Customer Reviews

Arizona Cowboys

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Western writer and photographer Dane Coolidge (1873-1940), cousin of Calvin, grew up on a citrus ranch in Riverside County, California, and knew old-time cowboys first hand. This book about Arizona cowboys, first published in 1938, takes place in central Arizona, where Coolidge spent some time on the open range at the turn of the last century, taking photographs as a cover, he says, for gathering material for his writings about the West. There are 36 photographs in this book, most of them showing these cowboys at work. The thread of discourse that holds them together is an account of their struggle with sheepherders, who dominate the range and are quick to use any means - legal or illegal - to keep out the cattlemen. Meanwhile, the grasslands are decimated by overgrazing, and drought and flood take their toll on the land and the cattle.

Coolidge devotes much of his book to a young cowboy Johnny Jones, who keeps his cattle alive through a prolonged drought by chopping down palo verde trees and saguaro cactus for them to eat. A great story teller, Johnny gets a whole chapter for his monologues about cowboying. There are accounts of roundups of wild cattle, stampedes, feuding cattlemen, painful encounters with cactuses, Teddy Roosevelt's efforts at conservation by creating National Forests, and the story of the Lost Dutchman gold mine, where the secret of its location in the Arizona mountains seems to have been buried with the many men who lived and died knowing how to find it. An enjoyable, detailed description of "cactus cowboys" working a century ago in the dust and heat of the open range.