One of the most unusual yet lucrative types of ranching came into fashion around 1900 in Arizona’s Salt River Valley. With a head- ‘em-up, move –em-out, and a yippie-ti-yi-yay, cowboys, er, ostrichboys were actually herding flocks of funny-looking birds.
It wasn’t that the cattle business had fallen off so much, but rather that women’s fashions of the time dictated the wearing of ostrich feathers on hats and dresses. Those die-hard cattlemen who originally scoffed at such an enter

True West May/June 2025
In This Issue:
Features
- Historic Hotels of the American West
- A Journey Through Wyoming’s Outlaw History
- A Journey Through Washington’s Wild Frontier
- Blazing The Oregon Trail
- Journey Through Time
- Did Brigham Young Order a Massacre?
- Mountain Meadows Scapegoat John D. Lee VS. A Firing Squad
- Mormons in the Movies
- An Indigenous Consultant Ensures Accuracy
- The Battle Axe And A Raw Deal
- Showdown: Bridger VS. Brigham
- The Mountain Man and the Mormon Moses
- The Ghosts of Mountain Meadows
- The War Before the War
- Mountain Meadows