This is 134-year-old tradition in our family -- not for the women necessarily to be part of it, but my dad was blessed with nine children, six of which were girls. So his cowboy crew was made up of daughters.-- from the chapter on Sara Shields Tough by Nature: Portraits of Cowgirls and Ranch Women of the American West by Lynda Lanker, published by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum and distributed by OSU Press.
Tough by Nature is a first-rate, gorgeous coffee table book filled with portraits of 49 real women ranchers of the western United States. Each portrait is accompanied by a short biography of the woman portrayed.
Artist Lynda Lanker. Spent close to 20 years on the portraits and stories that went into this book. She worked with oil pastels, pencil and charcoal, egg tempura, plate and stone lithography, engraving, and drypoint to capture the personalities of her subjects -- the matriarchs of the West.
The book features a foreword by Larry McMurtry, an introduction by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and an afterword by Maya Angelou.
Tough by Nature would make great Christmas or other gift for anyone with a love of the American West and its feisty, independent people.
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