Westerns may have had their heyday, but they remain popular. The greatest films from 1914, when The Squaw Man and The Virginian were among the genre's best, through 2001, when American Outlaws and Texas Rangers were tops, are the subject of this work. For each year, the author names the outstanding western films in the following categories: picture, screenplay (original and adaptation), direction, cinematography, music, male and female leading roles, and male and female supporting roles. Also for each year, the author lists the westerns that received Academy Award nominations (and those that won), makes note of the births and deaths of notable actors, directors, producers, composers, cinematographers, authors and other such personalities, and describes the genre's significant achievements.

In 1914, a young midwesterner quit his railroad job to crack the Hollywood motion picture boom. Impressed by his energy and honesty in his role as Lincoln, D.W. Griffith made him his assistant for Intolerance. Griffith then made Joe a director. He swiftly progressed to a preeminent position in the industry, directing some of the biggest Hollywood stars of the 1920's including Douglas Fairbanks, Fatty Arbuckle, and Rudolph Valentino. Versatility played an important role in Joe's rich creative life inside the studios. His understanding of the mechanics of motion-picture film led him to develop and be granted a patent for teaching speech to the deaf by visualizing sound. He pioneered sound short-subjects for the Vitaphone Studios in Brooklyn and later directed WWII training films for the Army Signal Corps in Astoria. Henabery contributed, not only as a director, but also as a researcher, writer, make-up artist/actor, architect, scenic designer, and special-effects innovator. His autobiography, Before, In and After Hollywood was completed in 1975 shortly before his death. Contains 24 black and white photographs.

Erwin and Painted Post are home to major facilities of Corning, Inc., formerly known as Corning Glass Works, a company that made a powerful impact on Erwins history. In Erwin, folks poured steel, tried out the exotic 1920s military vehicle seen on the cover, and attended family Christmas parties at Ingersoll-Rand. Many of these photographs come from before those high-tech and heavy-industry days, when men rafted lumber down to Gang Mills and farmers relied on equipment that required more horses than men. Over 200 years, Painted Post folks erected four figures of Native Americans. They all still exist and are captured in images here, as are Painted Post High School, the Townsends Grove Post Office, the Erwin familys fine homes, and life in Coopers Plains, both then and now. A century and a half of railroading and a century of floodsincluding the catastrophic Hurricane Agnes in 1972have altered the landscape. Images of Colonial Days, drill teams, old-time grocery stores, Costas Field, and even the Civilian Conservation Corps recall a bygone time in local history.