Pony Trails in Wyoming: Hoofprints of a Cowboy and U.S. Ranger

Pony Trails in Wyoming: Hoofprints of a Cowboy and U.S. Ranger by John K. Rollinson. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780803289321.

John K. Rollinson was certainly a greenhorn when he went west in 1890, but too bright to be the figure of fun seen in movies and pulp fiction. A sixteen-year-old runaway from New York, he came to Wyoming determined to learn everything about being a cowboy. When he signed up with a cattle outfit he knew the right boots to order and the kind of horses to buy. Pony Trails in Wyoming is Rollinsons entertaining recollection of years of following the roundup with the cowpunchers who became his family. In off times, he ran traplines, broke wild horses for a stage company, and drove a freight team. He befriended Tom Horn and, after Tom was hanged, got into fights defending his name. His sense of honor was perhaps better placed when he rescued an heiress from the clutches of thugs in Hartville and eloped with her. Housekeeping in Cody, Wyoming, did not keep Rollinson off the range, and his assignment as a U.S. ranger in the area of Yellowstone National Park did not keep him home. He was still young when, at the end of these memoirs, he rode off toward a new life.