During April in 1884, I took Horace Greeley s advice and headed for the big, open spaces in Wyoming. After dodging brakemen night and day, sleeping in boxcars, and living on crackers part of the time, I arrived in Cheyenne, after being incarcerated in a boxcar of lumber for twenty-four hours without food or water. Oh, yes, the old stomach felt as though it had gone on a prolonged vacation, while thirst had become a habit. Searching through my pockets, I found a lone fifty-cent piece, the only cash between me and starvation. Leaving the station yards, I found an eating joint where I filled up, but when I left that restaurant, I was broke and no job in sight. Roundups, trail drives, a lynching, mail-order romances, blacksmithing, Indians, the blizzard of 1885-86, bunkhouse humor, Calamity Jane, cattle barons Reuben Mullins experienced the West as it will never be again. This first-hand account, told by a man who lived the life, has become a respected range classic.

Pulling Leather: Being the Early Recollections of a Cowboy on the Wyoming Range, 1884-1889

Biographies & Memoirs

Mullins, Reuben B.

Historical

High Plains Press

Jane Coleman absorbed the American West -- the startlingly rich, resonant world of Belle Starr, Geronimo, Chicken Jo, Archie and Edith, Sacajawea, the Jesus wagon, mountains, trails, plains, and mesas -- and distilled it into the fine, vibrant poetry of No Roof But Sky. Coleman is a storyteller, a historian, and a poet.

No Roof But Sky: Poetry of the American West

Literature & Fiction

Coleman, Jane Candia

Poetry

Candy and Flossie Moulton present the story behind this horse whose likeness is the symbol of Wyoming seen on the state s license plates and as the University of Wyoming logo. The book traces the history of the bucking horse from his youth on the Two Bar outfit of the Swan Land and Cattle Company through his rise to the undisputed World Champion Bucking Horse. Was Steamboat the horse who wouldn t be rode? Which men climbed aboard the horse? Who is the cowboy atop the horse on the famous logo on the Wyoming license tag? How is Steamboat connected to Cheyenne Frontier Days, the notorious range detective Tom Horn, and the Irwin Brothers Wild West Show? You ll find the answers here.

Steamboat, legendary bucking horse: His life & times, and the cowboys who tried to tame him

Moulton, Candy Vyvey

What is this mysterious link between the land and the people of the American West? Barbara Allen Bogart traveled the West searching for the stories people tell about the places in which they live. She interviewed grizzled old-timers and wide-eyed newcomers. She dug through dusty boxes in archives looking for stories lost with time. In Place records the stories she found, written in the voices of the storytellers themselves. Sit down with them and hear tales of the West first-hand accounts of blizzards and bears, arid deserts and roaring floods, brides who stayed and those who didn t, tragic deaths and remarkable survival. Hear the story of the American West told by people who have experienced it. To share a place through story is to find a bond that cannot be broken while the place is there. As we tell and listen to stories about a place, we come to understand its effects on us. how its weather, its shapes and scents, its patterns of light and shadow, its colors and forms have imprinted us with that sense of familiarity that makes us call it home and makes us feel as though we somehow belong there.

In Place: Stories of Landscape & Identity from the American West

Bogart, Barbara Allen

History & Criticism

Jane Candia Coleman's first book of poetry, No Roof But Sky, was received with enthusiasm by critics and readers alike.The Red Drum, winner of a 1994 Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, expands on that rich tradition. Here are poems that are eloquent, earthy, and exact in their insight into the unsentimental reality of the American West.

The Red Drum: Poetry of the American West

Levendosky's poems invite us to step into a circle of light which illuminates our way and strips away the insignificant from a world of confusion, complications, and darkness.

Circle of Light

Levendosky, Charles

Robert Roripaugh was Appointed by Governor Jim Geringer as Poet Laureate of Wyoming in 1995, capping Roripaugh's distinguished career as a poet and educator. Today, he continues to enjoy traveling the region promoting literature as poet laureate. High Plains Press is pleased to issue a reprint-edition of Learn to Love the Haze.

Learn to Love the Haze

Roripaugh, Robert

Self-Help

Badmen on the Wyoming frontier? Many were lynched, but seven were legally hanged. You are respectfully invited to attend the executions. Badmen thrived in Wyoming Territory, but law and legal processes also existed. The frontier was so civilized that those men sentenced to hang were allowed to issue formal invitations to their executions. Read of the true stories of the crimes, lawmen, capture, investigations, escapes, trials, and deaths of the seven men legally hanged in Wyoming Territory, in this the second of Brown s trilogy on frontier crime.

You Are Respectfully Invited to Attend My Execution: Untold Stories of Men Legally Executed in Wyoming Territory

Brown, Larry K.

"Still, in a way, nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small, we haven't time, like to have a friend takes time."  Georgia O'Keeffe said it and she took time to look closely at things, seeing and painting close-ups like no one else. Mary Lou Sanelli writes like O'Keeffe paintedclose to the heart of things, close at hand.  In this collection of poetry Sanelli writes about friendships, about journeys, and about moving on.

Close at Hand: Poetry of the American West: Northwest Chapters

Sanelli, Mary Lou

The West found in Linda Hasselstrom's poems is neither the mythical Old West nor the New West of ranchettes and trophy homes. Hasselstrom's aria is set to the rhythms of the authentic West, laced with lyrical realism, and distilled to the sharp crispness of a plains morning.  Here you'll find the night heron whose "slender beak descends, a sudden hammer on a silver spine." You'll "give yourself sunsets]]in shades of pink and gold" while "long tatters curl eastward like discarded ribbons."

Bitter Creek Junction (Poetry of the American West)

Hasselstrom, Linda M.

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