The Cowboy

Gone are the long trail drives and the danger of Indian raids. Long since past are the battles with sheepmen and sod-busters. But ranching still continues in the West and vast herds of cattle roam the ranges from Texas to Oregon, Arizona to Wyoming and waypoints. Hundreds of thousands of cattle need to be tended. And the man who does the tending is the cowboy, working at one of the dustiest, wettest, coldest, bone-rattling, muscle-stretching, unbelievably demanding, sun-up to sun-down jobs ever invented by man. In photographs of extraordinary quality and color, Robert Reynolds brings you the cowboy today. He rode with cowhands throughout the West, sharing their life and long hours--rolling out before dawn to photograph the wrangler bringing in the remuda, swallowing dust and smoke in the branding corral, stopping to take a close-up of a wild flower and managing to get an evening campfire on film. The marks of weather show on the grayed fence post, the gnarled hands and the squint lines from facing wind and sun. You can almost hear the creak of saddle leather. Here are scenic panoramas with the sky so big, the horizon so distant that you feel the majesty of the cowboy's world and see the setting in which romantic legend grew. For this is the land which nurtured America's greatest folk hero. And today's cowboy is a worthy heir.--From jacket flap