The Westerners: A Roundup of Pioneer Reminiscences

Two dozen pioneering men and women talk about life out west on the downward slope of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth. It was still rough and raw. Paul Gray rode the cattle trails of the Staked Plain, where “nobody asked anybody’s name” because “it wasn’t courtesy.” Jake Goss recalls the fuss when chickens raised on Salt Creek in western Colorado were found to have gold in their craws. J. Selby Batt’s father owned a general store in Wells, Nevada, where a lady could buy yards of ribbon and a gallon of whiskey. Other old-timers reminisce about characters like Bat Masterson and the Tabors, range wars, unpopular government representatives, wild longhorns and marauding wolves, boom towns turned ghostly, and unsolved mysteries. Here, too, are the voices of miners, schoolteachers, dentists, businessmen, traveling salesmen, journalists, and writers from frontier Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, and beyond. In an arena like this, “You could do anything you was big enough to do.”