Robert Wills was five beers into a Cheyenne Friday night as he told his favorite story to a middle-aged couple from Cincinnati.

“Buddies used to introduce me as Bob Wills, and the women would say ‘You must be a Texas Playboy,’ and I’d say that I wasn’t any kind of Texan—I’m from Wyoming!” He cackled and tried not to trigger the cough that could go on and on and interfere with talking and drinking. He swallowed the last of the cheap draft and slapped the empty beer glass on the bar’s soggy coaster. He rocked the glass, hoping that...

He’s a muscular angle against the barn door’s frame. His back and one leg are straight. His other leg is bent, boot heel pressed against wood. Though his eyes are in a wedge of shade beneath his hat, he squints across the pasture, the arena, and the pine forest rising on the mountain. He smokes his cigarette like breathing, not even a pause when he places it at his lips, and he’s careful to flick the ashes into the dirt. His name is Lloyd. He arrived at this Colorado ranch a month ago, and, other than the Idaho license plate...

The third of January, 1959, was a cowboy’s curse of a bad day for Texas. From the Oklahoma border to Cameron County and the tip of the Rio Grande, pardners awoke having to sober up to their first day of being “second biggest.” Alaska had joined the Union.

No longer being the biggest, how was Texas to carry on with any straightshooting, self-respecting decency? The friendship between Big and Texas is established upon the fact of Texas being big in the sense of being biggest: The Biggest State in the Union. All the way from trucks to tomboys, everything’s big...

I touch my grandfather’s hand, trace the seam of scar that runs his palm from wrist to pinky. The mark is ragged, loud and white against his sun-dark skin. Beneath, the flesh is ridged and drawn, hard to the touch. The cyanide shell, shot from a powdered coyote-getter gun, practically tore his hand in half.

I have heard the story many times: He’s setting the gun near a sheep-kill along the north bank of Willow Creek, when it accidentally fires. There’s blood and black poison all over his hands and his boots, blood splashing in the dust, and his daughter,...

I set the alarm on my cell phone for 3:45 a.m., but anticipation had me up and throwing hay to the horses half an hour before that. Bill Hommertzheim, manager of the southwest Kansas feedlot where I planned to spend the day as a pen rider, had told me to report for work at 6:30 sharp, and since the ranch where I was staying was every bit of one hundred miles away, I knew I’d have to get an early start if I was going to make it on time. While the horses ate, I checked over the saddles and...

Josh Love and Eric Schneider are mounted up and on the lookout for movement in the tall yellow corn. “I see one now,” Josh says, but I don’t know how he can. As high as these cowboys sit up in their saddles, the corn’s even higher, and there are 140 acres of it—enough to fill more than a hundred football fields.

“There’s cows in them cornrows.” That’s what Farmer John says. Farmer John, who doesn’t like reporters and isn’t really named Farmer John. He’s losing his hair, just like me, and he keeps it closely cropped as a way...

As the oldest of four siblings and the only girl, I grew up under unusual circumstances. The ranch was seventy-five miles from the nearest town, and it was nine miles to the closest neighbor’s. I went to school with my three brothers in our “backyard,” and because I preferred being outdoors, spent any spare time with Dad and a bevy of hired men; I was rarely indoors with Mom. I’m not sure when Dad and I became fully cognizant of the fact that I wasn’t one of the “boys.” I’m now speculating it happened in the spring of my twelfth...