“On all the Great Plains, reaching like a thumb down from Canada deep into the country of the Rio Grande, the one enduring figure has been the man who works with cattle. . . . The first rancher I can remember was a tall man riding past our home on the upper Niobrara River. He sat his saddle so the fringe of his gauntlets barely stirred in the long easy trot, his horse a fine star faced, well-coupled black, spirited but not shying from the small girl who ran from her grand-mother’s grasp to see. . . .Although my first glimpse of the rancher was back in the homestead period, when much of the higher Plains region was still free grass, government land, he could be riding through my home region today, with the same saddle and coiled rope. Even if he was in a range jeep or a light plane, his eye would still slant in the same way over the grass and the stock. Some people consider our rancher, next to the farmer (without whom we would all starve), as the most important man of our meat-rich nation. . . . But to most of the world the cattleman and his cowboys, good and bad, are not known for the significance of their beef production. Instead they are the dramatic and romantic figures of a West, a Wild West that is largely imaginary. . . .I have tried, through a few selected individuals and incidents, to show something of the nature and the contrasts, something of the conflicts and the achievements of the cattlemen as a whole. I have tried to take the reader to a high ridge, where all but the nearest arroyos and canyons are hidden, where the cactus and the sage blend into the greening sweep of prairie that reaches far into the hazy horizon of May.” Mari Sandoz