Andy Adams

When I first found employment with Lance Lovelace, a Texas cowman, I had not yet attained my majority, while he was over sixty. Though not a native of Texas, "Uncle Lance" was entitled to be classed among its pioneers, his parents having emigrated from Tennessee along with a party of Stephen F. Austin's colonists in 1821. The colony with which his people reached the state landed at Quintana, at the mouth of the Brazos River, and shared the various hardships that befell all the early Texan settlers, moving inland later to a more healthy locality. Thus the education of young Lovelace was one of privation.

Andy Adams was born in Indiana. His parents, Andrew andElizabeth (Elliott) Adams, were pioneers. As a boy he helped withthe cattle and horses on the family farm. In the early 1880s he wentto Texas, where he stayed for 10 years, spending much of that timedriving cattle on the western trail. In 1890 he left the trail to try hishand at business, but the venture failed, so he turned his hand togold-mining in Colorado and Nevada. In 1894, he settled inColorado Springs, where he lived until his death. He began writingat the age of 43, publishing his most successful book, The Log of aCowboy, in 1903. His other works include A Texas Matchmaker(1904), The Outlet (1905), Cattle Brands (1906), Reed Anthony, Cowman: An Autobiography (1907), Wells Brothers (1911), andThe Ranch on the Beaver (1927). The Log of a Cowboy is a fictionalaccount of a five-month drive of 3,000 cattle from Brownsville, Texas, to Montana in 1882.