Published in the High Desert Advocate May 24th, 2018.
Bill Wright is a bastion of the American West. He is a cattle rancher who tends his herd to make his living; he has spurs on his boots and is most comfortable on horseback. Over the last decade, he has watched his native southern Utah landscape—the isolated red rock canyons and high desert where his family has lived for 150 years—grow from sleepy small towns without stoplights into urbanized gateways for tourists drawn to nearby national parks and open spaces. But Bill just tips his hat and considers the growth of his herd on Smith Mesa, set against the 3,000-foot sandstone walls of Zion National Park’s western boundary, fretting over the worsening drought and the ever-changing rules on federal lands. Bill Wright is all cowboy, but he raises more than cattle. He is the patriarch of a fast-growing family of world-champion saddle bronc riders.
In THE LAST COWBOYS: A PIONEER FAMILY IN THE NEW WEST, Pulitzer Prize-winning sports writer and New York Times journalist John Branch chronicles the lives of three generations of the Wright family as they navigate ranching, rodeo, and a world changing fast around them. Through meticulous and in-depth reporting, Branch weaves together the complex world of cattle ranching and the dangerous one of rodeo, fading anachronisms from the Old West that the Wrights see as the keys to their long-term future. Cody Wright—the oldest son of Bill and his wife Evelyn—is the first of their thirteen children to make a success of professional bronc riding. A world champion multiple times over, he invests some of his winnings and a growing amount of his sweat into his father’s ranching operation, while educating his younger brothers, brothers-in-law, and sons in the sport of rodeo. The rodeo life, like that of a rancher, is not easy: lonely mornings and late nights, injuries that can change fortunes in a heartbeat, a gamble that the next day will bring better luck.
Branch follows Cody, his sons Rusty and Ryder, and his brothers as they travel the circuit and attempt to earn enough in winnings to make it to the Nationals Final Rodeo, held each December in Las Vegas. Winning can mean doubling the rodeo earnings of an entire year’s worth of 8-second rides, and in the case of the Wrights—the most prominent rodeo family in the nation—an opportunity to build a cattle operation to pass to future generations. But is that still possible in the new west of the 21st century? And will it cost the Wright’s the very land they’ve worked for 150 years?
Dive into the dusty worlds of rodeo and ranching with THE LAST COWBOYS, a masterful work of nonfiction and a modern ballad to family, tradition and Western ideals. Branch’s narrative tells the Wrights’ story with beauty and clarity as it crisscrosses from Calgary to Amarillo, Rapid City to Las Vegas and back to Utah. “Rodeo,” Branch writes, “could be passed down, like a family tradition, like land and manners, but it could spit you out too, without warning.” THE LAST COWBOYS is an elegy to the traditions of the Old West as they evolve to fit a new way of life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Branch is an award-winning reporter for the New York Times. His story “Snow Fall” won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. He is the author of two other works of nonfiction, including Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard which won the PEN/ESPN Prize for Literary Sports Writing. He lives with his family near San Francisco.
