Horrors of Being a Cowboy in 1880

My book, The Times You Grew Up With, takes you back: https://paulmcallister.store A dollar a day, two thousand longhorns, and a thousand miles of open prairie between South Texas and the railhead at Dodge City. This is the real story of what it cost to be a cowboy on the Great Western Trail in 1880 — the stampedes, the river crossings at the Red and the Canadian, the night guard shifts, the rattlesnakes, the thirty-dollar monthly wages while the cattle owner cleared a fortune. The trail drives built the American West, but the men who rode them were used up and forgotten. From the spring roundup in the brasada to the saloons south of the tracks in Dodge City, this is the season as the cowboys actually lived it. Sources: E. C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott & Helena Huntington Smith, We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher (1939) Charles A. Siringo, A Texas Cowboy; or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony (1885) Andy Adams, The Log of a Cowboy: A Narrative of the Old Trail Days (1903) George C. Duffield, trail diary, 1866, published in the Annals of Iowa (1924) J. Marvin Hunter, ed., The Trail Drivers of Texas (originally compiled by George W. Saunders, 1920–23) J. Frank Dobie, Cow People (1964)