All the Cowboys Were Indians - Hardcover

Brock, Stan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 189232900X ISBN 13: 9781892329004

Publisher: Synergy, 1999

Synopsis

All the Cowboys Were Indians is adventurer Stan Brock's account of his life in the Amazon rain forest on the Dadanawa, the world's largest tropical cattle ranch. You will meet him as a fugitive schoolboy from England, longing to become a real vaquero. You will agonize with him as he learns bone-crushing lessons the hard way. You will share his triumph as he tames a killer horse. You will fall in love with Leemo, his pet mountain lion, and all the other four-footed and feathered friends he acquires during his days on the Dadanawa . . . days in a faraway time when all the cowboys were Indians..

About this title

From the Publisher:

Who hasn't heard of Stan Brock?

For years, Stan was a regular fixture in America's living rooms as co-host of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.

That program hasn't been on the air for many years now - but the legacy remains. If you watch TV at all, or if you go to the movies, sooner or later you'll hear a reference to Wild Kingdom. One character will refer to another one as crazy as "that guy on Wild Kingdom who wrestles the snakes."

That's the Stan Brock Americans, young and old, have known and loved for years. But that is just one Stan Brock persona.

Stan grew up as a proper English schoolboy. At age 17 he moved to South America where he spent the next 15 years living on one of the world's largest working cattle ranches.

He eventually became manager of the ranch - and of its crew of Indian vaqueros.

It was his experience there that led naturally to his work with the animals of Wild Kingdom and numerous other television and movie projects. Stan also is a pioneer Amazon bush pilot, a noted authority on wildlife management and conservation, and an expert on rain forests and their inhabitants.

But for 25 years there was one haunting image that Stan couldn't get out of his mind - the isolated Indian families who had no medical care. When he lived there Stan provided what medical care he could as an educated, but non-medical person, but he always wanted to find a way to provide these people with the basic medical care that most of us take for granted.

He did it through an organization he founded called Remote Area Medical, an all-volunteer, airborne medical corps that takes skilled medical professionals from various parts of the developed world, to the undeveloped world.

RAM, as the group is called, has completed some 200 missions. RAM volunteer doctors, dentists, optometrists, and nurses have treated thousands of patients for everything from dietary decencies to cleft pallet surgery.. Volunteers sometimes see 500 or more patients in a single dawn-to-dusk day. RAM veterinarians work side-by-side with other volunteers to treat the dogs, cattle, and other animals of the people RAM serves

This book, All the Cowboys Were Indians, is a detailed chronicle of his early life in South America and of the foundation of Remote Area Medical. All author's royalties from the sale of this book go to support the work of Remote Area Medical.

From the Author:

Imagine what it would be like to live in a place where there was no medical care whatsoever! The life style was punctuated by shootings, stabbings, hangings, drownings, malaria, broken limbs, disfiguring tropical sores, rotten teeth by the mouthful and problem pregnancies. For anyone unlucky enough to need a doctor, the nearest one was over 300 miles away in Georgetown. An airplane might fly into the region once or twice a month, or people who where strong enough could make the trip to medical care on foot in 26 days.

Such was life in the 1950s in the middle of the rain forest of British Guiana. The inhabitants overcame sickness with rain forest medicine or they died. Sometimes they came to me, a totally unqualified person unavoidably thrust into the role of medical practitioner. While I prescribed medicine by reading the labels on the bottles, I dreamed that one day I could help bring real doctors to the Rupununi.

The country was a British colony back then and the Rupununi District was a forgotten corner of the Empire largely written off as a fly-infested swamp inhabited by roving herds of wild cattle, giant snakes, jaguars and Indian tribes. In one hour's ride I could cross the divide at the Rupununi River and my pony could drink from a tributary of the Amazon As the years rolled by, I progressed from dispensing aspirin out of my saddlebags to flying antibiotics in a tiny fabric-covered plane into airstrips hacked out of the wilderness. These primitive and occasional efforts at health care delivery were the roots that grew, decades later, into an organization called Remote Area Medical.

It took independence and the efforts of the Guyana Ministry of Health to eventually bring real medical services to the people who live on the country's southern border with Brazil. Years later, Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps offered help to the Guyana government and thousands of AmerIndians and settlers received free health care through this joint effort.

But this book is not about medicine or mayhem in the jungle. It is about other events that confronted me in that primeval wilderness way back at the halfway point in the 20th century. I was running a ranch so big that it took an exceptional horse and a determined rider two days to cross it in any direction. We were the last of the real cowboys, and, except for me, all the cowboys were Indians!

About this edition

• Publisher: Synergy
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 189232900X
• ISBN 13: 9781892329004
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320