We Pointed Them North by E.C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott

Teddy’s dream had started out not to be a cowboy, but rather an Indian. started in the cattle business and provided the perfect playground for a young man to learn the business and live out his dreams. Nothing could have changed me after that.” Abbott told Smith that the days of hard work on that first drive, “made a cowboy out of me. “All eyes, no flesh on me whatsoever.” He was taken along with the hopes that the fresh air and time spent in the saddle would toughen him up. “I was the poorest, sickliest little kid you ever saw,” wrote Abbott. made the long trip to Texas to put together a herd of longhorns. Soon after he settled the family in, J.B. Abbott’s father, J.B., took up ranching and farming just outside Lincoln, Nebraska.

The result: We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher, published in 1939, is considered one of the most respected histories ever written of the cattle drive period.īorn in Norfolk County, England, in 1860, Teddy’s father packed up the family and moved to America in 1871. After spending time with him, she set aside her own novel and offered to help write his story. Abbot had been trying to write a book of his own adventures without much success. Smith wrote that, “Today he is seventy-eight years old, tough as whipcord, diamond clear as to memory, and boiling with energy.” The timing was fortunate for both of them. She tracked him down and found him living with his wife, Mary, on a ranch outside of Lewistown, Montana.

Fortunately, for generations of Western history enthusiasts, her search led to an old-time cowboy and cattle rancher by the name of Edward Charles “Teddy Blue” Abbott. In the summer of 1937, Helena Huntington Smith, a writer and lover of the old West, was searching for some authentic background material for her novel about the cowboys and cattle drives of the 1870s and 1880s. A 1939 epic book that chronicled the cowboy adventures of Teddy Blue Abbott

We Pointed Them North by E.C. &quot;Teddy Blue&quot; Abbott

We Pointed Them North by E.C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott