The Look of the Old West: A Fully Illustrated Guide

Illustrated with images of sabers, steamboats, handguns, hats, saddles, and more, this is a valuable resource for historians, re-enactors, costumers, and others. With encyclopedic knowledge and an extensive collection of Old West memorabilia handed down to him from Civil War veterans, cowboys, frontiersmen, and Native Americans, William Foster-Harris truly understood what the days of cowboys and trail drivers looked and felt like. His book offers the fashions and feel of the Old West from the end of the Civil War through the 1890s by detailing the styles of the period; military dress for the Union and Confederate armies; weaponry of the time; and more. Illustrated with clear, precise drawings to assist the descriptions, few books present a better idea of how the West really looked.

"Practically a how-to-do-it of western life--everything from saloon cuspidors to the Deadwood stagecoach."--Time

William Foster-Harris was many things in his lifetime, including an educator, an oilman, the editor of an oil-related newspaper, and an author. He founded the Oklahoma Professional Writing Award in 1963 to honor life's achievement of "literary excellence in the Oklahoma manner."Evelyn Curro was born Evelyn Rose Malone, on December 19, 1907, in Indian territory, just outside Spokane, Washington. When her mother died in 1930, Evelyn took her five-year-old half-sister and went to South America to stay with a family friend. While working as a secretary to a newspaper sportswriter in Panama in 1932, she met and married Anthony Curro, a visiting American prizefighter, and in 1933, she gave birth to their daughter Marta, in Mexico City. After returning to the states in 1935, the couple eventually divorced, and, living in San Francisco with her daughter, Evelyn Curro began to become well-known, as "Evelyn Curro, Cable Car Artist", for her drawings of same, and later  Victorian architecture, fire engines, railroad cars, circus wagons, automobiles, and paddle wheel steamboats. In 1970 she moved to Portugal, where she lived until her death in 2005.