Here's a sampling of High Plains titles on Wyoming and the West: history, outlaws and lawmen, women, poetry, memoirs, and other perspectives of the West. For more information click on the image of the book.
Follow the Boys of Company K to Wyoming during the Civil War.
The inside story of the life of Butch Cassidy.
Poems that will change the way the world looks at women in ranching.
A side of the military you never read about the official U.S. Army Laundresses.
Did Tom Horn commit the murder of 14-year-old Willie Nickell for which he was hanged?
The story of the horse that became the symbol of Wyoming
Frontiersman Biography
A road trip for a cause...on a donkey.
High Plains Press has recently obtained the remaining copies of this hard-to-find and highly collectible reprint of Letters from Old Friends and Members of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association: Reminiscences of Pioneer Wyoming Cattle Barons in Their Own Words. The original pamphlet was printed in 1923 and was not reprinted until this 2004 edition.
In 1914, the Wyoming Stock Growers adopted a resolution to record the history of the Wyoming cattle industry by collecting memories of early day ranchers. Project chair Harry E. Crain requested that pioneers send him their stories of the old days on the range.
He received letter from eleven men and one woman. You may recognize some of the names: Thomas Durbin, Hiram Kelly, John Hunton, Horace Plunkett, William Sturgis, Lee Moore. Other names are less familiar, but their stories are just as compelling, colorful, and humorous—intentionally or otherwise.
Each letter is reprinted exactly as the cattle raisers wrote it with all the surprises and eccentricities of the writer and the times.
Lee Moore, never one to take himself too seriously, explains how he got into the cattle business. He writes that cattlemen were not following the law requiring them to brand their calves, so he “adopted some of those neglected yearlings and put my brand on them so that the cowboys would know whose they were, and also to increase my herd . . . until I discovered that the legal talent, so necessary for my business, was so expensive that my profit was not sufficient. . . .”
Nannie Clay Steels tells of arriving in Cheyenne when only twelve trees graced the dirt streets. She recalls Tom Horn, whom she nursed back to health after an illness, as “a man of refinement and education” and writes that she wished he’d arrived in Wyoming sooner, before her herd suffered losses to rustlers. In 2004 Medicine Wheel Books obtained permission from the Wyoming Stock Growers Association to reprint the book in an edition of only 500 numbered copies. The editor wrote a short biography and added a photograph of each of the correspondents. High Plains Press has acquired the remaining 350 copies of this 2004 edition. The hardcover book is protected by a specially made matching slipcase.
Note: Because of their rarity, these books will not be sold on Amazon.