Condition: Good. SIGNED by Author Gretel Ehrlich and subjects Russ Vail and E.K. Smith, Inscribed, personalized (See Photos)! Packed in a BOX with cardboard backing and padding. (See Photos!) Same or next day shipping (weekdays and Saturdays)! Ships from California. Stated First Edition, 2000. Pages: not written on, clean, bright, odor free, fine edges. Dust Jacket: clean, faded down front left and back right, light bumping to parts of edges, rubbing to back bottom corner tip and small part of back bottom edge. ABOUT THIS: IN 1901, ARIZONA CATTLEMEN Walter Vail and John Van "J.V." Vickers went to sea with their ranching partnership to run cattle across Santa Rosa Island, the second largest of California's Channel Islands. In 1998, after an extensive court battle and a mediated settlement that pitted island heirs against mainland environmentalists and the federal government, the ranch was forced to close, ending an era for the Channel Islands ranching legacy. Cowboy Island is the story of Santa Rosa Island, its cowboys, and the four generations of Vail (St Vickers men and women who were at home on 54,000 ocean-bound acres. It was a place of winters lush and green, summers dry and stark, and water pounding on the coast and dumping from the sky. They were people of dedication and dignity, from vaquero Jesus Bracamontes, hunkered down in his saddle against 40-knot northwesterlies, to Margaret Vail Woolley, who credits this remote, otherworldly island with broadening the world view of an entire family. All the while, business was at hand: nearly four million pounds of beef was shipped from Santa Rosa each year but only after range riders had fanned out across canyons, peaks and beaches, gathered the herd, run them back to Bechers Bay, weighed them in the creaking scale house, and finally, drove them rumbling down the pier and aboard the Vaquero II, the only cattle ferry on the west coast of the Americas. This operation carried on essentially unchanged for a century, its final days overse