An engaging and richly detailed reminiscence of life on the North American range, Seventy Years a Cowboy preserves the firsthand recollections of T. B. Long, a Montana-born rancher and horseman whose life spanned the closing years of the open range and the transformation of the cattle industry across the northern plains. Born in 1876 in the Madison Valley near Ennis, Montana, Long began cowboying at the age of fifteen, and over the ensuing decades rode for a succession of outfits in both the United States and Canada.
Told to his son, Philip Sheridan Long, the narrative blends the immediacy of frontier storytelling with the steady, reflective tone of an old-timer looking back over a lifetime in the saddle. Long recounts his early apprenticeship in the cowboy trade and the colorful characters who peopled the range—among them the outlaw Con Murphy and the ill-fated Montana lawman Jim Summers. His tales move from youthful exploits in the Madison Valley to marriage with Esther Boardman, and northward into the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan, where he established himself as both cowhand and ranch owner.
The book offers vivid sketches of ranch life in two countries: bringing cattle up the Madison Valley; the grueling mother of all winters of 1906–1907; his tenure as manager of the Elling Ranch on the Upper Madison River; and his later years back in Canada, managing the famed 76 Ranch at Crane Lake and entering partnership on the vast Sand Lake lease—some seventy-seven thousand acres of prime grazing land. Interwoven are recollections of the social life of the southwest Saskatchewan range, friendships with neighboring ranchers such as Chester Gilchrist, and the endurance, humor, and resilience that defined the cattle frontier.
A true working cowboy’s account—unvarnished and authentic.
