High Country Cowboys-A History of Ranching in Western Colorado

High Country Cowboys is a history of ranching in Western Colorado. Ken Reyher begins with a claim that sets the tone: for over 150 years, Colorado cowboys have faced challenges very different from their counterparts in other ranching states. The mountains, the weather and the distances make this cowboy life its own thing.

The book works by documenting people. Reyher brings this dangerous and unique life to light through the achievements and exciting lives of some remarkable men. According to the catalogue, he comes to the subject from a Colorado background, and Bookshare's synopsis says he was raised by a ranching family. That closeness shows in a book written from the ranch side of the fence.

The subject suits the region it covers. Cattle came to the Western Slope in the era of open range, and the work has changed a great deal since. At 184 pages, the book is a mid sized history that a general reader can follow without prior knowledge. Open Library files it under history, ranching, local history and cowboys, which describes it well. The description is short, so what we can say about individual chapters is limited to what is stated here.

High Country Cowboys is for readers of Western and ranching history, and for families with roots on the Western Slope who want their own world described. Teachers and librarians building a Colorado shelf will want it because it covers ranch life rather than mining or railroads. Cowboy poetry fans may enjoy it, since the author also writes cowboy verse according to Bookshare. It is nonfiction, about 184 pages, and it assumes only a curiosity about how ranching worked in mountain country.

Ken Reyher was raised by a ranching family, according to a Bookshare synopsis, and later worked as a history teacher and crop dusting pilot. He lives outside Olathe, Colorado, with horses and dogs, so ranch life is not abstract to him. His author page covers him and his four other books with us.

More about Ken Reyher →

Ranching reached western Colorado after it began on the eastern plains. The Colorado State Publications Library timeline says miners drawn by gold and silver needed food, so cattlemen drove Texas Longhorns north to graze open range. Over time, ranching spread from the Eastern Plains into the mountains and the Western Slope.

The same timeline describes a hard business. Investors from the East and overseas came to control parts of the industry, and severe winters in the mid 1880s crippled the open range. Competition for water, and between cattle and sheep ranchers, ended the open range before the century closed.

Wikipedia notes that economic activity on the Western Slope has centered on ranching, mining and tourism, and that agribusiness remains a key industry for most of it. That is the setting for Reyher's book: a region where ranching has been part of life for generations, with its own weather, terrain and dangers.

Source: Colorado State Publications Library, Colorado Cattle Industry