Erwin E. Smith

Texan Erwin Evans Smith is regarded as one of the greatest photographers of the day-to-day life of the cowboy in the American Southwest. Smith hailed from north Texas, born in Honey Grove—an area discovered a half-century earlier by Tennessean Davy Crockett—on August 22, 1886. The family relocated 16 miles west to Bonham in 1894 when Erwin was eight. Even as a boy, he was artistic and sketched a romanticized cowboy life, particularly the scenes at his uncle’s ranch in Foard County, nea