Synopses & Reviews
Ed Lemmon managed the largest fenced pasture in the world (865,000 acres—an area larger than Rhode Island), bossed the single biggest roundup in history, held the record for the largest number of cattle (nine hundred) cut out, roped, and brought to the branding fire in a single day, and handled more cattle (more than a million head) than any other man.
Lemmon covered virtually every foot of range in western South Dakota and parts of Wyoming, Montana, and Nebraska on horseback and knew every important brand in the West. His recollections read like a who's who of the good old-bad old days: cattle kings and saddle tramps, stock detectives and cattle rustlers, stage-drivers and stage robbers, ranch wives and "scarlet poppies"—Ed Lemmon knew them all or had "heard tell."
Review
"[Lemmon's] exceedingly full life and pithy observations are vital to an understanding of Western America."—Choice CHOICE
Review
"Sparks with humor, bristles with the rattle of six-shooters and .30-30's, and takes the reader into cow camps, barrooms and brothels, the Johnson County War, Cheyenne when it was Hell on Wheels, and onto the biggest roundups the West ever saw."—The Roundup The Roundup
About the Author
Nellie Snyder Yost was the author of several volumes of cowboy history and reminiscences, including Pinnacle Jake. Richard W. Slatta is a professor of history at North Carolina State University. His books include Cowboys of the Americas and Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier, available in a Bison Books edition.