Follow a day in the life of cowboys and cowgirls as they carry out their everyday duties caring for and herding cattle. This book reveals the history of cowhands and how the job has changed over time. Readers will make a language arts connection while learning interesting vocabulary relating to cowhands and ranch life.
Grab your cowboy hat and saddle up! Early elementary readers learn about all the responsibilities it takes to be a cowhand and a ranch hand as they read through this captivating nonfiction title. Featuring plenty of vibrant photographs in conjunction with informational facts about cattle, cowboys, and rodeos, this book will have readers engaged and eager to learn more! This 6-Pack includes six copies of this title and a lesson plan.
Rattlesnakes and ornery horses, the dreaded Texas Itch, midnight rambles in graveyards, trips to Mexico, and hard riding on the last open range: George Philip recounts all these adventures and more with wit and humour. George Phillip arrived in South Dakota from Scotland in 1899. For the next four years, he rode as a cowboy for his uncle's L-7 cattle outfit during the heyday of the last open range. But the cowboy era was a brief one, and in 1903 Philip turned in his string of horses and hung up his saddle to enter law school in Michigan. In these candid letters, Philip provides fascinating insights into the development of the West and of South Dakota. His writing details the cowboy's day-to-day work, from branding and roping to navigating across the palins by stars and buttes, as the great open ranges slowly closed up.
Read Along or Enhanced eBook: Grab your cowboy hat and saddle up! Early elementary readers learn about all the responsibilites it takes to be a cowhand and ranchhand as they move through this captivating nonfiction title. Featuring plenty of vibrant photographs in conjunction with informational facts about cattle, cowboys, and rodeos, this book will have readers engaged and eager to learn more!
Readers brought up on Hollywood westerns will have their eyes opened by this story of a working cowboy. Although he never chased a rustler or rescued a pretty girl and probably couldn't even hire on as an extra in a B-grade western, Ed Alford (or "Fat") has worked cattle most of his life. Fred Gipson's vivid, earthy book about this cowhand, now in paperback, tells what the job is really like, the hardships, the hell-raising, and the sheer monotony of daily tasks.Fat Alford became a cowboy because he didn't think picking cotton was any way for a man to make a living. Although he may not have looked much like a cowboy and certainly started out green, he learned to rope a cow in an impenetrable brush, to break a mean horse, to get by with poor gear, worse food, and sorry mounts in freezing cold or blistering heat and still get the job done.Gipson's warm and rousing account captures the vivid reality of how it was and introduces us to a remarkable character--a working cowhand. This new paperback edition of Cowhand is sure to delight a whole new generation of readers.
"I've known about Ike Blasingame all my life, knew many of his fellow punchers, white and Indian. Ike was certainly a salty representative of the Texas bronc twister when he came North with that most romantic of cow outfits, the British-owned Matador. . . . [He] takes the reader across the treacherous Missouri River as the spring-softened ice goes out under the horses' feet, into the still wild cow towns, through the round-ups, the prairie fires. . . . There is the authentic smell and feel of the Northern cow country of fifty years ago in the story Ike Blasingame tells."-Mari Sandoz"Here is one of the most gripping Western tales since Andy Adams' The Log of a Cowboy was published in 1903. The telling is considerably like Adams'-warm, human, flavorful. The author, a one-time Matador ranch cowboy, . . . lived his story, and he tells it straight in the language of the cow country without contrivance."-New York Times"Many of the cowboys who have written about their experiences never really looked at any wider segment of the cattle business than was visible between their horses' ears, but Ike Blasingame did. He paints a big picture without omitting details."-New York Herald-Tribune
In February of his forty-fourth year, journalist David McCumber signed on as a hand on rancher Bill Galt's expansive Birch Creek spread in Montana. The Cowboy Way is an enthralling and intensely personal account of his year spent in open country—a book that expertly weaves together past and present into a vibrant and colorful tapestry of a vanishing way of life. At once a celebration of a breathtaking land both dangerous and nourishing, and a clear-eyed appreciation of the men—and women—who work it, David McCumber's remarkable story forever alters our long-held perceptions of the "Roy Rogers" cowboy with real-life experiences and hard economic truths. In February of his forty-fourth year, journalist David McCumber signed on as a hand on rancher Bill Galt's expansive Birch Creek spread in Montana. The Cowboy Way is an enthralling and intensely personal account of his year spent in open country—a book that expertly weaves together past and present into a vibrant and colorful tapestry of a vanishing way of life. At once a celebration of a breathtaking land both dangerous and nourishing, and a clear-eyed appreciation of the men—and women—who work it, David McCumber's remarkable story forever alters our long-held perceptions of the "Roy Rogers" cowboy with real-life experiences and hard economic truths.
Thousands of black cowpunchers drove cattle up the Chisholm Trail after the Civil War, but only Nat Love wrote about his experiences. Born to slaves in Davidson County, Tennessee, the newly freed Love struck out for Kansas after the war. He was fifteen and already endowed with a reckless and romantic readiness. In wide-open Dodge City he joined up with an outfit from the Texas Panhandle to begin a career riding the range and fighting Indians, outlaws, and the elements. Years later he would say, "I had an unusually adventurous life". That was rare understatement. More characteristic was Love's claim: "I carry the marks of fourteen bullet wounds on different parts of my body, most any one of which would be sufficient to kill an ordinary man, but I am not even crippled". In 1876 a virtuoso rodeo performance in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, won him the moniker of Deadwood Dick. He became known as DD all over the West, entering into dime novels as a mysteriously dark and heroic presence. This vivid autobiography includes encounters with Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid, a soon-after view of the Custer battlefield, and a successful courtship. Love left the range in 1890, the year of the official closing of the frontier. Then, as a Pullman train conductor he traveled his old trails, and those good times bring his story to a satisfying end.