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La Vie D'un Cow-Boy dans l'Ouest Américain Vers 1870

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Brief history of cowboys in the new world from 1521 to early 1900's. Includes several Charlie Russell prints, Fredric Remington, diagrams of chuck wagon set-up, diagrams of cattle herding, and bl/wh photos from the time period.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

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About the author

Kenneth Raymond Peters Ulyatt lived latterly in Poole, Dorset.

He attended art college prior to World War II, during which he served in the RAF, seeing action in the Middle East. It was there that he met his future wife, Pat.

After the war he returned to England and worked as a commercial artist, as well as helping out in his parents' public house in Chesham, Buckinghamshire. He and Pat moved to Poole in the late 1960s.

He had a great interest in art, jazz, literature and movies, particularly westerns, and the old west, which he began writing about in the mid-1960s.

He said of himself: "I have always been lucky enough to earn my living at the two things I most like doing - writing and drawing. And I have always been interested in the frontier days in America; both as a boy, when I was a keen scout and camper, and later, when I began reading the history of the West rather than its fiction. When TV came along and we watched westerns, my children would ask me: `Was it really like that?' and as often as not I would have to say `no.' So I began to write my
first western: a story in which the Indians did not bite the dust and the cavalry were defeated. It was a true story.

"And I think that it was because I tried hard to make that past, which
I found so exciting, vibrant for young readers that the Portugee Phillips trilogy became so successful. The subject of the West, too, transcends frontiers. Portugee Phillips now rides in nine European countries, from Finland to Italy."

He died in Poole on 8 November 2008, aged 88.

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Profile Image for Gerry.
Author 43 books120 followers
May 29, 2014
An excellent little book, well illustrated in colour and black and white by some of the great artists of the west such as Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, Wilhelm ('Big Bill') Koerner and Karl Bodmer plus photographs by the legendary photographer of cowboy life Erwin E. Smith.

It gives a great understanding of the development of the cowboy from the arrival of the Spanish Conquistador Gregorio de Villalobos, who arrived with a small herd of cattle in 1521 through to the virtual end of the cowboy as we understand him. Indeed, Kenneth Ulyatt tells us 'The day of the cowboy was a short one, perhaps thirty years at the most.'

The book also explains the great trek west, the herding of cattle on such as the Chisholm Trail, the Goodnight-Loving Trail and others plus explaining the role of Joseph M. McCoy, a famous Illinois cattle dealer, whose name is now remembered when the phrase 'The real McCoy' is used.

How the cowboys lived, ate, herded their cattle, numbers of which grew in Kansas from 93.455 in 1860 to 1,533,133 in 1880, and how they related to the Indians, plus background to the Gunfight at the OK Coral (a very short gunfight!), how 'the land of the Tejas', who were the Indians so called by the Spaniards because they were allies or friens, became Texas are also fully explored in an admirable book that is a great, easy to follow introduction to the subject.
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