For those readers who have grown up watching Westerns on television or in the movies and imbibing through them a vision of the Wild West – heroes and heroines, good guys and bad guys, guns and rustling – The Log of a Cowboy will reveal a whole new view of American experience in the West. Andy Adams departs from the sentimental tradition to show the cowboy as he was historically, a man with a trade, concerned with the day-to-day problems of cattle on the move. And this diary, though it lacks the melodrama of blazing guns – the “horse opera” approach – contains the real drama of those times. For this reason it continues to be, in its quiet way, a key to the lives of those men on the trail and an important historical document.

A classic fictional chronicle of life on the open trail, The Log of a Cowboy has long been considered the best and most reliable account of real cowboy life ever written.

In the years following the Civil War, sixteen-year-old Andy Adams left his home in the San Antonio Valley and took to the range. Here he charts his first journey as a bona fide cowboy, from south Texas to Montana along the western trail. Guided by his plainspoken, sure-saddled voice and the living, breathing feel of firsthand experience on every page, we relive dusty cattle drives, perilous river crossings, honor-based gunfights, and narrow escapes from buffalo stampedes, not to mention tall tales passed around the campfire and such unforgettable characters as Bull Durham and Bill Blades.