I Always Did Like Horses and Women

📖 The Scoop

This is an authentic, well researched, and richly illustrated account of Jackson Hole's legendary and colorful Cal Carrington. It is a tale that goes beyond imagination. As a young child in Sweden, Cal Carrington is given up by religiously zealous parents to Mormon missionaries. He is taken on a frightening transatlantic voyage and then by railroad boxcar on an emigrant train to Utah. He hates his foster family and the stern elder. As a teenager, he beats up the elder and runs away--an orphaned saddle tramp roaming the frontier, becoming an open range cowboy and bronc rider. He eventually takes up a homestead in Teton Valley, Idaho. Drifting across the pass into frontier Jackson Hole, Wyoming, as a skilled horseman, he becomes a wrangler for the infant Yellowstone National Park. Some consider him a "rough character;" rumors he is a horse rustler and outlaw follow him. Instead he becomes head guide for the Bar B-C, Jackson Hole's most famous dude ranch. There he meets and becomes involved with wealthy Eleanor "Cissy" Patterson. As heiress to the Chicago-Tribune empire and editor and publisher of the Washington Times, she was considered the most powerful woman in the U.S. Together, Cal and Cissy homestead and build the Flat Creek Ranch in Jackson Hole. Through Cissy as his paramour and patron, Carrington's life exceeds his wildest cowboy dreams; he travels abroad, hunts big game in Africa, and attends lavish East Coast parties. Carrington maintains two personas and lifestyles: that of a poor dirt farmer and homesteader in Teton Valley, Idaho; the other, a romanticized Jackson Hole cowboy, high society, and an owner of beachfront property in southern California. The Wyoming State Historical Society bestowed their award for biography on this book. This is a true story for those who love the history of the Old West and that of the Yellowstone-Teton region; and for those, who will derive inspiration and joy reading of a life passionately lived during the rapidly changing times of the Gilded Age.

Genre: Biography & Autobiography / Historical (fancy, right?)