The Log of a Cowboy Author:Andy Adams For those readers who have grown up watching Westerns on television or in the movies and imbibing through them a vision of the Wild West - heroes and heroines, good guys and bad guys, guns and rustling - The Log of a Cowboy will reveal a whole new view of American experience in the West. Andy Adams departs from the sentimental tradition to show... more » the cowboy as he was historically, a man with a trade, concerned with the day-to-day problems of cattle on the move. And this diary, though it lacks the melodrama of blazing guns - the "horse opera" approach - contains the real drama of those times. For this reason it continues to be, in its quiet way, a key to the lives of those men on the trail and an important historical document.
Andy Adams was the kind of man his book describes, a real cowboy. At the age of twenty (1882), he went to Texas and from there, for the next ten years, followed the frontier as it pushed steadily across the country. Finally he settled in Colorado to write of his trail days. Among his other works are a collection of short stories, Cattle Brands, and a novel, The Outlet.« less