Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West

"The best all-around study of the American cowboy ever written. Every page crackles with keen analysis and vivid prose about the Old West. A must-read!" -- Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

The open-range cattle era lasted barely a quarter century, but it left America irrevocably changed. Cattle Kingdom reveals how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We meet a diverse cast, from cowboy Teddy Blue to failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. This is a revolutionary new appraisal of the Old West and the America it made.

"Knowlton writes well about all the fun stuff: trail drives, rambunctious cow towns, gunfights and range wars . . . [He] enlists all of these tropes in support of an intriguing thesis: that the romance of the Old West arose upon the swelling surface of a giant economic bubble . . . Cattle Kingdom is The Great Plains by way of The Big Short." -- Wall Street Journal

"Knowlton deftly balances close-ups and bird's-eye views. We learn countless details . . . More important, we learn why the story played out as it did." -- New York Times Book Review

"The best one-volume history of the legendary era of the cowboy and cattle empires in thirty years." -- True West

Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Knowlton, Christopher
Published: 06/05/2018
Publisher: Mariner Books
ISBN: 9781328470256
Pages: 464
Weight: 0.82lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.30w x 1.60d