There I am shopping in our local neighborhood grocery store Friday and see the newest American Cowboy on the shelf. Immediately I saw the words Chisholm Trail and grabbed up a copy and started flipping through it. I squealed when I saw a small image of mine on page 37, of my cowboy morning ride silhouette. I have a tendency to go from back to front with magazines.
A couple more pages and my excitement tripled. There was the cover of my book, Riding the Chisholm Trail, filling half of page 32!
I can remember seeing the first copy of American Cowboy years ago and though I'm more of a city girl than country (also never been on a horse) I've got quite a collection of cowboy, rodeo and horse images. I also have always wanted to have my images in that magazine. Here's the story of how it happened.
A few weeks ago, a friend, Cova Williams with the Chisholm Trail Heritage Center, called me to tell me about Bob Welch writing an article for American Cowboy. He needed some photos to go with his article which was about life on the trail and she thought of my cattle drive photos from 2007, that was the year of Oklahoma's centennial and there was a month long cattle drive from the Red River to the Kansas border.
I only had a day to shoot, as they came through Stephens County and Duncan. A couple years later I decided I needed to do something with the photos and then it dawned on me. I'm a writer, just call these cowboys and get their stories. Then I went into editing mode and eventually the book was ready.
The cover and the silhouette were the images I sent her, providing a one-time usage to American Cowboy. I had forgotten all about it until I saw them in the magazine. Pretty awesome! I've had my images in magazines before but this has to be one of my finer moments. I had another photo from this same event make it into Cowboys & Indians 2009 Photographing the West annual contest.
Next? To get an entire layout in American Cowboy!
