Helena Huntington Smith

Helena Huntington Smith wrote numerous books and articles about the West. In 1937, she recorded the memories of E.C. Abbott, an elderly cowpuncher who was one of the last survivors of the Great Trail Drives of the 1860s and 1870s. Known to cowmen across the West as "Teddy Blue," he came up the trail from Texas with long-horned cattle to stock the northern ranges, punched cows in Montana when there wasn't a fence in the territory, and married a daughter of pioneer stockman Granville Stuart. Smith published his memories in her 1976 cowboy classic, We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher.

Other books by Helen Huntington Smith include The War on Powder Ridge and A Bride Goes West.

Articles by this Author

The Johnson Country War, April 1961 | Vol. 12, No. 3

Enraged by losses from their herds a band of respectable cattle barons took the law into their own hands—and barely escaped with their lives

Pioneers In Petticoats, February 1959 | Vol. 10, No. 2

Legend says the frontier was “hell on women,” but the ladies claim they had the time of their lives

A Few Men In Soldier Suits, August 1957 | Vol. 8, No. 5

A down-to-earth story of the way in which the German thrust at the Bulge was halted

Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.