John Branch

The Last Cowboys John Branch

A Pulitzer Prize–winning reporters gripping portrait of one western family struggling to hold on to age-old American ways. New York Times reporter and best-selling author John Branch takes readers to the magnificent red soil and rocky arroyos of southern Utah, where the Wright family of Smith Mesa have for generations raised cattle and world-champion saddle-bronc riders—some call them the most successful rodeo family in history. Filled with vivid scenes of cattle ranching and the high drama of rodeo, The Last Cowboys follows three generations of Wrights through the seasons as they are battered by drought, the falling price of beef, battles over land-use and federal regulation, and rodeos ever-present risks of serious injury. This is an epic but intimate story of real-life cowboys squeezed by social change in the twenty-first century, their soiled boots planted firmly in the past while they optimistically build a future.