The Cattlemen is the story of the cattle industry in America and of the men whose ranches reached from the Rio Grande into Montana, from the early Spanish days to Mari Sandoz's contemporary times. It is the second in Sandoz's trilogy of books narrating the history of the American West in relation to animal species.

"A revolutionary new appraisal of the Old West and the America it made. The open-range cattle era lasted barely a quarter century, but it left America irrevocably changed. These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary...

When Tom Chantry comes west to buy cattle, he quickly runs into trouble. During a drunken scuffle in a bar, Dutch Akin challenges Chantry to a gunfight. Leaving town rather than face Akin, Chantry is quickly branded a coward.
Later, when hiring men to take his herd to the railroad, Chantry faces a dilemma: No one wants to make the long, dangerous ride with a leader of questionable courage. So when French Williams, a shrewd and ruthless cattleman,...

Since 1967, the authors have had one mission: to tell readers exactly where the Western Cattle Trail was located and to give a history of its place in the American West. Their first book, The Western, the greatest cattle trail, 1874-1886, presented the location and history of the trunk line during that time period. In this second volume, the entire trunk line is presented from Texas to Canada, showing its route before and after the Kansas quarantine...