DAKOTA COWBOY

by Ike Blasingame ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 3, 1958

This authentic and highly readable account of cowboy life in South Dakota in the early years of this century, told by one who lived through those days himself as a cowboy, holds little gunplay and nothing of trigger-happy sheriffs; instead it tells of life on a new cattle range, of cattle and the men who herded them. When in 1903 the Bureau of Indian Affairs leased the vast domain west of the Missouri in the Dakotas for the Indian Ward owners to the cattle interests, the great Texas cattle companies, among them the Matador Land & Cattle Company for which the author was working as a cowboy, immediately bid for the virgin grass lands and began sending cattle and employees north in great cattle ""spreads,"" the cattle to be fattened on the rich grass and then shipped east for slaughter. With the Matador cattle the author came to Dakota, knowing the owner, the fabulous Murdo MacKenzie of Scotland; for them and other companies he worked for some years. By 1904 a vast cattle empire had been established in South Dakota on lands once Indian reservations, but what the Indians thought of this is not recorded (some of them made fortunes out of cattle), for this book deals with cattle and cowboys, a town named Evarts, now vanished and never a rival of Dodge City, of killing blizzards and stampedes and cooks and plain hard work. Bearing no mark of the ghost and not always grammatical, this book should appeal to all addicts of ""western"" fiction and non-fiction. It should find a temporary place on the shelves of lending libraries and a permanent one in Western historical libraries.

Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1958

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1958

Categories: NONFICTION