Another Man’s Shoes (1913)

Open Range portrays the historic West from 1865 to the 1890s. While the well-known lives of Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, George A. Custer, Tom Horn, and others are told, other story poems profile fictional characters, steeped in the attitudes of the region and period, often with the influences of American Civil War backgrounds. These depictions include trail-wise drovers and capable Kansas City marshals, nomadic Indians and their nemeses, white buffalo hunters, cattle barons and homesteaders, spendthrift cowboys and callous dance-hall gals, a respectable madam and an escapee hotel proprietor, a peddler to storekeeper and a frontier preacher, a town sheriff who laments shooting a young rustler. The open range was terminated by barbed-wire, water-rights disputes with farmers (sod-busters), railroad trunk lines, severe weather (snows of 1886-1887), and scientific livestock raising. However, the open and non-status-seeking personalities of American western people still prevail.