Cattle kingdom
Subtitle: the hidden history of the cowboy West
By: Christopher Knowlton
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 426
ISBN-13: 9780544369962
Subjects: Social life and customs; Cattle trade; Frontier and pioneer life; Ranch life; History
Description: "A revolutionary new appraisal of the Old West and the America it made. The open-range cattle era lasted barely a quarter century, but it left America irrevocably changed. These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades. Cattle Kingdom reveals the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We venture from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakota Badlands to the Chicago stockyards. We meet a diverse array of players--from the expert cowboy Teddy Blue to the failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. Knowlton shows us how they and others like them could achieve so many outsized feats: killing millions of bison in a decade, building the first opera house on the open range, driving cattle by the thousands, and much more. Cattle Kingdom is a revelatory new view of the Old West."--Jacket.

Describes the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 393-407) and index.
Table of contents: title: Part one: Birth of a boom. The demise of the bison ; Cattle for cash ; Birth of the cattle town ; Cattle-town high jinks ; Lighting the fuse ; Cowboy aristocrats; title: Part two: Cowboys and cattle kings. From stockyard to steakhouse ; The rise of Cheyenne ; Barbed wire : the devil's rope ; Frewen's castle ; The nature crusader; title: Part three: The boom busts. Teddy Blue and the necktie socials ; Mortal ruin ; Poker on joint-stock principles ; The big die-up ; The fall of Cheyenne; title: Part four: Nails in the coffin. The rustler problem ; Nate Champion and the Johnson County War ; The cowboy president ; The closing of the range ; Failed second acts ; Myths of the Old West; title: Afterword: "Unhorsed for good."