fraternity”—the photographers such as Belden, Huffman, Koerner,
Smith, and Kendrick—who recorded images of cattle drives, frontier towns,
roundup camps, cowboys on the range, chuck wagons, and horses and cattle.
They probably knew that they were recording for posterity both a dramatic and
emotive period in history and a changing country, in this case the cattlemen’s
frontier, which existed from the end of the Civil War to the early part of the twentieth
century.
Through selections from museums and state historical society collections,
THE AMERICAN COWBOY puts together a stirring series of images that capture the
movement of life on the range. Now, as our frontier extends itself into a new
millennium with disparate concerns, THE AMERICAN COWBOY offers an evocative
message of “a dream and a forgetting, a chapter forever closed.”