Cowboys North and South

When first published in 1924, Cowboys North and South was eagerly accepted by a public hungry to know more about cowboys and the West. Not since Mark Twain had anyone been so successful in capturing a slice of Americana.



Now this classic collection of cowboy stories is available for the first time as an ebook. New readers from around the world can discover that Will James’s writing and artwork remain as fresh and vital today as when he first set his pen to it over ninety years ago.



The book was hailed by the critics:



“All the life of the true cow-punchers, his work, his amusements, the capture and taming of the mustang or wild horse, the riding and the roping. –Chicago Post



“It is a delight from preface to tail-piece, and full of amazingly good pen-and-ink drawings by the author. . . . Every page of it is absorbing. For those who want to know the ‘real’ cowboy, to see him at work and play, to share with him that longing for a ‘country where I can spread my loop without getting it caught in a fence-post,’ and to understand his viewpoint of life in general, Cowboys North and South is a book that must not be missed. Any every one of the illustrations is worth framing.” –Philadelphia Record



“Will James is a cowboy. He is also a number of other things. He is a draftsman of horses, critters, and men. He is the possessor of a prose style, of a saline wit, of a wonder sense of the strange whirl of civilization which, beginning in Asia in the Dark Ages, threw men all the way across the western plains by the middle of the nineteenth century. . . . He is not writing language, he is writing living speech.” –New York World



In the preface to Cowboys North and South, James writes, “The cowboy’s life can’t be learnt in a day or even a year, it’s a life you got to be raised at to understand, and I’ve had it proved that in my work even tho it may be rough, all the folks of the cow countries are backing me in what I say, and I hear the same holler as I used to when riding the side-winding bucker ‘stay a long time cowboy.’”