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Excerpt from We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher

Originally published in 1939

By E. C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott and Helena Huntington Smith

E.C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott was by all accounts a regular cowboy who had worked on the range in the 1870s and 1880s. Abbott was "discovered" by a journalist named Helena Huntington Smith, who had read an interview with Abbott in a Montana newspaper. She began to meet with him and soon became convinced that his stories needed to be documented. Working with the aging cowboy in 1937 and 1938, Smith wrote as quickly as Abbott talked, preserving the tone and excitement of his stories.

On December 17, 1860, Abbott was born in Norfolk, England. His family moved to the United States when he was a baby and settled near Lincoln, Nebraska, where his father became a farmer. Abbott's father, who he described as "overbearing and tyrannical," wanted...