All in a Day's Riding: Stories of the New Mexico Range

"The desire to convey authentic and credible portrayals of the western cattle range and its people in its formative years guided Steve Zimmer in choosing to collect and illuminate real, remembered experiences of times and places in the West that was. If the aim is an authentic depiction of cowboys, cowgirls, and early western cattle ranching, how better to find it than by consulting the testimonies and recollections of people who were there and took part in the great western migration, or who just lived lives on horseback, caring for animals, fixing fence, taking in wide and beautiful spaces and knowing the satisfaction of hard work well done? This is what may be said of those whose writings are related in this collection. The stories the writers tell are from their own experience, or as told to them by contemporaries." (From the Foreword by David L. Caffey, author of "Frank Springer and New Mexico" and "The Santa Fe Ring")

Stephen Zimmer comes from four generations of West Texas cattle ranchers. Beginning in 1976 he spent twenty-five years as Director of Museums at New Mexico’s Philmont Scout Ranch. He has been studying the history of the New Mexico cattle frontier for more than thirty years. He has driven through or ridden horseback in all kinds of weather over the land where outfits ran cattle in the last decades of the 19th century in order to better understand what life was like for the men and women who worked the range. He lives outside of Cimarron, New Mexico on his Double Z Bar Ranch where he writes about western art and cowboy life. His articles have appeared in "Cowboy Magazine," "Western Horseman," "New Mexico Magazine," and "Wild West" among others. "Parker's Colt: A Novel of New Mexico Ranch Life" and "Cowboy Days, Stories of the New Mexico Range," were also published by Sunstone Press.