T'was

bad

ground

&

holy

ground

in this American ghost town

in which the haunted saloon whistled its tune

which sounded forth shrilly especially around high noon…

~

There was no more whiskey

no more tables no more chairs

one wall was missing & half the roof

dust was thick where a rooster roosted

I wobbled on the last stool at the counter

Life is a really good thing. It is enjoyable, happy, wonderful, fascinating, amazing, sad, discouraging, disappointing and in fact, it is every single emotion one can conjure up in one’s mind of all that is real and all that is not real but in fact it, life, is every emotion ever experienced by any and all people who have lived, are living and will live in the future.

Easy Way to Order Below

Here is my latest piece which I entered in the American Plains Artist competition. It is of a an artisan I met at The Cowboy Fest in Santa Clarita, Calif. last month. I entered two other works for their consideration. They have quite an extensive prize pool, but my real motivation is the head judge is Robert Shufelt. He is the go to guy for western pencil art. And my hero.

An interesting new Western debuted this weekend. Meek's Cutoff is a solid, if spooky, addition to the genre. Michelle Williams (of Brokeback Mountain-fame and Heath Ledger's widow) plays a pioneer woman, who, along with her husband and two other couples, points her wagon West and follows mountain man Stephen Meek through eastern Oregon to cross the Cascade Mountains.

In bookstores now and available on Horsebooksetc.com, American Cowboy’s new book “The 100 Greatest Western Movies of All Time: Including Five You’ve Never Heard of” is our definitive—if controversial—ranking. Westerns are our favorite movie genre, of course, and we worked with publishers Globe Pequot to do it justice.