Publisher's Synopsis
Old West Poems is a collection of western poems depicting the lifestyle of cowboys and their adventures in the great American West. At the end of the Civil War, Texas was literally "run-over" with wild cattle and since fences were unknown at the time, they free-ranged throughout the state. Beef cattle markets quickly opened up in the eastern United States and cattle drovers found lucrative markets for these wild cattle wherever the railroads existed. Abilene and Dodge City, Kansas, were two of the most popular destinations and from the late 1860s until the late 1880s hundreds of thousands of cattle, primarily longhorns, were driven to these railheads.
Old West Poems captures this era in poetry and many of the poems are historically accurate as to time and place. The cowboy mystique is not a shrinking phenomenon and the strength of their historical contribution to the opening of the west has not been lost. Cowboys are the subject of countless novels, works of art, scores of movies and plays, country-western music, and not the least, cowboy poetry. Old West Poems represents the romance and adventure of this era in verse. (Reprint of Wanted: The greatest cowboy poet.)
