".
- ISBN10 0803282362
- ISBN13 9780803282360
- Publish Date 1 June 1997
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 2 June 2021
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Nebraska Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 258
- Language English