In the first twenty-three years of the twentieth century Emerson Hough played a major role in interpreting the West and Southwest, establishing his reputation as an authority on the region with The Story of the Cowboy (1898). A Midwesterner by birth, Hough lived most of his life in that region, but the settings of his stories range from Canada to Mexico and from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. His major focus was the various frontiers of the American nation.

Hough was forty years old when he published The Story of the Cowboy. Between its publication and his death in 1923, he published thirty-four major works of fiction and nonfiction and more than one hundred articles, stories, poems, and plays. He was a journalist, essayist, novelist, historian, polemicist, and conservationist who used fact and fiction to capture the spirit of the American character. A tireless writer, explorer, hunter, and adventurer...