Examines the role of the ranchers in shaping the American West and probes their contributions to the nation's cultural development

For fifty years the progressive Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company, popularly known as the Taft Ranch, led in the development of South Texas, and in the early twentieth century achieved national and international repute for its contributions to agriculture. The story of the ranch reaches its climax as the firm is absorbed into the community growing up around it—the same community the ranch had nurtured to an unprecedented prosperity. In 1961 A. Ray Stephens visited Taft, Texas, and received permission to use the dust-covered records, which for thirty years had been closed to historians. These records, plus the valuable supplementary material in the Fulton Collection at the University of Texas, have enabled the author to tell the complete story of the ranch from its inception in 1880 to its dissolution in 1930. In 1880, with a fifty-year charter, the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company was legally born as a private corporation. For the duration of its history this company aided the advancement of South Texas through effective utilization of the fertile land, through development of agriculture and related industries, and through encouragement of settlers and curious visitors to the Coastal Bend region. Its history is a long, determined fight against severe drought, cattle disease, and financial insolvency. Guided by farsighted men who believed in experimentation in agriculture—and who also promoted the establishment of stores, schools, colleges, churches, and industrial plants—the company not only survived but prospered, and by 1920 its owners could survey their vast properties with well-earned satisfaction. The struggling cattle firm of 1880 had expanded into a multi-interest, profitable corporation that had established and supervised most of the industries in Taft, Texas. Stephens' well-documented 1964 study had been long needed. During the three decades preceding it, the ranch had been well-nigh forgotten; only the handful of people, then still living, who had worked on the ranch had kept its memory fresh, while the voluminous company records remained inaccessible. The author supplemented his study of company records and newspapers with archival material, government records, and information obtained during hours of interviewing. His book will insure for the Taft Ranch its deservedly prominent position in Texas history. The lively introduction was written by Joe B. Frantz (1917–1993) who, in his role of Professor of History at the University of Texas, encouraged the study and watched its development.

The cowboy, America’s most popular folk hero, appeals to millions of readers of novels, histories, biographies, and folk tales. Cowboys command a vast audience on country radio, television, and at the movies, but what exactly is a cowboy? Authors Joe B. Frantz and Julian Ernest Choate, Jr., reveal the real, dyed-in-the-wool cowboy as a heroic being from the American past, who richly deserves to be understood in terms of reality, instead of myth. Here, then, is the definitive portrait of the American cowboy—in frontier history and in literature—reexamined, revitalized, and set in the proper perspective. Many exciting accounts of cowboy life have been presented by such talented writers as J. Evetts Haley, J. Frank Dobie, Wayne Gard, Walter Prescott Webb, Edward Everett Dale, Helena Huntington Smith, Ramon F. Adams, and C. L. Sonnichsen. But Frantz and Choate see the cowboy in relation to the entire panorama of western history and as part of a continuing tradition: “The American cowboy has carved a niche—niche nothing, it’s a gorge—in American affection as a folk hero, and in this role we have surveyed him.” The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality is illustrated with sixteen pages of the great cowboy photographs made more than a century ago by Erwin E. Smith.