This edition of the book contains 18 unique, period photographs.
The cowboy has long been romanticized. We seem to feel that the "good" cowboy must be a heroic figure who always has a likeable but bumbling sidekick, and who, against all odds, saves the fair maiden, the bank, the stagecoach payroll, and the entire town, simultaneously, with snap shots of almost unbelievable accuracy from his must-be-hundred-shot revolver, all the while riding his horse wearing his white, ten-gallon hat, strumming his guitar and singing, "Oh, Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie," in a memorable baritone.
If the cowboy wasn't a Good Guy, he had to be a "bad" guy - an Outlaw. You could always tell the Outlaw from the Good Guy -- the Outlaw wore a black hat, was named something like "Bad Curly Jack," and was forbidden from riding a white horse: The Lone Ranger's horse, Silver, would never let the Outlaw climb into his saddle! Only a few occupations were open to the Outlaw -- rustling cattle, robbing trains, banks, and stagecoach payroll, or stealing the Greenhorn's or City Slicker's stake by cheating at the widly-popular cowboy card game, Go Fish. Rustling cattle was the most popular occupation because if a duststorm or blizzard came up, the Outlaw could always eat some of his booty. Cash ill-gotten by robbing a bank, for example, was easier to transport, but if you were trying to stay warm on a cold, winter night, you couldn't get a long-lasting fire by burning greenbacks.
The The Outlaw wasn't always bad, either. While he was a deadly shot when shooting at the average man, he deliberately missed the Good Guy. And, even if he kidnapped the pretty bank teller, he would treat her with great courtesy, even in the worst of times. It is not widely known that an Outlaw who rustled cattle AND kidnapped a pretty bank teller would always offer her the choice piece of beef when the blizzard struck and they were pinned down.
The book offered here discusses what actually made a "cowboy," as well as describing cowboy weaponry, clothing, saddles and equipment; the "cowboy character"; and a cowboy's work. Rollins also describes the history of ranching in the United States, the raising of horses and cattle, livestock rustling, and more.
* This e-book is a true representation, hand-transcribed from a high-definition scan of a pre-1923 print version of the book. Unlike other e-copies of the book, it was not produced by using Optical Character Recognizion (OCR). OCR-scanning old books is seldom, if ever, error-free. This often results in an e-book with many **, ^^, >> and typographic errors when OCR can't read the word or punctuation correctly.
* "True representation" means that if there are typographic, spelling, or grammatical errors that the editor judges to have minimal impact on the book's comprehension, they are preserved; otherwise, they are corrected.
* In other words, no changes or as few as possible have been made to either illustrations or text in order to bring you an e-book that is as close to the original as possible.
