A gallery of Texas's historic dance spots, in words and images

In 1870, sixteen-year-old Frank Maynard left his home in Iowa and arrived in Towanda, Kansas, where he soon took a job helping to trail a small herd of cattle from Missouri to Colorado. Thus began his adventures as an open-range cowboy, a ten-year career that coincided with the peak of the great trail-drive era. Among the highlights of Maynard s time on the range were brushes with outlaws and encounters with famous lawmen, such as Bill Tilghman and Bat and Ed Masterson (he was in Dodge City when Ed was shot). On one drive Maynard was set upon and chased by irate German homesteaders; on...

"Words that spring from a deep intimacy with the land"
From the Texas panhandle to the mountains of Arizona, Amy Auker has lived the cowboy lifeas wife, as mother, as cook, as ranch hand, as writer. In fine-grained detail she captures the prairie light, the traffic on small farm-to-market roads, the vacant stillness of shipping pens when fall works are over. But she also captures the unmistakable westernness of the people and animals around her: the son who must get back on the horse, the husband who gives great gifts, the horses whose names and temperaments are as recognizable as...

"From the book"
At the end of our visit in the big snow, I hiked the mountain behind Dad s house with my brother, stepping into his size 13 footprints. With trail signposts long buried, we kept to the main road, a route once used for logging. Although almost every trip home included this steep climb, I d never hiked it in two feet of snow. The muffled whiteness made it difficult to tell how far we d come, how much farther we had to go. More than once I sat on a log saying I d stay there and wait for Ken, whose long strides made it look easy, to go up without me. Each time I did this, he...

"From the book"
At the end of our visit in the big snow, I hiked the mountain behind Dad s house with my brother, stepping into his size 13 footprints. With trail signposts long buried, we kept to the main road, a route once used for logging. Although almost every trip home included this steep climb, I d never hiked it in two feet of snow. The muffled whiteness made it difficult to tell how far we d come, how much farther we had to go. More than once I sat on a log saying I d stay there and wait for Ken, whose long strides made it look easy, to go up without me. Each time I did this, he...

Glenn Ohrlin (1926-2015) was a cowboy singer, working cowboy, rodeo rider, storyteller, and illustrator. In The Hell-Bound Train he has gathered dozens of his favourite songs, which chronicle the range and rodeo life he lived. Most of his repertoire comes from the period of 1875 to 1925.