Cattle Kingdom

The open-range cattle era lasted barely a quarter century, but it left America irrevocably changed. These few decades saw the greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, the dawn of the conservation movement, and the birth of American legends, like the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time has remained unexamined for decades.

“The best all-around study of the American cowboy ever written. Every page crackles with keen analysis and vivid prose about the Old West. A must-read!” — Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

The open-range cattle era lasted barely a quarter century, but it left America irrevocably changed. Cattle Kingdom reveals how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We meet a diverse cast, from cowboy Teddy Blue to failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. This is a revolutionary new appraisal of the Old West and the America it made.

“Knowlton writes well about all the fun stuff: trail drives, rambunctious cow towns, gunfights and range wars . . . [He] enlists all of these tropes in support of an intriguing thesis: that the romance of the Old West arose upon the swelling surface of a giant economic bubble . . . Cattle Kingdom is The Great Plains by way of The Big Short.” — Wall Street Journal

“Knowlton deftly balances close-ups and bird’s-eye views. We learn countless details . . . More important, we learn why the story played out as it did.” — New York Times Book Review

“The best one-volume history of the legendary era of the cowboy and cattle empires in thirty years.” — True West