Joe Beeler – illustratör

This collection of tales and traditions from the Southwest includes stories of lost mines stacked with bars of gold, mule loads of silver cached away in outlaw hoards, and fabulous Jesuit treasures buried when that order was expelled from New Spain. Some treasure locations would be rediscovered by chance or by an old map-and somehow always lost again.But not all these folk teasures are of material wealth. There is the story of a nun who loved a soldier and repented, and whose kneeling figure may still be seen as a mountain rock formation. There is the Hermit of Las Vegas, an actual person who, after traveling between Argentina and Quebec, settled in New Mexico, where he became the subject of affectionate legends.

One of the last Old-time cowboys here tells his own story: his boyhood in Texas, wandering from ranch to ranch in the Southwest, the trek to Montana with a trail herd, and his life thereafter among the people and ranches of the area. His account is full of anecdotes, humorous or tragic, which themselves illuminate facets of a way of life that is no more.Bob Kennon knew the Ketchums, Kid Curry, and Western artist Charles M. Russell, who was his friend, as well as many prominent ranchmen of his day.""Perhaps I am the last living rider of those boys who, in 1896, came up that long trail to Montana from what was then the largest ranch in the world, the Terrazas Ranch in Old Mexico,"" he begins. And he goes on to tell just what the cowboy business was really like not only on the trail and the range, but in the wild, infrequent visits to town, encounters with camp cooks and titled Englishmen, rodeo performances, and all that belongs to the cowboy's existence. The smell of the bunkhouse and the atmosphere of the range pervade every page.