Cowboys and Kansas: Stories from the Tallgrass Prairie

In Cowboys and Kansas, Jim Hoy educates and entertains us with essays and tales about cowboy life that are based on personal experience, folklore, and history. Introduced to cowboys-famous and obscure, historical and contemporary-we hear them tell about troublesome horses they have ridden, rattlesnakes they have encountered, and outlaws they have met. We experience the details of the cowhand's daily work (roping, counting, and shipping cattle, riding with a trail herd) and play (rodeos, horse races, roping contests, poetry). We meet women drovers, Wild West show riders, and jockeys in a section on cowgirls, and we learn the history of cowboy boots, pants, hats, and saddles. "Cowboys and Kansas offers . . . a vibrant, fascinating facet of the modern American West. It will have a broad appeal for the general history reader and to the fan of western or range life. To the folklorist and social historian, it is a mother lode of primary source material."-Lawrence Clayton, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, Hardin Simmons University "This is a very enjoyable and instructive collection of writings from a proud native son. Kansans will swell with pride. Others will find fascinating tidbits to compare with cowboy and ranch life elsewhere in the West."-Richard W. Slatta, Journal of the West. Jim Hoy is Professor of English at Emporia State University. He is the coauthor, with Tom lsern, of Plains Folk: A Commonplace of the Great Plains and Plains Folk II: The Romance of the Landscape, both published by the University of Oklahoma Press.