This book is about the life of cowboys on cattle drives and other experiences they endured. It is about hard times and good times and making lifelong friends including Black, White, Mexican, American Indian, and a woman trail boss. It is about facing hostile Indian attacks and rustlers and the battles that ensued, and about sheer bravery and fear when facing down another man in a gunfight. It is also about a quiet, shy young cowboy falling in love and marrying the girl of his dreams and working on a ranch. It includes flashbacks interrupting the chronological order of the main narrative to take the reader back in time to the past events in a character's life. It explores notable historical figures and time periods in these settings. Considering the cowboy code #4 "Do what has to be done," most of the men and women in this novel served their country in times of conflict and distress. It discusses the family's lineage, patriotism and war service including the Mexican War, Civil War, Indian wars of 1876, Spanish American War, WW1, WW2, the Korean Conflict, and Vietnam.

This book is about the life of cowboys on cattle drives and other experiences they endured. It is about hard times and good times and making lifelong friends including Black, White, Mexican, American Indian, and a woman trail boss. It is about facing hostile Indian attacks and rustlers and the battles that ensued, and about sheer bravery and fear when facing down another man in a gunfight. It is also about a quiet, shy young cowboy falling in love and marrying the girl of his dreams and working on a ranch. It includes flashbacks interrupting the chronological order of the main narrative to take the reader back in time to the past events in a character's life. It explores notable historical figures and time periods in these settings. Considering the cowboy code #4 "Do what has to be done," most of the men and women in this novel served their country in times of conflict and distress. It discusses the family's lineage, patriotism and war service including the Mexican War, Civil War, Indian wars of 1876, Spanish American War, WW1, WW2, the Korean Conflict, and Vietnam.

E. C. Abbott was a cowboy in the great days of the 1870's and 1880's. He came up the trail to Montana from Texas with the long-horned herds which were to stock the northern ranges; he punched cows in Montana when there wasn't a fence in the territory; and he married a daughter of Granville Stuart, the famous early-day stockman and Montana pioneer. For more than fifty years he was known to cowmen from Texas to Alberta as "Teddy Blue." This is his story, as told to Helena Huntington Smith, who says that the book is "all Teddy Blue. My part was to keep out of the way and not mess it up by being literary.... Because the cowboy flourished in the middle of the Victorian age, which is certainly a funny paradox, no realistic picture of him was ever drawn in his own day. Here is a self-portrait by a cowboy which is full and honest." And Teddy Blue himself says, "Other old-timers have told all about stampedes and swimming rivers and what a terrible time we had, but they never put in any of the fun, and fun was at least half of it." So here it is—the cowboy classic, with the "terrible" times and the "fun" which have entertained readers everywhere. First published in 1939, We Pointed Them North has been brought back into print by the University of Oklahoma Press in completely new format, with drawings by Nick Eggenhofer, and with the full, original text.

"I've known about Ike Blasingame all my life, knew many of his fellow punchers, white and Indian. Ike was certainly a salty representative of the Texas bronc twister when he came North with that most romantic of cow outfits, the British-owned Matador. . . . [He] takes the reader across the treacherous Missouri River as the spring-softened ice goes out under the horses' feet, into the still wild cow towns, through the round-ups, the prairie fires. . . . There is the authentic smell and feel of the Northern cow country of fifty years ago in the story Ike Blasingame tells."-Mari Sandoz"Here is one of the most gripping Western tales since Andy Adams' The Log of a Cowboy was published in 1903. The telling is considerably like Adams'-warm, human, flavorful. The author, a one-time Matador ranch cowboy, . . . lived his story, and he tells it straight in the language of the cow country without contrivance."-New York Times"Many of the cowboys who have written about their experiences never really looked at any wider segment of the cattle business than was visible between their horses' ears, but Ike Blasingame did. He paints a big picture without omitting details."-New York Herald-Tribune

Over 450 entries provide information on cowboy history, culture, and myth of both North and South America.