NONFICTION - Sept. 1, 1991

COWBOYING: A Tough Job in a Hard Land by James H. Beckstead (Univeristy of Utah Press: $19.95). Beckstead has assembled an exceptional collection of archival photographs for this study of the lives and duties of cowboys in Utah during the later 19th Century, but he fails to establish that conditions there were typical of other regions of the American West. In contrast to the popular, glamorous image of cowboys, he stresses that the work was hard and done largely by men at the low end of the social scale. The most interesting sections of the book deal with the outlaws of the region, and include some intriguing speculations about the ultimate fate of Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh--alias Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.