"Here is the book of western pictures I have been waiting for. It is a book of photographs by Erwin Smith, who took a camera to cow camps in the early years of this century, before the old life in the saddle was entirely dead and gone. He made the best pictures of that life I ever saw.... If you love the land, and the herds at grass, and the men who rode horses, this is your book."
—Tom Lea
"Smith is to range-land photography what Mathew Brady was to Civil War photography."
—Houston Post
"Along with Andy Adams, Philip Ashton Rollins, Ross Santee, and the artist Charles M. Russell, Erwin Smith belongs in the great tradition of interpreters of the real cowboy."
—Saturday Review
"Every student of the West should savor this book and every library with a serious emphasis on Western Americana should purchase it . . ."
—Journal of the West
First published in 1953, this photographic record of the real life and work of cowboys remains a perennial favorite. Erwin E. Smith was the outstanding cowboy photographer of the West, and these eighty photographs were among those he chose for an exhibit of his best work at the 1936 Texas Centennial. The text by J. Evetts Haley, a noted historian of the range, skillfully complements Smith's visual record of a vanishing way of life.
